Monstrous Society

Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780-1848

David Collings

2009
332 pages
ISBN 9781611483154
Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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.

Order here

Reviews

"David Collings offers a strikingly new perspective on social conflict in Britain during the Romantic period...Collings' achievement in Monstrous Society is not just to demonstrate how...earlier radicalism was superseded by modern revolutionary politics, but how much of it survived, albeit in mutated forms, in the gothic literary imaginings of the nineteenth century."
--Nigel Leask. BARS Bulletin & Review December 2010: 21-22.

"Colling's argument is stimulating, if by definition schematic, overriding literary nuance to bring home its larger point."
-- Ian Duncan, SEL 2010: 917.

"..tells a compelling story of social history, and it grounds that story in rigorous and inventive readings of some of the most influential texts of the period. It is an impressive book."
--James O'Rourke, SiR, 50 (Winter 2011).

About the author:

David Collings is Professor of English at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He is author of Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (1994) as well as articles on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thelwall, Mary Shelley, Bentham, Malthus, Adam Smith, and contemporary Romantic criticism. With Michael O'Rourke, he has co-edited a special issue on Queer Romanticisms at Romanticism on the Net (2004-2005). His work has focused on the history of sexuality, discourses of the unreadable and the uncanny, the formation of disciplinary knowledges, and the emergence of popular radical traditions in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. His primary long-term project is to construct a post-disciplinary analysis of the formation of modern British culture.

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group