Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism

Re-examines Rousseau's influence on French Revolution and English Romanticism, through the mediating figure of Robespierre.

Gregory Dart (Author)

9780521020398, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 September 2005

304 pages, 5 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.456 kg

"This recent book by Gregory Dart is a well-informed and intelligently executed account of the impact of Rousseau's thought upon British romanticism... Rousseau, Robespirre, and Romanticism is a valuable, highly readable addition to romantic scholarship, a text that future analysts of the intersections of politics and literature in the age of romanticism would do well to read with care. Alertly attentive to the texts it reads, it sketches with considerable success the highly important process of Rousseau's assimilation into the political life of England in the post-revolutionary era." Stidies in Romanticism, 40 (Summer 01)

This book re-opens the question of Rousseau's influence on the French Revolution and on English Romanticism, by examining the relationship between his confessional writings and his political theory. Gregory Dart argues that by looking at the way in which Rousseau's writings were mediated by the speeches and actions of the French Jacobin statesman Maximilien Robespierre, we can gain a clearer and more concrete sense of the legacy he left to English writers. He shows how the writings of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth and William Hazlitt rehearse and reflect upon the Jacobin tradition in the aftermath of the French revolutionary Terror.

Introduction
1. Despotism of liberty: Robespierre and the illusion of politics
2. The politics of confession in Rousseau and Robespierre
3. Chivalry, justice and the law in William Godwin's Caleb Williams
4. 'The Prometheus of Sentiment': Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and aesthetic education
5. Strangling the infant Hercules: Malthus and the population controversy
6. 'The virtue of one paramount mind': Wordsworth and the politics of the mountain
7. 'Sour Jacobinism': William Hazlitt and the resistance to reform
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]