Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel

Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the novel. Early nineteenth-century England saw two developments—the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action—both of which undermined the fundamental premise of liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading five Romantic novels alongside debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, Daniel Stout argues that the novel registered not individualism’s ideological ascent but the fragile and deliberate 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 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.