The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism

Romantic writers reimagined political progress in multiple genres, embracing a commitment to optimistic improvement while cultivating religious and political dissent. Political entities such as Percy Shelley's plans for political reform and Charlotte Smith's motley associations of strangers in The Banished Man are progressive because they advance collective utility or common good, but they simultaneously stake a claim to progress only insofar as they paradoxically solicit contending vantage points on the criteria for the very public benefit they passionately pursue.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 07 April 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press

This book explores how Romantic writers responded to familiar ideas about political progress inherited from the eighteenth century. While earlier writers like Voltaire and John Millar compared improvements in political institutions to the progress of sciences or refinement of manners, the novelists, poets, and political theorists examined in this book reimagined politically progressive thinking across various genres. While embracing a commitment to optimistic improvement, they also cultivated increasingly visible and volatile energies of religious and political dissent. Earlier narratives of progress tended to edit and fictionalize history, agglomerating different modes of knowledge and practice in their quest to describe and prescribe uniform cultural improvement. However, Romantic writers seized on internal division and viewed it less as an occasion for anxiety, exclusion, or erasure and more as an impetus to rethink the groundwork of progress itself. Political entities, such as Percy Shelley's plans for political reform and Charlotte Smith's motley associations of strangers in The Banished Man, are progressive because they advance some version of collective utility or common good. However, they simultaneously stake a claim to progress only insofar as they paradoxically solicit contending vantage points on the criteria for the very public benefit they passionately pursue. The majestic edifices of Wordsworth's imagined university in The Prelude embrace members who are republican or pious, not to mention the recalcitrant enthusiast who is the poet himself.

Weight: 540g
Dimension: 241 x 164 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192895301