Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • James P. Carson

   Pages 1-24

3. Gothic and Romantic Crowds

   • James P. Carson

   Pages 25-43

4. Popular versus Legitimate Authority in Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian

   • James P. Carson

   Pages 45-74

5. Gothic Properties: Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Journal of a West India Proprietor

   • James P. Carson

   Pages 75-104

6. Unisonance and the Echo: Popular Disturbances and Theatricality in the Works of Charles Maturin

   • James P. Carson

   Pages 105-136

7. Godwin’s “Metaphysical Dissecting Knife”

   • James P. Carson

   Pages 137-167

8. “A Sigh of Many Hearts”: History, Humanity, and Popular Culture in Mary Shelley’s Valperga and Lodore

   • James P. Carson

   Pages 169-193

9. Conclusion

   • James P. Carson

   Pages 195-200

10. Back Matter

    Pages 201-247

    PDF

Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel is a richly historicized account that explores anxieties about crowds, fiction and disguise, women authors, and unstable gender roles. James P. Carson argues that the Romantic novel is a form individualizing in its address, which exploits popular materials and stretches formal boundaries in an attempt to come to terms with the masses. Informed by Bakhtin, Foucault, and Freud, this book offers fresh new readings of works by Sir Walter Scott, William Godwin, Matthew Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, and Mary Shelley.

• fiction
• novel
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Romanticism
• British and Irish Literature

"Carson s Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel is an intensely original study, a powerful and provocative meditation on political and gender issues raised with special urgency by the major Romantic English novelists. By extracting from these novels a rich thematic complexity centered on mass movements and the role that women are represented as playing in them, Carson rescues Gothic and Romantic fiction from the charge that it is merely sensationalistic or sentimental. This is an important book, consistently insightful and often revelatory." - John Richetti, A.M. Rosenthal Professor of English (Emeritus), University of Pennsylvania

"In this fascinating study, Carson examines the decline of the voice of the crowd in the Romantic era, as social unity achieved in the realm of sound is challenged by aural surveillance. He vividly recounts the process by which Romantic novels are complicit in and resistant to the attempt to exert power over the masses by individualizing them. This work importantly engages with recent work on nations and nation-building and on the place of people in them." - Frances Ferguson, Mary Elizabeth Garrett Professor, Johns Hopkins University

JAMES CARSON, Associate Professor of English at Kenyon College, USA.

Policies and ethics