"UNEASY FEELINGS discusses and learnedly illustrates an important relationship between the neoclassical and romantic periods in England by way of a continuity in the discourse of the passions in those periods. An original (and very fully developed) argument of the book ms. concerns the topic of social and economic class, which is centrally important in that discourse, as Morillo convincingly shows.

"The book's strong start shows how John Dennis's treatment of `enthusiasm' is rooted in anxieties from the Civil War but undergoes a reversal, under commercial pressure, in the direction of decorum and taste. In an original and coherent way, the next chapter, on Wordsworth, shows how the same issues arise in the later poet's works, in the troubled decade of the French Revolution and its aftermath .... The Pope chapter is one of the best examples of something that appears often in this ms.: Morillo will sometimes mobilize a binary opposition for explanatory purposes (e.g., benevolence and Stoicism), and then go on to show how troubled and contradictory some works are, and how inadequate, therefore, the binary opposition really is. The chapter on Byron not only situates that work in a context in which no one has situated it before - moral philosophy but does so in a way that usefully illustrates Byron's critical response to Wordsworth .... The outstanding essay on Adam Smith shows how Smith's books ...and his moral allegiances ...make more complex, uneasy, but rewarding mixes than earlier and more simplified commentaries have suggested ....

"UNEASY FEELINGS is a valuable contribution to two scholarly fields - eighteenth-century studies and studies in Romanticism. The scholarship is solid, the interpretations are intelligent,. and the writing is lucid. This book will be an important resource for years to come."*

-TERENCE HOAGWOOD, author of Prophecy and the Philosophy of the Mind, Skepticism and Ideology, Byron's
Dialectic, and Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Texts.

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CONTENTS

Introduction: Uneasy Feelings

1. Enthusiastic Passions and Vulgar Readers in John Dennis
2. Bordering on Enthusiasm and Spots of Crime in William Wordsworth
3. Benevolence, An Essay on Man, and the Social Order in Alexander Pope
4. Lord Byron's Skeptical Critique of Benevolism in Pope and Wordsworth
5. The Emergence of Class between Benevolent Sympathy and Passionate Ambition in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments
6. Alienation and the Analogy of the Passions in Marx and Haywood

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Book Prospectus: "Uneasy Feelings: Literature, the Passions, and Class from Neoclassicism to Romanticism"

This book examines the relationship between two important British literary and cultural periods, romanticism and neoclassicism, through a history of their shared dependency on a discourse of the passions. The work explores how this discourse represented the emotions and developed a consistent set of ideological limits based on an uneasy relationship between strong feelings and class society in modernizing Britain. The central problem investigated involves a conflict between unity and division: in an era that emphasizes repeatedly that the emotions form an unchanging aspect of human nature and unite people through their universally shared feelings, how do such passions sort with the division of people by classes? As soon as neoclassical writers turn to the passions as living evidence that people are essentially the same, and argue that the passions can accurately measure morality and human worth, they discover that those shared passions threaten the division of society into classes. As the taste-making Romantic reviewer Sir Francis Jeffrey saw the issue in 1814, something dangerous happens to class politics in Britain when "poetry does not disdain, in pursuit of her new idol of strong emotion, to descend to the very lowest conditions of society, and to stir up the most revolting dregs of utter wretchedness and depravity."
 
 

Vital to the ideological tenor of this discourse is an unresolved ambivalence about the passions’ role in uniting or dividing members of society. This study focuses on those British writers who contribute most distinctively to the discourse of passions and its conflicts and negotiations with class: John Dennis, Eliza Haywood, Alexander Pope, Adam Smith, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron. Because the Romantic writers in this list express neither a unique nor a more profound interest in the passions than their neoclassical predecessors, they are paired directly with their neoclassical kin. The argument's structure therefore avoids relying on period boundaries. Its non-chronological, cross-period pairing, in which a chapter on Dennis is followed by one on Wordsworth, and Byron directly follows Pope, is justified, because it best reveals how British Romanticism inherits from Neoclassicism an ongoing fascination with the passions. This shared interest connects Romantic authors to a rich literary and cultural tradition that they sometimes sought to deny in their better-known attempts to break with the past and start literature afresh.
 
 

The last two chapters step outside canonical neoclassicism and romanticism, as well as the literary genres that dominate the previous chapters. They consider how a developing class-consciousness implicit to the language of passions in Britain appears when seen from the perspective of two writers explicitly concerned with theorizing class: Adam Smith and Karl Marx. From their perspectives of political economy and its critique, class appears as an idea retaining a pronounced and critical intellectual interdependence with the discourse of passions in Britain, especially its implicit theory of an alienated human agency. Marx's alienation converges with the philosophical model of persons assumed by a language of passions, because in both cases some essence of human faculties, character, and morals is represented as both essential to personhood yet alien enough from it to render the person passive to a greater social force. Like labor under capitalism, the passions generate a split subject as the model person. Finally, by pairing Marx not directly with Smith, but instead with the broader cultural neoclassical heritage of the passions as epitomized in the writings of Eliza Haywood, the argument justifies reading social relations in even the early eighteenth century as class relations by noting how much Marx's analysis of class remains strongly analogous to an eighteenth-century anatomy of persons and passions.
 
