Cultural Politics in the 1790s

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction: Literature and the Public Sphere in the 1790s

   • Andrew McCann

   Pages 1-32

3. Edmund Burke’s Immortal Law: Reading the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1788

   • Andrew McCann

   Pages 33-58

4. William Godwin and the Pathological Public Sphere: Theorizing Communicative Action in the 1790s

   • Andrew McCann

   Pages 59-82

5. Politico-Sentimentality: John Thelwall, Literary Production and the Critique of Capital in the 1790s

   • Andrew McCann

   Pages 83-106

6. Gothic Consumption: Populism, Consumerism and the Discipline of Reading

   • Andrew McCann

   Pages 107-144

7. Domestic Revolutions: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Limits of Radical Sentimentality

   • Andrew McCann

   Pages 145-180

8. Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: the Colonial Context of Non-identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda

   • Andrew McCann

   Pages 181-206

9. Back Matter

   Pages 207-226

   PDF

Cultural Politics in the 1790s examines the relationship between sentimental literature, political activism and the public sphere at the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on critical theorists such as Habermas, Negt and Kluge, Marcuse and Foucault, it attempts to demonstrate how major literary and political figures of the 1790s can be read in terms of the broader dynamics of modernity. Reading a diverse range of political and literary material from the period, it examines how relationships between the aesthetic and the political, the private and the public, mark the emergence and consolidation of bourgeois behavioural norms and the simultaneous marginalization of potentially more radical forms of political and cultural production.

• Age of Enlightenment
• critique
• dynamics
• eighteenth century
• English literature
• enlightenment
• gothic
• identity
• Jürgen Habermas
• knowledge
• literature
• love
• Michel Foucault
• politics
• subject
• British and Irish Literature

...Cultural Politics in the 1790s is both accomplished and promising. Studies in Romanticism

• Department of English, University of Queensland, Australia

  Andrew McCann

ANDREW McCANN teaches in the English Department at the University of Queensland.

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