ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas and their successors have to different degrees demonstrated the modern tendency to define the public sphere in terms of private interests. A homologous process underlies many efforts to bring sexuality “into the open”. To “go public” with sexuality may not only reinforce the bourgeois regime of the sentimental, reproductive marriage: it may also, as queer theorists such as Lauren Berlant, Tim Dean and Michael Warner have pointed out, presuppose an authoritative and sovereign self in whom that sexuality is contained. British Romantic writing participates in a threefold ideology that I call privatism-the sexual, economic and ontological withdrawal from otherness. A movement famed for its enlightened depiction of sexuality is thus often characterized by self-begotten attitudes of exclusion and anxiety.
