| Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel Contributor(s): Stout, Daniel M. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0823272230 ISBN-13: 9780823272235 Publisher: Fordham University Press OUR PRICE: $109.25 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: December 2016 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh - Law | Legal History - Political Science | History & Theory - General |
| Dewey: 823.709 |
| LCCN: 2016043659 |
| Series: Lit Z |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 6.2" W x 9" (1.05 lbs) 264 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - British Isles |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Stout, Daniel M.: - Daniel Stout is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. |