Cultural politics in the 1790's : literature, radicalism, and the public sphere

Cultural Politics in the 1790s examines the relationship between sentimental literature, political activism and the public sphere at the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on critical theorists such as Habermas, Negt and Kluge, Marcuse and Foucault, it attempts to demonstrate how major literary and political figures of the 1790s can be read in terms of the broader dynamics of modernity. Reading a diverse range of political and literary material from the period, it examines how relationships between the aesthetic and the political, the private and the public, mark the emergence and consolidation of bourgeois behavioural norms and the simultaneous marginalization of potentially more radical forms of political and cultural production. Cultural Politics in the 1790s examines the relationships between sentimental and Romantic literature, political activism and the public sphere at a crucial period in British history. Drawing on the work of Habermas, Marcuse, Negt and Kluge, and Foucault, it demonstrates how major literary and political figures of the 1790s, and the ideological controversies in which they were involved, can be read in terms of the broader dynamics that typify modernity. Through discussions of Edmund Burke, William Godwin, John Thelwall, Mary Wollstonecraft, Matthew Lewis, Maria Edgeworth and the diverse cultural and political milieus they represented, Andrew McCann examines tensions between the aesthetic and the political, consumption and critique and the private and the public, arguing that the negotiation of these tensions was central to the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony and the containment of radical politics in the aftermath of the French Revolution Although many books have studied writers and alcohol in modern American literature, the rich culture of drinking and the many poems and narratives about it in the Romantic period in England have been entirely neglected. Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink 1780-1830 is the first study to describe the bulk and variety of writings about drinking to set these poems, novels, essays, letters and journals in a historical, sociological, and medical context to demonstrate the importance of drunkenness in the works of a number of major and minor writers of the period and to suggest that during these years, for a short time, the pleasures and pains of drinking are held in a vivacious balance. The book argues that the figure of the drinker tests the margins of the human being, either as a beast, savage, or thing or, on the other edge of the human range, as a free, inspired spirit Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: Literature and the Public Sphere in the 1790s....Pages 1-32 Edmund Burke’s Immortal Law: Reading the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1788....Pages 33-58 William Godwin and the Pathological Public Sphere: Theorizing Communicative Action in the 1790s....Pages 59-82 Politico-Sentimentality: John Thelwall, Literary Production and the Critique of Capital in the 1790s....Pages 83-106 Gothic Consumption: Populism, Consumerism and the Discipline of Reading....Pages 107-144 Domestic Revolutions: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Limits of Radical Sentimentality....Pages 145-180 Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: the Colonial Context of Non-identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda....Pages 181-206 Back Matter....Pages 207-226 "This book focuses on some of the greatest writers and artists of European Romanticism, including S. T. Coleridge, Wordsworth, J. M. W. Turner, Goethe, Holderlin and, in the later nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold. Concluding with a discussion of the significance of Romanticism for our understanding of postmodernity, its various chapters explore the place of the biblical canon as the central element in the shift from the sacred to the secular, and the place of the Bible in the development of our concept of Weltliteratur, or world literature, as definitive of culture. This book will be of interest to all concerned with art, literature and the development of biblical criticism and religious thought."--BOOK JACKET