The Politics of Romanticism (original) (raw)

Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

This book examines the relationship between two major traditions which have not been considered in conjunction: British Romanticism and social contract philosophy. It argues that an emerging political vocabulary was translated into a literary vocabulary in social contract theory. British Romanticism absorbed the metaphors and questions of this new discourse of individualism. Elements of social contract theory have subsequently reverberated backwards to shape the reception of Romanticism in contemporary literary studies and culture, leading Romanticism to be perceived as an individualistic literary movement. But Romantic writers were actually astute commentators on a crisis in concepts of community that had developed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theory. By looking at the intersection of social contract theory, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, German Idealism, canonical works of Romanticism, and the political culture of the 1790s, the book provides an alternative...

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