Politics of Romanticism

Zoe Beenstock is a lecturer at the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa.

• Introduction: Romanticism and the Social Contract; Part I: Philosophy; 1. Forming a Social Contract: Hobbes to Anti-JacobinismBonds of Sociability: The Scottish Enlightenment; Idealist Responses: Kant, Schiller, and Hegel; The Anti-Jacobin Social Contract; 2. Writing the Social Contradiction: Rousseau’s Literary Politics; Julie and The Social Contract; Free from Desire; Part II: Poetry; 3. Coleridge’s Exile from the Social Contract, 1795-1829; Ending in Mere Nothingism: Pantisocracy to Idealism; Coleridge’s Conversation Poems; Scepticism and The Ancient Mariner, 4. Individual Sovereignty and Community: Wordsworth’s Prelude; Social Nature; Education: London and Europe; General Wills, Individual Ills: The Life and Death of Social Bodies; Utopia in The Excursion; Part III: Novels; 5. Empiricism’s Secret History: Fleetwood and Rousseau; Godwin and the Social Contract; An Individualist Education; Rousseau’s Ghost; Wollstonecraft and Marriage’s Secret Contracts; Fiction; 6. Gendering the General Will: Frankenstein’s Breaches of Contract; Social Withdrawal; Making Empiricist Monsters; The Female Creature; Conclusion: The Ends of Romanticism; Works Cited.

The Politics of Romanticism makes a compelling case for the significance of social contract theory as a tradition of philosophical and political thought, and is likely to become an important reference point for scholars of key Romantic writers