Corporate romanticism : liberalism, justice, and the novel / Daniel M. Stout.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stout, Daniel, author.

Series:

Lit z

Lit Z

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Individualism in literature.

Justice in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

254 pages ; 23 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2017.

Summary:

Innocence you don't have to earn, virtue that you cannot deserve, guilt that never ends, action that never stops, character without innerness, many persons speaking through a single human, a single creature who is also a species, a man who is not himself because he is his double, a man who is neither himself nor his double. These confusions of personhood and action are not exceptions to the law of liberal individualism; they are the confusions that are its only history." 'Corporate Romanticism' offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments - the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action - undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. 0Reading a set of important Romantic novels - 'Caleb Williams', 'Mansfield Park', 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of Justified Sinner', 'Frankenstein', and 'A Tale of Two Cities' - alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, Daniel Stout argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism's ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, ' Corporate Romanticism' reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels.

Contents:

1 The Pursuit of Guilty Things: Corporate Actors, Collective Actions, and Romantic Abstraction 21

2 The One and the Manor: On Being, Doing, and Deserving in Mansfield Park 53

3 Castes of Exception: Tradition and the Public Sphere in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 96

4 Nothing Personal: The Decapitations of Character in A Tale of Two Cities 115

5 Not World Enough: Easement, Externality, and the Edges of Justice (Caleb Williams) 145.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-248) and index.

ISBN:

9780823272242

0823272249

9780823272235

0823272230

OCLC:

947147157