Corporate romanticism : liberalism justice and the novel Introduction: Personification and its discontents The pursuit of guilty things: corporate actors collective actions and romantic abstraction The one and the manor: on being doing and deserving in Mansfield Park Castes of exception: tradition and the public sphere in The private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner Nothing personal: the decapitations of character in A tale of two cities Not world enough: easement externality and the edges of justice (Caleb Williams) Epilogue: Everything counts (Frankenstein) Innocence you dont have to earn virtue that you cannot deserve guilt that never ends action that never stops character without innerness many persons speaking through a single human a single creature who is also a species a man who is not himself because he is his double a man who is neither himself nor his double. These confusions of personhood and action are not exceptions to the law of liberal individualism; they are the confusions that are its only history. 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. 0Reading a set of important Romantic novels Caleb Williams Mansfield Park The Private Memoirs and Confessions of 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 Daniel Stout argues that the novel a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualisms 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