Literature and the Party System in Britain, 1760–1830
James Chandler, Frances Ferguson, Eric Slauter
Drawing on interdisciplinary research in the political theory and print culture of Britain and its empire, “Literature and the Party System” resituates writing of the late eighteenth century and Romantic age within an expanded history of partisan crisis and global transformation. The absence of a viable political spectrum compelled Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson, Maria Edgeworth, and Lord Byron to reimagine party politics through literary form. In close engagement with a vibrant field of political debate—including works by Burke, Hume, and the satirist “Junius,” pamphlets, newspapers and visual caricature—these authors reinvented literature as a vehicle for political reasoning and collective agency.
University of Chicago, Department of English Instructor, Wordsworth and Byron, Spring 2012 Course Assistant, Virginia Woolf (MA level), Spring 2010 Course Assistant, Introduction to Poetry, Winter 2009 University of Virginia, Department of English Teaching Assistant, History of Literatures in English, 1649–1865, Spring 2005, Spring 2006
PUBLICATIONS “Arbitrary Government: Tristram Shandy and the Crisis of Whig History,” ELH (forthcoming). SELECTED PAPERS “The Cultural Logic of Late Toryism,” paper presented at the 18th and 19th-Century Cultures and Early Modern History Workshops at the University of Chicago, May 2012 “The Devil’s Parties: Opposition and Complicity in Romantic Visions of Satan,” paper presented at the Annual Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Park City, Utah, August 2011 “Shylock in the Colonies,” paper presented at “Reintegrating British and American History” Mellon Summer Institute, Newberry Library, Chicago, July 2011 “Sterne’s Waverley Novel,” paper presented at the Biennial Conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies, University of Glasgow, UK, July 2011
Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, Visiting Fellow NEH Summer Fellow British Association of American Studies Teaching Fellow