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 literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Liberalism in literature.

Juristic persons.

Individualism in literature.

Corporations in literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (264 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2017

Place of Publication:

Baltimore, Maryland : Project Muse, 2016

Summary:

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. Reading works by Godwin, Austen, Hogg, Mary Shelley, and Dickens 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, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.

Contents:

Introduction : personification and its discontents

1. The pursuit of guilty things : corporate actors, collective actions, and romantic abstraction

2. The one and the manor : on being, doing, and deserving in Mansfield Park

3. Castes of exception : tradition and the public sphere in The private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner

4. Nothing personal : the decapitations of character in A tale of two cities

5. Not world enough : easement, externality, and the edges of justice (Caleb Williams)

Epilogue : everything counts (Frankenstein).

Notes:

Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.

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

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8232-7227-3

0-8232-7228-1

OCLC:

966458148