Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel

by J. Carson

Overview

Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel is a richly historicized account that explores anxieties about crowds, fiction and disguise, women authors, and unstable gender roles. James P. Carson argues that the Romantic novel is a form individualizing in its address, which exploits popular materials and stretches formal boundaries in an attempt to come to terms with the masses. Informed by Bakhtin, Foucault, and Freud, this book offers fresh new readings of works by Sir Walter Scott, William Godwin, Matthew Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, and Mary Shelley.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230621107
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	06/21/2010
Series:	Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
Edition description:	2010
Pages:	247
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

JAMES CARSON, Associate Professor of English at Kenyon College, USA.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1

1 Gothic and Romantic Crowds 25

2 Popular versus Legitimate Authority in Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian 45

Women Rioters and the October Days 46

Women's Dress and "Black Scores" 56

3 Gothic Properties: Matthew Lewis's The Monk and Journal of a West India Proprietor 75

"A Sort of Half-Man": Disguise, Disgust, and Dismemberment 79

Popular Culture, Slavery, and Social Control 89

4 Unisonance and the Echo: Popular Disturbances and Theatricality in the Works of Charles Maturin 105

The "Frantic Idea" of Irish Independence: Maturin's Politics 105

Unsexed Women 119

The Echoes of Incarceration 129

5 Godwin's "Metaphysical Dissecting Knife" 137

Moral Anatomy and Agency 138

The Crowd and the Noble Savage in St. Leon 147

Sympathy and the Problem of Essentialist Gender Definition 153

The Angelic Station and the Calvinist Congregation 161

6 "A Sigh of Many Hearts": History, Humanity, and Popular Culture in Mary Shelley's Valperga and Lodore 169

Aristocrats and the London Crowd in Lodore 169

From Frankenstein to Valperga 173

History and Sensibility 175

Defining Humanity 180

Republicanism and Popular Culture 186

Conclusion 195

Notes 201

Bibliography 219

Index 237

Editorial Reviews

"Carson s Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel is an intensely original study, a powerful and provocative meditation on political and gender issues raised with special urgency by the major Romantic English novelists. By extracting from these novels a rich thematic complexity centered on mass movements and the role that women are represented as playing in them, Carson rescues Gothic and Romantic fiction from the charge that it is merely sensationalistic or sentimental. This is an important book, consistently insightful and often revelatory." - John Richetti, A.M. Rosenthal Professor of English (Emeritus), University of Pennsylvania

"In this fascinating study, Carson examines the decline of the voice of the crowd in the Romantic era, as social unity achieved in the realm of sound is challenged by aural surveillance. He vividly recounts the process by which Romantic novels are complicit in and resistant to the attempt to exert power over the masses by individualizing them. This work importantly engages with recent work on nations and nation-building and on the place of people in them." - Frances Ferguson, Mary Elizabeth Garrett Professor, Johns Hopkins University

From the Publisher