Disaffected Parties: Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760-1830

Description

Disaffected Parties reveals how alienation from politics effected crucial changes to the shape and status of literary form. Recovering the earliest expressions of grumbling, irritability, and cynicism towards politics, this study asks how unsettled partisan legacies converged with more recent discontents to forge a seminal period in the making of English literature, and thereby poses wide-ranging questions about the lines between politics and aesthetics. Reading works including Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, James Boswell's Life of Johnson, the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, and the satirical poetry of Lord Byron in tandem with print culture and partisan activity, this book shows how these writings remained animated by disaffected impulses and recalcitrant energies at odds with available party positions and emerging governmental normseven as they sought to imagine perspectives that looked beyond the divided political world altogether. 'No one can be more sick of-or indifferent to politics than I am' Lord Byron wrote in 1820. Between the later eighteenth century and the Romantic age, disaffected political attitudes acquired increasingly familiar shapes. Yet this was also a period of ferment in which unrest associated with the global age of revolutions (including a dynamic transatlantic opposition movement) collided with often inchoate assemblages of parties and constituencies. As writers adopted increasingly emphatic removes from the political arena and cultivated familiar stances of cynicism, detachment, and retreat, their estrangement also promised to loop back into political engagement-and to make their works 'parties' all their own. Cover Disaffected Parties: Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760–1830 Copyright Preface Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures Introduction: Sick of Politics DISAFFECTION, POLITICS, LITERATURE INSTABILITY, CRISIS, REVOLUTION LITERATURE ON THE SHORES OF POLITICS LITERARY FORM AND THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK 1: Disaffected Parties, 1688–1832 ‘POLITICKS’! 1688 AND THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ESTRANGEMENT SATIRE AND CYNICISM: FROM THE MAKING OF SWIFT TO THE FALL OF WALPOLE (1714–42) ‘ALL THE DIFFERENT PARTIES ELECTRIFIED’: STRUCTURES OF POLITICAL FEELING AT THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE I I I THEATRICAL INTERLUDE: A WORD TO THE WISE (1770) POLITICAL SCIENCE, PUBLIC FEELINGS: GOVERNANCE IN EGERIA (1802–3) 2: Tristram Shandy and the Divided Worlds of Politics ‘MY PEN I ’VE SPLINTER’D QUITE’: STERNE AND THE POLITICS OF PARTY TAKING SIDES: LAUNCHING TRISTRAM SHANDY ‘HEARTY LAUGHING SUBJECTS’? CONSIDERING SHANDEISM ‘UTOPIA! WHERE THE DEVIL’S THAT?’ ‘HEARTY LAUGHING (POLITICAL) SUBJECTS’? SHANDEISM RECONSIDERED 3: Literary Leviathans: Johnson, Boswell, and the 1790s THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITYIN THE JOHNSON CIRCLE JOHNSON’S ERRATIC TORYISM LEVIATHAN IN THE 1790S: WILD DEMOCRATS AND WAYWARD PREROGATIVES BOSWELL’S ‘WARM’ TORYISM THE LITERARY LEVIATHAN? WRANGLING THE LIFE OF JOHNSON 4: Burke, Edgeworth, and Ireland’s Discontents WOMEN, POLITICS, AND THE NOVEL IRELAND’S DISCONTENTS BURKE’S PARTIES ABSENT FRIENDS: ‘MAJESTIC’ POLITICIANS AND ‘WRETCHED TENANTS’ PARTIAL SPECTATORS IN THE ABSENTEE 5: Austen and the Cultural Logic of Late Toryism ‘THE SCEPTER, NOW TRANSFERR’D’: POWER AND PREROGATIVE REVISITED WILLIAM PITT AND THE IMPORTANCE OF FEELING TORY MASTERS AND SERVANTS: THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY IN MANSFIELD PARK ‘HE MUST NOT HEAD MOBS’: NATIONAL ORDER AND THE NOVEL AUSTEN’S WILFUL HEROINES 6: Byron’s Opposition THE SHADOW OF OPPOSITION: BYRON AND THE ‘DEVIL’S PARTY’ BYRONIC, IRONIC, DISAFFECTED UNSHACKLED JUNIUS BYRON’S CYNICISM THE TRUTH IN POLITICS Conclusion Works Cited ARCHIVES AND MANUSCRIPTS PUBLISHED MATERIAL Index