Democratic Subjects

• Introduction; Part I. The Sorrows of Edwin Waugh: A Study in Working Class Identity: 1. Young Edwin; 2. The struggle for the moral life; 3. The ends of the moral life; 4. The cult of the heart; 5. 'God bless these poor folks'; 6. The legacy of Edwin Waugh; Part II. John Bright and the English People: A Study in Middle Class Identity: 7. Plain man's prophesy; 8. Speaking Bright; 9. Making the self; 10. Bright make the social; 11. Creating the democratic imaginary; Part III. Democratic Romances: Narrative as Collective Identity in Nineteenth-Century England: 12. Narrative and history; 13. The romance of improvement; 14. The aesthetic framing of the social; 15. The constitution as an English Eden; 16. The story of the cruel Turk; 17. Some democratic leading men, or Mr Gladstone's dream; Appendices.

"Joyce's investigation of the lives, careers, and ideas of Waugh, Bright, and other "demotic" figures, as well as his more general analysis of the "democratic romances" expressed in melodramas, popular fiction, journalism, and other discursive forms, are detailed, thoroughly researched, and usually astute about the social contradictions informing "the democratic imaginary" of past and present." Nineteenth-Century Prose