Reviewed by:

• Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 by Thomas Keymer
• Paul Keen (bio)

Most of us, if we are asked, would immediately agree that freedom of speech is a good thing, maybe even a cornerstone of modern democracy, though if pressed we tend to concede that there exist important exceptions to this freedom. Thomas Keymer’s new book represents a major addition to the well-established critical discussion about the links between literature and censorship. Poetics of the Pillory was originally presented as the 2014–15 Clarendon lectures, an origin that may help to explain the entertaining prose style that is also one of its hallmarks.

The heavily mythologized image of the pillory might make this history seem almost quaint, but the unsettling conjunction of Keymer’s double epigraph, which invokes the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and Idi Amin (“there is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech”) underscores how high the stakes were (1). For seventeenth-century victims of Stuart absolutism and Star-Chamber repression, in an age when convictions frequently included a range of physical mutilations, there was nothing quaint about it.

Poetics of the Pillory grounds its coverage in an analysis of four successive eras, from the unstable world of Restoration intrigue to the revolutionary struggles of the Peterloo era. By the 1810s physical mutilation was no longer practiced as part of this punishment, but the long historical arc traced by Keymer’s study is not designed to affirm the sort of Whiggish narrative of progress embraced by critics such as Thomas Macaulay, for whom the expiration of the Licensing Act in 1695 was a powerful symbol of British freedom of expression. For many eighteenth-century and Romantic writers, it felt like anything but that. Amin’s twentieth-century warning could have been lifted straight from a William Cobbett article. Rather than recycling this myth of progress, Poetics of the Pillory demonstrates the historical messiness with which these struggles played out in circumstances that exemplified the arbitrary, uneven, and often unpredictable nature of state power, in which government forces used the threat of the pillory, prison time, financial ruin, and thuggish intimidation, or resorted to bribery, when it was a writer worth recruiting, to control potentially wayward authors.

However intimidating this uncertainty may have been for oppositional writers, Keymer’s focus is on the ways it often energized and enriched authors’ writing. Taking his cue from Annabel Patterson’s argument in Censorship and Interpretation (1984), Keymer suggests that however [End Page 489] intimidating and even traumatizing these pressures may have been, they also “constitute not disabling constraint but enabling discipline—a discipline in which writers cultivate complex literary strategies of indirection ... in order to communicate dissident meaning while also rendering it deniable” (22). Poetics of the Pillory traces the ways that these strategies of poetic indirection or evasion resulted in precisely the sort of textual complexities that, for subsequent critics, became the essence of aesthetic value. These authors often found ways of inscribing their audiences (including juries, prosecutors, and judges) in elaborate forms of reader response that Keymer describes, with a nod to Rita Felski’s work, as “a distinctively Augustan hermeneutics of suspicion, challenging their readers to become nimble decoders of highly allusive and powerfully ironic texts” (25).

As Keymer’s opening chapter illustrates, few writers converted the strategic pressure of scrambling to stay onside of shifting political currents into poetic achievement more skilfully than John Dryden. Samuel Johnson’s description of Dryden “as a poet who ‘delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle’” becomes an uncanny description of Dryden’s ability to forge a poetics whose indirection of meaning enabled him to accommodate himself to the endlessly changing political landscape, from the “superficially tactless, profoundly calculated verbal choices” with which his early poetry registered an implied ambivalence about Oliver Cromwell, to his translation of Juvenal’s Satire 3, which encoded criticism by proxy after the Revolution had cost Dryden his position as poet laureate (49...

审核人：

• 嘲讽诗学：英国文学与煽动性的诽谤，1660-1820年，托马斯·凯默（Thomas Keymer）
• 保罗·基恩（生物）

如果被要求，我们大多数人会立即同意言论自由是一件好事，甚至可能是现代民主的基石，尽管如果受到敦促，我们倾向于承认这种自由存在重要的例外。托马斯·凯默（Thomas Keymer）的新书是对文学与审查制度之间的联系的周密的批判性讨论的重要补充。嘲讽诗学最初是在2014-15克拉伦登演讲中提出的，其起源可能有助于解释有趣的散文风格，这也是它的标志之一。

大量的神话般的image头形象可能使这段历史看起来几乎是古朴的，但是Keymer的双重题词的令人不安的联结，援引了Shaftesbury的第三伯爵和Idi Amin（“有言论自由，但我不能保证言论自由” ）强调了赌注有多高（1）。对于17世纪Stuart专制主义和Star-Chamber压制的受害者，在一个定罪经常包括一系列肢体残害的时代，这没有什么古怪的。

从对不稳定的复兴阴谋世界到彼得鲁时代的革命斗争的四个连续时代的分析中，《嘲讽诗学》将其覆盖范围作为基础。到1810年代，不再采用肢体切割作为这种惩罚的一部分，但Keymer的研究所追溯的悠久历史弧线并未旨在肯定托马斯·麦考利（Thomas Macaulay）等批评家所接受的那种惠格基式的进步叙事， 1695年的《许可法》是英国言论自由的有力象征。对于许多18世纪和浪漫主义的作家来说，感觉还不止如此。阿敏（Amin）的二十世纪警告本来可以从威廉·科贝特（William Cobbett）的文章中直接提出来。嘲讽诗学不是在重复这种进步的神话展示了这些斗争在历史上的混乱状态，这种混乱状态体现了国家权力的任意性，不平衡性以及通常不可预测的性质，在这种情况下，政府部队利用了嘲弄的威胁，入狱时间，经济崩溃和残酷的恐吓，或者诉诸于手段受贿，这是一个值得招聘的作家，要控制可能任性的作家。

尽管这种不确定性可能使反对派作家感到恐惧，但Keymer的重点是它经常激发和丰富作者写作的方式。从安纳贝尔·帕特森（Annabel Patterson）在《审查与解释》（1984）中的观点得出的线索来看，Keymer建议，尽管[End Page 489]恐吓甚至是折磨着这些压力，但他们“也并非构成束缚，而是建立了纪律-这是作家所遵循的纪律”。培养间接的……复杂的文学策略……以便传达异议的意义，同时也使它变得可否认”（22）。嘲讽诗学追溯了这些诗意的间接或逃避策略所导致的文本复杂性的方式，这些复杂性对于后来的批评家而言，已成为美学价值的本质。这些作者经常发现以精心设计的读者回应方式招揽听众（包括陪审团，检察官和法官）的方式，凯默将其描述为对Rita Felski作品的致谢，称其为“一种独特的奥古斯都怀疑主义诠释学，向读者挑战，使其成为高度寓言和具有讽刺意味的文本的灵活解码器”（25）。

正如Keymer的开头一章所说明的那样，很少有作家将争夺战略的压力转换为比John Dryden更熟练地将政治潮流转变为诗意的成就。塞缪尔·约翰逊（Samuel Johnson）对德莱顿的描述“是一位乐于在意义边缘踩踏的诗人，光明与黑暗开始交融”，这成为对德莱顿伪造诗学的能力的一种不可思议的描述，诗学的意义的间接性使他能够适应自己的思想。不断变化的政治格局，从他的早期诗歌对奥利弗·克伦威尔隐含矛盾的“表面上无精打采，深思熟虑的言语选择”，到他翻译成《少年》的《讽刺3》，在革命使德莱顿付出了代价之后，由代理人进行了批评诗人桂冠（49 ...