Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel

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. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents Introduction: Personification and Its Discontents 1. The Pursuit of Guilty Things: Corporate Actors, Collective Actions, and Romantic Abstraction 2. The One and the Manor: On 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 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Z