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Unusual Suspects: Pitt's Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s de Kenneth R. Johnston

Unusual Suspects: Pitt's Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s

Autor Kenneth R. Johnston
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 25 iul 2013

Bazându-ne pe arhivele istorice ale perioadei revoluționare și pe studiile literare recente, reținem că Unusual Suspects propune o reevaluare critică a deceniului 1790 în Marea Britanie. În timp ce istoriografia tradițională se concentrează adesea pe triumful britanic împotriva lui Napoleon, Kenneth R. Johnston scoate la lumină „Regimul Alarmei” condus de William Pitt cel Tânăr. Această perioadă a fost marcată de o represiune internă fără precedent, în care peste o sută de procese pentru trădare au vizat nu doar activiștii politici consacrați, ci și o întreagă clasă de tineri intelectuali liberali ale căror cariere au fost distruse prin mijloace informale: contracte anulate, moșteniri negate și campanii de denigrare.

Credem că elementul distinctiv al acestei lucrări este modul în care autorul recuperează vocile unor scriitori „aproape faimoși”, precum Helen Maria Williams sau John Thelwall, integrându-le într-un context dominat de figurile canonice ale Romantismului. Cartea acoperă aceeași arie tematică precum The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution 1789-99, dar cu o abordare mai biografică și axată pe impactul social al „listelor negre”, spre deosebire de analiza lui S. Andrews focalizată pe presă. Stilul lui Johnston este riguros și documentat, amintind de precizia din The Hidden Wordsworth, însă aici perspectiva se lărgește pentru a include întregul eșafodaj de supraveghere și cenzură care a precedat epoca victoriană. Este un studiu despre cum teama politică poate înăbuși potențialul cultural al unei generații, oferind o paralelă istorică fascinantă cu fenomenul McCarthyismului american.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780199657803
ISBN-10: 0199657807
Pagini: 400
Ilustrații: 5 page colour plate section; 16 black-and-white in-text images
Dimensiuni: 162 x 240 x 30 mm
Greutate: 0.76 kg
Editura: OUP OXFORD
Colecția OUP Oxford
Locul publicării:Oxford, United Kingdom

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această carte cititorilor pasionați de istorie politică și literatură britanică care doresc să înțeleagă „partea întunecată” a epocii romantice. Veți descoperi cum mecanismele de represiune ale statului pot marginaliza talente literare remarcabile și veți câștiga o perspectivă nuanțată asupra contextului în care au scris marii poeți ai vremii. Este o lectură esențială pentru a înțelege fragilitatea libertății de exprimare în perioade de criză geopolitică.

Despre autor

Kenneth R. Johnston este profesor emerit și fost director al departamentului de engleză la Indiana University. Este un specialist de renume mondial în mișcarea romantică britanică, fiind cunoscut în special pentru biografia sa monumentală The Hidden Wordsworth, care a redefinit înțelegerea tinereții și radicalismului lui William Wordsworth. Cercetările sale se concentrează pe intersecția dintre biografia literară, istoria politică și climatul social al secolului al XVIII-lea. Prin Unusual Suspects, Johnston își continuă explorarea tensiunilor dintre convingerile radicale și necesitatea supraviețuirii într-un stat autoritar, temă recurentă în întreaga sa carieră academică.

Descriere

Robespierre's Reign of Terror spawned an evil little twin in William Pitt the Younger's Reign of Alarm, 1792-1798. Terror begat Alarm. Many lives and careers were ruined in Britain as a result of the alarmist regime Pitt set up to suppress domestic dissent while waging his disastrous wars against republican France. Liberal young writers and intellectuals whose enthusiasm for the American and French revolutions raised hopes for Parliamentary reform at home saw their prospects blasted. Over a hundred trials for treason or sedition (more than ever before or since in British history) were staged against 'the usual suspects' - that is, political activists. But other, informal, vigilante means were used against the 'unusual suspects' of this book: jobs lost, contracts abrogated, engagements broken off, fellowships terminated, inheritances denied, and so on and on. As in the McCarthy era in 1950s America, blacklisting and rumor-mongering did as much damage as legal repression. Dozens of 'almost famous' writers saw their promising careers nipped in the bud: people like Helen Maria Williams, James Montgomery, William Frend, Gilbert Wakefield, John Thelwall, Joseph Priestley, Dr. Thomas Beddoes, Francis Wrangham and many others. Unusual Suspects tells the stories of some representative figures from this largely 'lost' generation, restoring their voices to nationalistic historical accounts that have drowned them in triumphal celebrations of the rise of English Romanticism and England's ultimate victory over Napoleon. Their stories are compared with similar experiences of the first Romantic generation: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Burns, and Blake. Wordsworth famously said of this decade, 'bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!' These young people did not find it so-and neither, when we look more closely, did Wordsworth.

Recenzii

No one before Johnston has understood the poetry of the Romantic period so centrally in the context of Pittâs alarm ... This fascinating book is one way of thinking afresh about the huge damage a tyranny such as Pittâs can do, not just to a generation of writers, but to the development of a whole culture.
Johnston has written a book that is part investigative history and part elegy ... a story that has waited a long time to be told. We might think of Unusual Suspects as a cross between William Hazlittâs The Spirit of the Age and E.P. Thompsonâs The Making of the English Working Class: group biography meets radical history.
The great strength of Johnston's approach is its breadth and accessibility. To provide such a rich tableau of the 1790s and its writers and thinkers, both known and unknown, in only four hundred or so pages is a remarkable achievement. Unusual Suspects is a profoundly useful book for every student of the period, at whatever level of accomplishment; if it does not fundamentally change the way we view and teach the period, it should.
The book's greatest contribution is to show how the reign of alarm shaped the ideas and writing of these extraordinarily talented writers. That many of them are now scarcely known even to literary academics reinforces one of Johnston's recurrent points ... that this reign not only caused the ruin of personal lives and the deferral of political reforms but also hampered the genesis of great literature, including Romanticism itself ... Johnston tells a good story in a prose style self-consciously American and more colloquial than one usually finds in academic writing.
A study of huge scope and persuasive argument which will be of benefit to literary scholars and historians alike.
A new thorough-going treatment of a whole generation ... written with attractive informality of style ... that all students of the period will find themselves raiding for its judicious narration of ways in which texts of all kinds participate in and do not merely respond to political change.
A deeply moving book ... reveals the appalling extent to which William Pitt's Reign of Alarm impacted upon the history of Romanticism during the 1790s ... providing overwhelming evidence that innumerable writing careers were brought to a shuddering halt in the 1790s ... a wonderful resource for these lost writers.
Generally ... when academics try to write for a broader, popular audience, we fail ... because we try too hard. But not Kenneth Johnston [who] has been developing [his] style since writing The Hidden Wordsworth ... a style charged with moral urgency ... that is not so much popular as populist ... his model is the writings of a usual suspect, mentioned often in the book: Thomas Paine.
[An] exceptional study ... an invaluable resource to students of Romanticism.
engaging ... the sheer amount of material covered never feels overwhelming ... this is an important resource on a wide range of liberal thinkers of the late eighteenth century ... [and] it deserves a place on the bookshelf of any scholar interested in the literature of the French revolutionary period.

Notă biografică

Kenneth R. Johnston received his PhD from Yale University and spent his entire academic career at Indiana University, where he was honored for distinguished teaching and scholarly achievement, while also heading its Department of English. He is author of Wordsworth and 'The Recluse' and The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy, and editor of Romantic Revolutions. The Hidden Wordsworth won the 1999 Barricelli Prize for outstanding contribution to Romantic studies, and was named to several Book of the Year lists in both UK and US. He now resides in Chicago.