Cultural Politics in the 1790s examines the relationship between sentimental literature, political activism and the public sphere at the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on critical theorists such as Habermas, Negt and Kluge, Marcuse and Foucault, it attempts to demonstrate how major literary and political figures of the 1790s can be read in terms of the broader dynamics of modernity. Reading a diverse range of political and literary material from the period, it examines how relationships between the aesthetic and the political, the private and the public, mark the emergence and consolidation of bourgeois behavioural norms and the simultaneous marginalization of potentially more radical forms of political and cultural production.

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ANDREW McCANN teaches in the English Department at the University of Queensland.

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List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction Literature and the Public Sphere in the 1790s Edmund Burke's Immortal Law: Reading the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1788 William Godwin and the Pathological Public Sphere: Theorizing Communicative Action in the 1790s Politico-Sentimentality: John Thelwall, Literary Production and the Critique of Capital in the 1790s Gothic Consumption: Populism Consumerism and the Discipline of Reading Domestic Revolutions: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Limits of Radical Sentimentality Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: the Colonial Context of Non-identity in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda Index