Description
Book SynopsisCorporate Romanticism reads a series of important Romantic novels alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law, politics, and aesthetics in order to show liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity.
Trade Review"To eye-opening effect, Daniel Stout argues that the historical period, the early nineteenth century, and the literary form, the novel, that we regularly associate with the triumph of individualism and the consolidation of liberalism are marked instead by anxieties about whether there is any such thing as a person or an individual action and anxieties, too, about whether persons and actions can ever be meaningfully correlated in the way that justice demands. Corporate Romanticism might well come to be seen as one of the most important books we have on nineteenth-century fiction and liberal modernity." -- -Deidre Lynch Harvard University
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Personification and Its Discontents 1. The Pursuit of Guilty Things: Corporate Actors, Collective Actions, and Romantic Abstraction 2. The One and the Manor: 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) Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index
