Revolutionary subjects in the English "Jacobin" novel, 1790-1805 / Miriam L. Wallace.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wallace, Miriam L.

Series:

Bucknell studies in eighteenth-century literature and culture.

The Bucknell studies in eighteenty-century [sic] literature and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political fiction, English--History and criticism.

Political fiction, English.

English fiction--18th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Human rights in literature.

Revolutionaries in literature.

English fiction--French influences.

Politics and literature--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Politics and literature.

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

Jacobins in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (314 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cranbury, NJ : Bucknell University Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Revolutionary Subjects in the English "Jacobin" Novel engages ongoing debates on subject-formation and rights discourse through the so-called "English Jacobin" novels. Ostensibly celebrating the universal rights-bearing subject, these political novels inadvertently also questioned the limitations of such universalist conceptions. Including works by both men and women, and those normatively identified as radical alongside others considered more conservative or even "anti-Jacobin," this work examines the shared efforts to represent developing political consciousness and to inculcate such consciousness in readers across a reformist continuum. These novels' efforts to expand the citizen-subject threatened to reveal the cost implicit in accessing subjectivity on universal terms. The sovereign subject modeled as the ideal republican radical subject is undercut, even revealed as inadequate or impossible, in subversive narrative moments in these fictions--not always in line with the work's overt "moral." If the concept of human rights appears both necessary and inadequate in 2009, it was likewise problematic at the moment of its greatest appeal in the revolutionary 1790s. Miriam L. Wallace is Associate Professor of British and American literature at New College of Florida.

Contents:

Duplicitous subjects and the tyranny of ideology: Godwin's Things as they are; or Caleb Williams (1794) and Fenwick's Secresy (1795)

Constructing revolutionary subjects: Wollstonecraft's rational citizen and Hays's "female philosopher"

Revolutionary masculinities in Anna St. Ives (1792) and Hermsprong (1796)

Female suffering and witnessing subjects in Hays's The victim of prejudice (1799)

Subjects of property and The memoirs of Bryan Perdue (1805)

Anti-Jacobin re-visions and relational subjects in Edmund Oliver (1798) and Adeline Mowbray (1805)

Anti-Jacobin parody and the reformist continuum: Memoirs of modern philosophers (1805)

Conclusion: revolutionary subjectivities and rights discourse.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-8387-5849-5

OCLC:

694147628