Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel
Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel
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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.
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Front Matter
- Introduction: Personification and Its Discontents
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1.
The Pursuit of Guilty Things: Corporate Actors, Collective Actions, and Romantic Abstraction
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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)
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End Matter
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