English literature in history, 1730-80: An equal, wide survey

Barrell, John

Literature & Fiction

Hutchinson

First published in 1983, English Literature in History, 1780-1830 is an original and provocative study of the literature of the Romantic period with an introduction by Raymond Williams. Roger Sales concentrates his analysis on two related themes. The first, the politics of pastoral, analyses the use of this genre by both established writers and poets who were enormously popular in their time, but who are now less well known. The author argues that all literary treatments of rural society in this period make political statements, particularly when they displace or disguise the economic facts of life. His second theme, the theatre of politics, introduces the reader to some of the main political events of the period, and demonstrates how their form and presentation can illuminate some of the literature of the period. This book will be of interest to students and teachers of English literature.

English Literature in History, 1730-80

HarperCollins, Publishers

It is high treason in British law to imagine the king's death. But after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, everyone in Britain must have found themselves imagining that the same fate might befall George III. How easy was it to distinguish between fantasising about the death of George and imagining it, in the legal sense of intending or designing? John Barrell examines this question in the context of the political trials of the mid-1790s and the controversies they generated. He shows how the law of treason was adapted in the years following Louis's death to punish what was acknowledged to be a "modern" form of treason unheard of when the law had been framed. The result, he argues, was the invention of a new and imaginary reading, a "figurative" treason, by which the question of who was imagining the king's death, the supposed traitors or those who charged them with treason, became inseparable.

Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-1796

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

How was the social and cultural life of Britain affected by the fear that the French Revolution would spread across the channel? In this brilliant, engagingly written, and profusely illustrated book, John Barrell, well-known for his studies of the history, literature, and art of the period, argues that the conflict between the ancien régime in Britain and the emerging democratic movement was so fundamental that it could not be contained within what had previously been thought of as the "normal" arena of politics. Activities and spaces which had previously been regarded as "outside" politics suddenly no longer seemed to be so, and the fear of revolution produced a culture of surveillance and suspicion which penetrated every aspect of private life. Drawing on an unusually wide range of sources, including novels, poems, plays, newspapers, debates in parliament, trials, political pamphlets, and caricatures, The Spirit of Despotism focuses on a number of examples of such invasions of privacy. It shows how the culture of suspicion affected how people spoke and behaved in London coffee-houses; how it influenced attitudes to the king's behavior in private, especially during his summer holidays in Weymouth; how it infiltrated the country cottage, previously idealized as a protected haven of peace and retirement from political life; and how it influenced the fashion of the period, so that even the way people chose to style their hair came to be seen as a political issue.

The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s

British & Irish

Examines the opinions of Reynolds, Barry, Blake, and Fuseli in regard to the function of painting in modern society

The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public

Yale Univ Pr

Thomas De Quincey, best known for his book Confessions of an English Opium Eater, was a journalist and propagandist of Empire, of oriental aggression, and of racial paranoia. The greater part of the fourteen volumes of his collected writings concerns the history, the colonial development, and increasingly the threat presented by the Orient in all its manifestations―human, animal, and microbiological. This remarkable book, which is an account of De Quincey’s fears of all things oriental, is also an extraordinary analysis of the psychopathology of mid-Victorian imperialist culture.  John Barrell paints a picture of De Quincey as a happy family man, apparently at ease with himself and with the rest of the world, but in fact harboring and expressing the most ferocious and brutal denunciation of Orientals of all kinds and dreaming of exacting from them a terrible retribution. Barrell shows that throughout De Quincey’s writings there is a repeated story of the murder or violation of a female victim―either within or outside De Quincey’s family―by an oriental criminal This story finds its way into almost everything he wrote: the various versions of his autobiography, his novels and short stories, his biographical and critical writings, his essays on politics, history, and science. Barrell attempts to understand this European terror of the East by an approach that is both historical and psychoanalytic. In particular, he explores the relation between childhood anxiety and imperial guilt in a body of writing in which the fear of violence within the family is imaged as a fear of the oriental, and the private and the public, the sexual and the imperial, the feminine and the exotic are endlessly intertwined.  This book will be fascinating reading for those interested in Victorian literature, in psychoanalysis and its relation to literature, in the history of imperialism, and in debates about the characteristics and effects of colonial discourse.

The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism

Yale University Press

What is the function of painting in a commercial society? John Barrell discusses how British artists and writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, William Blake, and James Barry attempted to answer this question. His provocative and illuminating book offers a new perspective on both art criticism and eighteenth-century British culture.

The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: "The Body of the Politic" (Body of the Public)

English Literature in History, 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey

History

St.Martin's Press

It is generally agreed that in the early eighteenth century people began to be interested in landscape as something to have a 'taste' for; that they saw landscape through the eyes of the great painters, and that later pictures, poetry and landscape gardening all reflect that taste. Dr Barrell examines this interest, showing how the taste for landscape affected the poetry in detail. John Clare, who lived most of his life in rural Northamptonshire, whose landscape was being transformed by enclosure, is then taken as the focus of these different attitudes. Clare's truthfulness to the individual locality he wanted to describe would not permit him to use the conventional literary language of his predecessors, and he had instead to find his own language. His success in doing this removed him from mainstream English poetry. This 1972 text brings 'taste' into contact with the social and economic bases of life.

The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare

Cambridge University Press

The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare

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