Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, And The Novel (Lit Z),New

Corporate Romanticism Offers An Alternative History Of The Connections Between Modernity, Individualism, And The Novel. In Early Nineteenthcentury England, Two Developmentsthe Rise Of Corporate Persons And The Expanded Scale Of Industrial Actionundermined The Basic Assumption Underpinning Both Liberalism And The Law: That Individual Human Persons Can Be Meaningfully Correlated With Specific Actions And Particular Effects. Reading Works By Godwin, Austen, Hogg, Mary Shelley, And Dickens Alongside A Wideranging Set Of Debates In Nineteenthcentury Law And Romantic Politics And Aesthetics, Daniel Stout Argues That The Novel, A Literary Form Long Understood As A Reflection Of Individualisms Ideological Ascent, In Fact Registered The Fragile Fictionality Of Accountable Individuals In A Period Defined By Corporate Actors And Expansively Entangled Fields Of Action.Examining How Liberalism, The Law, And The Novel All Wrestled With The Moral Implications Of A Highly Collectivized And Densely Packed Modernity, Corporate Romanticism Reconfigures Our Sense Of The Nineteenth Century And Its Novels, Arguing That We See In Them Not Simply The Apotheosis Of Laissezfair Individualism But The First Chapter Of A Crucial And Distinctly Modern Problem About How To Fit The Individualist And Humanist Terms Of Justice Onto A World In Which The Most Consequential Agents Are No Longer Persons.