Print Politics

• Introduction: locating a plebeian counterpublic sphere; Part I. A Rhetoric of Radical Opposition: 1. Party, corruption and political opposition; 2. Representing the people: the press and parliamentary reform; 3. Beyond corruption: independence, personality, egotism; 4. The radical profession and 'the wholesale trade of sedition'; 5. Countersystem and the ends of opposition; Part II. Radical Print Culture In Periodical Form: 1. Popular radicalism in print; 2. Periodical forms in crisis; 3. A form deformed; 4. Radical reading and radical organization; Part III. The Trials of Radicalism: Assembling the Evidence of Reform: 1. The law of libel; 2. The courtroom defence as public offence; 3. Radical assembly in print; 4. 'A fair, plain and honest account'; 5 The language of fact: apocalypse without imagination; Part IV. Reading Cobbett's Contradictions: 1. 'The system'; 2. Writing as system and countersystem; 3. The economy of the world and the disappearance of the writer; Part V. Leigh Hunt and the End of Radical Opposition: 1. 'Reform of periodical writing'; 2. The antinomies of independent opposition: egotism and community; 3. The language of class in a progressive public sphere; Afterword: William Hazlitt: a radical critique of radical opposition?

"While anchored in a rich historical contextualization and punctuated by ideologically edged perceptions, Gilmartin's study of the early nineteenth-century radical culture is most notable for its nuanced description of and appreciation for that culture's rhetorical and literary achievements." Michael Scrivener, Victorian Periodicals Review