Title: The politics of romanticism : the social contract and literature /
Authors: Beenstock, Zoe
Year: 2016
Subjects: English literature History and criticism; English literature History and criticism; Romanticism Political aspects Great Britain.; Social contract History; Social contract History
Abstract: Zoe Beenstock examines the relationship between two major traditions which have not been considered in conjunction: British Romanticism and social contract philosophy. Her reading offers a new understanding of canonical accounts of retreat by some of British Romanticism's most dominant voices.
Contents: Philosophy. Forming a social contract : Hobbes to anti-Jacobinism -- Writing the social contradiction : Rousseau's literary politics -- Poetry. Coleridge's exile from the social contract, 1795-1829 -- Individual sovereignty and community : Wordsworth's Prelude -- Novels. Empiricism's secret history : Fleetwood and Rousseau -- Gendering the general will : Frankenstein's breaches of contract -- Concusion : the ends of Romanticism.