Author : David Collings
Release : 2009
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind :
Book Rating : 208/5 ( reviews)

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Monstrous Society - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Monstrous Society write by David Collings. This book was released on 2009. Monstrous Society available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. "Monstrous Society problematizes competing representations of reciprocity in England in the decades around 1800. It argues that in the eighteenth-century moral economy, power is divided between official authority and the counter-power of plebeians. This tacit, mutual understanding comes under attack when influential political thinkers, such as Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and T.R. Malthus, attempt to discipline the social body, to make state power immune from popular response. But once negated, counter-power persists, even if in the demands of a debased, inhuman body. Such a response is writ large in Gothic tales, especially Matthew Lewis's The Monk and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and in the innovative, embodied political practices of the mass movements for Reform and the Charter. By interpreting the formation of modern English culture through the early modern practice of reciprocity, David Collings constructs a "nonmodern" mode of analysis, one that sees modernity not as a break from the past but as the result of attempts to transform traditions that, however distorted, nevertheless remain broadly in force."--Jacket.