More on the Post-Revolutionary Public

Privacy... underwent a shift in this period from a classical conception of seclusion and withdrawal to a more recognizably modern notion of independence and intimacy [p218]... Discussions of solitude and retirement in the revolutionary period represented fantasy narratives of self-liberation from the public sphere, even as they address that public sphere [p219]... In one sense, private withdrawal made thought about public things possible. Narratives about individuals who chose to leave society had a social function, of course, and one way to account for the prevalence of hermits in the print culture of late eighteenth-century America is to consider them as exemplary figures of the public sphere [p220].

Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art (Chicago, 2009)