Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere.(Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

Andrew McCann. Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere. New York and London: St. Martin's Press and Macmillan Press, 1999. Pp. xi+226. $59.95.

As a revised dissertation by a young scholar, Cultural Politics in the 1790s is both accomplished and promising. McCann advances the discussion of the revolutionary decade with provocatively novel readings of Burke's texts on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, William Godwin and the public sphere, John Thelwall and the counter-public sphere, the Gothic text (especially Matthew Lewis' The Monk), Mary Wollstonecraft's feminist texts, and Maria Edgeworth's equivocally postcolonial Belinda. Although the style will strike some readers as jargon-saturated, I counsel patience because McCann's heavily theorized approach to literary interpretation yields interesting results. Drawing upon primarily Habermas' work on the public sphere--Offentlichkeit--and the critique of Habermas from the left by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, and Herbert Marcuse's unaccountably neglected essay, "The Affirmative Character of Culture" (1937), McCann reads in a Marxist way that clarifies and challenges: we find with clarity what is at stake in each text under consideration and we are challenged to accept the ideological reading or counter it with something more conceptually adequate.

I will summarize McCann's chapters, then discuss briefly some of the theoretical implications of the book.

McCann writes within the tradition of negative critique of romanticism, supplemented and qualified by a positive estimation of the counter-public sphere and its redemptive powers. The idealistic aesthetic, called here after Marcuse "affirmative culture," serves bourgeois interests by locating emancipatory impulses in a private realm outside history. As with the critics of "Romantic Ideology," the aesthetic displaces politics because liberation occurs within the individual outside of historical time. Moreover, the bourgeois public sphere is not so much an anti-aristocratic as an anti-proletarian site that produces...

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