Rhetoric and Resistance
The Literary Arts of Dissent in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Ohio University Press
Published:16th Sep '25
Should be back in stock very soon
A fresh perspective on the enduring relationship between literature, democracy, and dissent
Rhetoric and Resistance explores the transformative role of nineteenth-century literature in shaping modern concepts and practices of democratic dissent. By examining the works of Romantic and Victorian novelists, poets, and journalists, Maeve Adams identifies origins of modern theories and practices of resistance in nineteenth-century literary forms. Offering a literary history of dissent, the book recovers the intertwined development of democracy and aesthetics, revealing how narrative form became a potent tool for challenging authority.
Tracing the lineage of dissent from the radical fiction and journalism of the 1800s to contemporary movements like #MeToo, Adams offers a genealogy that highlights how literary texts experimented with political power, granting new and consequential voices to working-class individuals, women, colonized peoples, and other marginalized groups.
Adams takes an interdisciplinary approach, weaving together close readings of works by Thomas De Quincey, Walter Scott, Elizabeth Gaskell, and H. G. Wells, as well as lesser-known journalists, with insights from modern moral and political philosophy. Drawing on theories of democratic ethics and justice from scholars such as Miranda Fricker, Sharon Krause, Martha Nussbaum, and Philip Pettit, the book bridges literary history and contemporary debates about political agency and expression.
"Weaving together political theory and literary reading, Maeve Adams makes a fascinating case for the importance of literature to genuine democracy. She shows how nineteenth-century writers taught publics to practice and value inclusive debate even before the expansion of the franchise. And she makes clear how urgently we need literature now." - Caroline Levine, author of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis
"In this remarkable book, Maeve Adams outlines a formally supple literary canon of political dissent while simultaneously theorizing literature’s democratic politics of consequential expression and collective imagining. A balm for the humanities crisis while outpacing crisis-talk, it delights in actual readings and big ideas, and will in turn delight readers." - Anna Kornbluh, author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism
"Rhetoric and Resistance traces the way persuasive writing helped give shape to new publics and more inclusive conceptions of the nation. Along the way, it shows us the wealth of literary forms writers used to call for these conceptions. While the book focuses on nonfiction writing, newspapers, short stories, and novels, it also explores the proliferation of forms within forms-the frontispiece, the editorial letter, the poem cited within a larger narrative. In this way it is an important contribution to feminism, Victorian studies, and rhetoric studies, as well as to the interdisciplinary study of print culture and media." - Tanya Agathocleous, author of Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere
ISBN: 9780821426463
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
240 pages