Monstrous society : reciprocity, discipline, and the political uncanny, c. 1780-1848 / David Collings.
2009
PR448.P6 C65 2009 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection
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Details
Title
Monstrous society : reciprocity, discipline, and the political uncanny, c. 1780-1848 / David Collings.
Author
Collings, David, 1959-
ISBN
9780838757208 hardcover alkaline paper
0838757200 hardcover alkaline paper
0838757200 hardcover alkaline paper
Imprint
Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, c2009.
Language
English
Description
332 p. ; 24 cm.
Call Number
PR448.P6 C65 2009
Dewey Decimal Classification
820.9/3584107
Summary
"Monstrous Society problematizes competing representations of reciprocity in England in the decades around 1800. It argues that in the eighteenth-century moral economy, power is divided between official authority and the counter-power of plebeians. This tacit, mutual understanding comes under attack when influential political thinkers, such as Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and T.R. Malthus, attempt to discipline the social body, to make state power immune from popular response. But once negated, counter-power persists, even if in the demands of a debased, inhuman body. Such a response is writ large in Gothic tales, especially Matthew Lewis's The Monk and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , and in the innovative, embodied political practices of the mass movements for Reform and the Charter. By interpreting the formation of modern English culture through the early modern practice of reciprocity, David Collings constructs a "nonmodern" mode of analysis, one that sees modernity not as a break from the past but as the result of attempts to transform traditions that, however distorted, nevertheless remain broadly in force." -- Book jacket.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-321) and index.
Series
Bucknell studies in eighteenth-century literature and culture.
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Table of Contents
Reversibility and the crowd in early modern England
The monstrous crowds and mysterious incorporations of Edmund Burke
Society without reciprocity: the auto-icon of Jeremy Bentham
The ghost of revolution: the politics of the uncanny in The monk
Discipline of disaster: the cancellation of reciprocity in T. R. Malthus
Monstrous "man": impasses of social mastery in Frankenstein
The politics of reciprocity: transformations of counterpower at the end of early modern England.
The monstrous crowds and mysterious incorporations of Edmund Burke
Society without reciprocity: the auto-icon of Jeremy Bentham
The ghost of revolution: the politics of the uncanny in The monk
Discipline of disaster: the cancellation of reciprocity in T. R. Malthus
Monstrous "man": impasses of social mastery in Frankenstein
The politics of reciprocity: transformations of counterpower at the end of early modern England.