Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism: 32 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Series Number 32)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 2/25/1999
EAN 9780521641005, ISBN10: 0521641004
Hardcover, 304 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
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.