Monstrous society
Subtitle: reciprocity, discipline, and the political uncanny, c. 1780/1848
By: David Collings.
Publisher: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses; UNKNO
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Lewisburg [Pa.]; Cranbury, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9780838757208
Subjects: Burke, Edmund, -- 1729-1797 -- Political and social views; Bentham, Jeremy, -- 1748-1832 -- Political and social views; Malthus, T. R. -- 1766-1834 -- Political and social views; English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Literature and society -- England -- History -- 18th century; Literature and society -- England -- History -- 19th century; Literature and history -- Great Britain -- History; Politics and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century; Politics and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
Description: "Monstrous Society problematizes competing representations of reciprocity in England in the decades around 1800. It argues that in the eighteenth-century moral economy, power is divided between official authority and the counter-power of plebeians. This tacit, mutual understanding comes under attack when influential political thinkers, such as Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and T.R. Malthus, attempt to discipline the social body, to make state power immune from popular response. But once negated, counter-power persists, even if in the demands of a debased, inhuman body. Such a response is writ large in Gothic tales, especially Matthew Lewis's The Monk and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and in the innovative, embodied political practices of the mass movements for Reform and the Charter. By interpreting the formation of modern English culture through the early modern practice of reciprocity, David Collings constructs a "nonmodern" mode of analysis, one that sees modernity not as a break from the past but as the result of attempts to transform traditions that, however distorted, nevertheless remain broadly in force."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Reversibility and the crowd in early modern England; title: The monstrous crowds and mysterious incorporations of Edmund Burke; title: Society without reciprocity: the auto-icon of Jeremy Bentham; title: The ghost of revolution: the politics of the uncanny in The monk; title: Discipline of disaster: the cancellation of reciprocity in T. R. Malthus; title: Monstrous "man": impasses of social mastery in Frankenstein; title: The politics of reciprocity: transformations of counterpower at the end of early modern England.