Corporate Romanticism ─ Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel

"...innocence you don't have to earn, virtue that you cannot deserve, guilt that never ends, action that never stops, character without innerness, many persons speaking through a single human, a single creature who is also a species, a man who is not himself because he is his double, a man who is neither himself nor his double. These confusions of personhood and action are not exceptions to the law of liberal individualism; they are the confusions that are its only history."

Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments--the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action--undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading a set of important Romantic novels--Caleb Williams, Mansfield Park, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of Justified Sinner, Frankenstein, and A Tale of Two Cities--alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, Daniel Stout argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism's 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 laissez-fair 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.

Daniel Stout is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Mississippi. He is the coeditor, with Jason Potts, of Theory Aside (2014) and has published articles in Novel and ELH.