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Defending Privilege - Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel (Paperback)
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Defending Privilege - Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel (Paperback)
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A critique of attempts by conservative eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century authors to appropriate the rhetoric of
victimhood and appeals to "rights" to safeguard the status of the
powerful. As revolution and popular unrest roiled the final decades
of the eighteenth century, authors, activists, and philosophers
across the British Empire hailed the rise of the liberal subject,
valorizing the humanity of the marginalized and the rights of
members of groups long considered inferior or subhuman. Yet at the
same time, a group of conservative authors mounted a reactionary
attempt to cultivate sympathy for the privileged. In Defending
Privilege, Nicole Mansfield Wright examines works by Tobias
Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and others to show how
conservatives used the rhetoric of victimhood in attempts to
convince ordinary readers to regard a privileged person's loss of
legal agency as a catastrophe greater than the calamities and
legally sanctioned exclusion suffered by the poor and the enslaved.
In promoting their agenda, these authors resuscitated literary
modes regarded at the time as derivative or passe-including
romance, the gothic, and epistolarity-or invented subgenres that
are neglected today due to widespread revilement of their politics
(the proslavery novel). Although these authors are not typically
considered alongside one another in scholarship, they are united by
their firsthand experience of legal conflict: each felt that their
privilege was degraded through lengthy disputes. In examining the
work of these eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors,
Wright traces a broader reactionary framework in the Anglophone
literary legacy. Each novel seeks to reshape and manipulate public
perceptions of who merits legal agency: the right to initiate a
lawsuit, serve as a witness, seek counsel from a lawyer, and take
other legal actions. As a result, Defending Privilege offers a
counterhistory to scholarship on the novel's capacity to motivate
the promulgation of human rights and champion social ascendance
through the upwardly mobile realist character.
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