| Abstract |
"Radical Conduct draws on both original material and a range of interdisciplinary insights to transform our understanding of the literary radicalism of London at the time of the French Revolution. It offers new accounts of people's understanding of and relationship to politics, their sense of the boundaries of privacy, their practices of sociability and friendship, the place of gossip and deliberation, relations between radical men and women, and their location in a wider world of sound and movement in the period. It reveals a series of tensions between many radicals' deliberative aspirations and the social conventions and practices in which their behaviour remained embedded. In doing so, it provides an understanding of the very fractured world of London society and politics, and sheds light both on the changing fortunes of radical men and women and on the uncertainties that drove the government's repressive policies and the loyalist reaction. The book centres on circles around William Godwin and women writers of the 1790s, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Inchbald and Amelia Alderson, while also using a range of materials explored for the first time in relation to other figures and circles in London in the period"-- Provided by publisher. |
