Skip to Main Content

Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel

Online ISBN:
9780823272273
Print ISBN:
9780823272235
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel

Daniel M. Stout
Daniel M. Stout
University of Mississippi
Find on
Published online:
18 May 2017
Published in print:
1 December 2016
Online ISBN:
9780823272273
Print ISBN:
9780823272235
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the rise of 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 a set of important Romantic novels—Caleb Williams, Mansfield Park, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Frankenstein, and A Tale of Two Cities—alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, this book 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.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close