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  3. The Romantic Crowd
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
February 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139382724
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139382724
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature 1700-1830
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (97)
Information

Book description

In the long eighteenth century, sympathy was understood not just as an emotional bond, but also as a physiological force, through which disruption in one part of the body produces instantaneous disruption in another. Building on this theory, Romantic writers explored sympathy as a disruptive social phenomenon, which functioned to spread disorder between individuals and even across nations like a 'contagion'. It thus accounted for the instinctive behaviour of people swept up in a crowd. During this era sympathy assumed a controversial political significance, as it came to be associated with both riotous political protest and the diffusion of information through the press. Mary Fairclough reads Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, John Thelwall, William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey alongside contemporary political, medical and philosophical discourse. Many of their central questions about crowd behaviour still remain to be answered by the modern discourse of collective psychology.

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'Detailed and nuanced …'

Source: The Times Literary Supplement

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