Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s - Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth

Manly,Susan

ISBN 10: 0754658325 / ISBN 13: 9780754658320

Published by Ashgate, Aldershot & Burlington, 2007

About this Item

2007. [vii], 204pp. Black and white illustrations. "Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s" shows for the first time how the radical 'Jacobin' poets, and their ideas of a 'revolutionary' poetry, were impelled-even 'invented'-by the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. For too long, the revolutionary Romanticism and poetic experiments of the 1790s have been understood as responses to the American and French revolutions or attributed to the intellectual influence of Rousseau.Susan Manly counters these assumptions, by tracing threads of influence from Locke's ideas of 'arbitrary' language and tyranny, through Tooke's attacks on terms such as 'majesty' and 'law', to the supposedly 'real language' of Wordsworthian Romanticism. She breaks new ground in establishing Maria Edgeworth's place in Locke's anti-authoritarian tradition, contending that Edgeworth's work, produced in the shadow of the United Irishmen uprising, revives the politicisation of the idea of common language displaced in Wordsworth's neutralizing of Locke's radical impulse in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Manly's original and engaging book will appeal to scholars of 1790s radicalism, eighteenth-century linguistic theory, women's writing, and the relations between Britain and Ireland." Bbook and unclipped jacket as new.

Seller Inventory # LitCrit156

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s - Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth
• Publisher: Ashgate, Aldershot & Burlington
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0754658325
• ISBN 13: 9780754658320
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • Poetry
  • Politics

About this title

Synopsis

Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s shows for the first time how the radical 'Jacobin' poets, and their ideas of a 'revolutionary' poetry, were impelled - even 'invented' - by the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. For too long the revolutionary Romanticism and poetic experiments of the 1790s have been understood as responses to the American and French revolutions or attributed to the intellectual influence of Rousseau. The author counters these assumptions, by tracing threads of influence from Locke's ideas of 'arbitrary' language and tyranny, through Tooke's attacks on terms such as 'majesty' and 'law', to the supposedly 'real language' of Wordsworthian Romanticism. She breaks new ground in establishing Maria Edgeworth's place in Locke's anti-authoritarian tradition, contending that Edgeworth's work, produced in the shadow of the United Irishmen uprising, revives the politicisation of the idea of common language displaced in Wordsworth's neutralizing of Locke's radical impulse in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. The author's original and engaging book will appeal to scholars of 1790s radicalism, eighteenth-century linguistic theory, women's writing, and the relations between Britain and Ireland.

About the Author

Susan Manly is a lecturer at the University of St Andrews, UK. She is the editor of Maria Edgeworth's Harrington and Practical Education, and the co-editor of Helen and Leonora, all in the twelve-volume Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth (1999/2003). She is also the editor of a paperback edition of Harrington (2004), and the author of several articles and book chapters on Edgeworth, Burke, Coleridge and Wollstonecraft.