| Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics: Romanticism, Language, Politics Subjects: ENGLISH LITERATURE -- 19TH CENTURY -- HISTORY AND CRITICISM; POLITICS AND LITERATURE -- GREAT BRITAIN -- HISTORY -- 19TH CENTURY; ENGLISH LANGUAGE -- POLITICAL ASPECTS -- GREAT BRITAIN; ENGLISH LANGUAGE -- 19TH CENTURY -- RHETORIC; POWER (SOCIAL SCIENCES); This book explores previously unexamined links between the arbitrary as articulated in linguistic theories on the one hand, and in political discourse about power on the other. In particular, Willam Keach shows how Enlightenment conceptions of the arbitrary were contested and extended in British Romantic writing. In doing so, he offers a new paradigm for understanding the recurrent problem of verbal representation in Romantic writing and the disputes over stylistic performance during this period. With clarity and force, Keach reads these phenomena in relation to a rapidly shifting literary marketplace and to the social pressures in Britain generated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the class antagonisms that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre. William Keach is Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Shelley's Style and the editor of Coleridge: The Complete Poems . |