Corporate Romanticism [electronic resource] : Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel /
Stout, Daniel,author.
New York [New York] : Fordham University Press,
2017.
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.
Specialized.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Specialized.
Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.
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).
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.
Description based on print version record.
English literature
Liberalism in literature.
Juristic persons
Individualism in literature.
Corporations in literature.

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