Description
Book SynopsisA critique of attempts by conservative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors to appropriate the rhetoric of victimhood and appeals to rights to safeguard the status of the powerful. As revolution and popular unrest roiled the final decades of the eighteenth century, authors, activists, and philosophers across the British Empire hailed the rise of the liberal subject, valorizing the humanity of the marginalized and the rights of members of groups long considered inferior or subhuman. Yet at the same time, a group of conservative authors mounted a reactionary attempt to cultivate sympathy for the privileged. In Defending Privilege, Nicole Mansfield Wright examines works by Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and others to show how conservatives used the rhetoric of victimhood in attempts to convince ordinary readers to regard a privileged person's loss of legal agency as a catastrophe greater than the calamities and legally sanctioned exclusion suffered by the poor and
Trade ReviewKeenly researched and persuasively conveyed,
Defending Privilege is a fascinating, dynamic, and wonderfully engaging book.
—Barbara Hughes-Moore,
Hedgehogs and FoxesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: A Neglected Inheritance
Part I. Downward Mobility and the Safety Net of the Law
1. Bad Citizens and Insolent Foreigners: Tobias Smollett's Elite Outsiders and the Suspension of Legal Agency
2. Covert Critique: Genteel Victimhood in Charlotte Smith's Fictions of Dispossession
Part II. The Pen as a Weapon against Reform of the Law
3. Letters of the Law: Ambivalent Advocacy and Speaking for the Voiceless in Walter Scott's Redgauntlet
4. Masters of Passion and Tongue: White Eyewitnesses and Fear of Black Testimony in the Proslavery Novel
Epilogue: Abiding the Law
Notes
Index
