Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere

by A. McCann

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349408207
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	02/11/1999
Series:	Romanticism in Perspective:Texts, Cultures, Histories
Edition description:	1st ed. 1999
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

ANDREW McCANN teaches in the English Department at the University of Queensland.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction Literature and the Public Sphere in the 1790s Edmund Burke's Immortal Law: Reading the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1788 William Godwin and the Pathological Public Sphere: Theorizing Communicative Action in the 1790s Politico-Sentimentality: John Thelwall, Literary Production and the Critique of Capital in the 1790s Gothic Consumption: Populism Consumerism and the Discipline of Reading Domestic Revolutions: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Limits of Radical Sentimentality Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: the Colonial Context of Non-identity in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda Index

Editorial Reviews

...Cultural Politics in the 1790s is both accomplished and promising. Studies in Romanticism

From the Publisher

Cultural Politics in the 1790s is both accomplished and promising.

Studies in Romanticism

Examines the relationships between sentimental and Romantic literature, political activism, and the public sphere in Britain during the decade. Drawing on the work of recent thinkers such as Habermas and Marcuse, puts the literary and political figures, and the controversies they engaged in, into a broad dynamic that typifies modernity. Considers such people as Edmund Burke, William Godwin, John Thewall, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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