Disaffected Parties

Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760-1830

John Owen Havard

Provides the first integrated account of literary and political developments over the 1760-1830 period in England, with particular attention to the continuing influence of the 1688 Revolution and the neglected consequences of unrest in the American colonies and Ireland
Presents authoritative discussions of the politics of major authors including Jane Austen and Lord Byron and draws upon original archival research such as Samuel Johnson's American reputation and Laurence Sterne's early political journalism
Recovers the origins of modern disenchanted political attitudes, including the earliest widespread popular expressions of cynicism towards the political establishment, to provide a prehistory to the current 'disaffective turn'
Proposes an expanded approach to the 'parties' of political activity, drawing upon the work of Jacques Ranciere and recent discussions of political assembly
Poses wide-ranging questions about the 'political' status of literary production and suggests fresh approaches to the relationship between politics and aesthetics

Disaffected Parties

Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760-1830

John Owen Havard

Description

Disaffected Parties reveals how alienation from politics effected crucial changes to the shape and status of literary form. Recovering the earliest expressions of grumbling, irritability, and cynicism towards politics, this study asks how unsettled partisan legacies converged with more recent discontents to forge a seminal period in the making of English literature, and thereby poses wide-ranging questions about the lines between politics and aesthetics. Reading works including Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, James Boswell's Life of Johnson, the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, and the satirical poetry of Lord Byron in tandem with print culture and partisan activity, this book shows how these writings remained animated by disaffected impulses and recalcitrant energies at odds with available party positions and emerging governmental norms—even as they sought to imagine perspectives that looked beyond the divided political world altogether.

'No one can be more sick of-or indifferent to politics than I am' Lord Byron wrote in 1820. Between the later eighteenth century and the Romantic age, disaffected political attitudes acquired increasingly familiar shapes. Yet this was also a period of ferment in which unrest associated with the global age of revolutions (including a dynamic transatlantic opposition movement) collided with often inchoate assemblages of parties and constituencies. As writers adopted increasingly emphatic removes from the political arena and cultivated familiar stances of cynicism, detachment, and retreat, their estrangement also promised to loop back into political engagement-and to make their works 'parties' all their own.

Disaffected Parties

Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760-1830

John Owen Havard

Preface
Introduction: Sick of Politics
1. Disaffected Parties, 1688-1832
2. Tristram Shandy and the Divided Worlds of Politics
3. Literary Leviathans: Johnson, Boswell, and the 1790s
4. Burke, Edgeworth, and Ireland's Discontents
5. Austen and the Cultural Logic of Late Toryism
6. Byron's Opposition
Conclusion

Disaffected Parties

Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760-1830

John Owen Havard

Author Information

John Owen Havard, Assistant Professor, Binghamton University

John Owen Havard is Assistant Professor at Binghamton University and received his PhD from the University of Chicago. His articles and essays have appeared in ELH, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Contemporary Literature and in the volumes Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne and Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry. His reviews and review essays have appeared in The Scriblerian, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The New Rambler, and the English Historical Review. He has received fellowships from the British Association for American Studies, the Whiting Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.

Disaffected Parties

Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760-1830

John Owen Havard

Reviews and Awards

"John Owen Havard's new book, Disaffected Parties: Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760-1830, offers a thoughtful and searching account of the relationship between this dis-word cloud and the political terrain of the Romantic period, after 1760 and into the early 1820s with Byron." -- Jon Mee, University of York, The Wordsworth Circle

Disaffected Parties

Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760-1830

John Owen Havard

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