This book argues that the repressions of the British government had a constitutive role in the formation of early Romantic-era writing. At stake in this argument is a reinvestigation of a model of the period’s literary history that finds the democratic energy of British culture in the early 1790s speedily dissipating as the Parisian scene grows violent, turning most supporters of the revolution into its opponents with the killing of Louis XVI in 1793. In this narrative, those who continued to support the revolutionary cause went underground, while many familiar writers turned to aesthetic esca ... More

This book argues that the repressions of the British government had a constitutive role in the formation of early Romantic-era writing. At stake in this argument is a reinvestigation of a model of the period’s literary history that finds the democratic energy of British culture in the early 1790s speedily dissipating as the Parisian scene grows violent, turning most supporters of the revolution into its opponents with the killing of Louis XVI in 1793. In this narrative, those who continued to support the revolutionary cause went underground, while many familiar writers turned to aesthetic escapism or reactionary conservatism. But this account assumes an atmosphere in which writers felt able to write (and find publishers for) anything they pleased, and that within this Habermasian idyll previously progressive writers abruptly chose to abandon their political ideals. This book reassess this narrative for what it misses and for what it loses. Both well- and lesser-known writers of the period, while publishing work that cautiously engaged the historical moment, were more forthcoming in their diaries, letters, and other unpublished writing. This archive, which pulses with the democratic energy of the early 1790s, casts a powerful illumination on the work that these authors did choose to publish later in the decade. The exclamations of fear, explanations of self-censorship, and urgings to caution in these manuscripts help us to recognize the political charge of the poetics of gagging that marks so much early Romantic-era writing.