 

The passions, like any discourse, exceed literature to encompass theology, philosophy, history, and economics. To negotiate this massive and malleable domain of texts requires a special methodology. It must avoid generating the kind of confusing grab bag of disparate primary textual evidence related only by time and typical of some discourse studies, and yet it must be plausibly representative to earn the title of a cultural study. This study's method therefore is organized around a further principle of selection, choosing two dominant but rarely combined subsets of the discourse of passions, enthusiasm and benevolence. Discussions of enthusiasm and benevolence, though less prominent in secondary sources about the century, often stand out in the primary textual record. Debate over these critical aspects of emotion is especially featured in the kinds of mediocre, middle-brow texts of culture that Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and others have taught us to value for their ideological and historical if not aesthetic significance. This study therefore interprets the theological and philosophical writings that dominate these sub-discourses of enthusiasm and benevolence in order to help represent the range of a genuinely cultural discourse, and to address ideology in its most vital form, as embodied in these popular and often forgotten texts. Each chapter historicizes its often higher-brow literary subjects within this wider world of discourse. For example, I especially select the kinds of theological texts from dissenting to and orthodox Anglican that literary and cultural historians as various as Samuel Holt Monk and J. C. D. Clark have argued are alien to most moderns but crucial to comprehend the long eighteenth century. These include George Hickes’ Spirit of Enthusiasm Exorcised (1680), Jonas Hanway’s Virtue in Humble Life (1777), and Joanna Southcott’s The Strange Effects of Faith (1792). Furthermore, enthusiasm and benevolence, as well as a history of class, form the argumentative bridges between the literary figures. A history of enthusiasm directly ties the Dennis and Wordsworth chapters together, and the changing fate of benevolence from Shaftesbury to Shelleylinks the chapters on Pope, Byron and Smith.
 
 

This book, however, is not exclusively concerned with the larger historical canvas, nor is it a compendium of cultural marginalia. Each chapter relies on extensive close-readings of often major canonical works, literary and intellectual, including Essay on Man, The Prelude, and Capital. It also treats texts of debated stature like the Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Corsair, and introduces some rare texts by men and women alike as corroborating historical evidence for arguments about the more major figures. For example, the representation of the passions and race in Thomas Branagan’s 1805 epic poem on the slave trade, Avenia, and Melessina Trench’s 1815 Tales and Other Poems, when combined shed new light on his contemporary readers’ reaction to Byron, and resituate his self-representation as an especially passionate soul. Throughout, the book presents some well-known texts in a defamiliarizing but productive light while revising some recent influential critical assessments. For example, this study's history of enthusiasm counters part of Clement Hawes’ account of it in Mania and Literary Style (1995) as consistently politically subversive and radical. It instead argues that enthusiasm, as an extreme form of passionate subjection, can cohere with Tory ideology as a politically conservative and quietist rhetoric of submission. This history of enthusiasm also brings the significant critical work of John Dennis back into circulation and explains how and why Wordsworth draws aesthetic and spiritual strength from Dennis’s largely forgotten theory of "enthusiastic passions." It proposes seeing the Prelude as Wordsworth’s attempt to imagine an enthusiastic, meditative version of the Revolution, even of its Terror. The chapters on benevolence offer new readings of some major poets and contribute to the recent, ongoing history of class. First, the interpretation of Pope propose a political rereading of Pope’s "ruling Passion" absent from most treatments of that concept yet necessary to understand the ideological tensions within the Essay on Man. Next, the Byron chapter argues that his Eastern Tales The Corsair and Lara together critique the politics of passion in both Pope and Wordsworth, and that Byron upbraids Wordsworth for a politics based on a fatuous form of "enthusiastic benevolence." The final chapter in the benevolence triad revises Mary Poovey’s explanation in "The Social Construction of Class" (1994) of the rise of the concept of class in Adam Smith; I see that emergence of class less as the general legacy of a seventeenth-century scientific rhetoric of disinterestedness and more as the specific result of Smith’s divided allegiance to the treatment of passions in stoicism and benevolism. Unlike two prior book-length arguments about passions in and beyond the eighteenth century, Albert Hirschman’s pioneering The Passions and the Interests (1977) and Alan Mackenzie’s Certain, Lively Episodes (1986), this study restores political and ideological issues to the study of the passions and can complement similarly inclined recent works like Adela Pinch’s Strange Fits of Passion (1996) and Chris Jones’ Radical Sensibility (1997).
 
 

The motivating premise for this study is that neoclassical and romantic culture are both better understood when combined rather than separated. Methodologically, to the degree that this book is a history of two concepts joining those two periods, class and human feelings, both sometimes believed to be situated outside history or treated as if they were, the interpretation is New Historical. However, instead of being concerned with the mainstay of Foucault’s and Greenblatt’s New Historicism, the genealogy of a moment when a fundamental cultural concept changed, the study dwells on stubborn continuities between periods and shared interests between authors. Moreover, it treats authors as historical persons with uniquely shaped and often influential lives, and not just depopulated sites of discourse. Although the study ends with a reading of Marx, it challenges the constraining boundaries of some Marxist literary analysis. It treats Marx not as the one who saw the truth of class, but as someone who, like other figures in this study, encountered the power of class by first theorizing the passions. Marx and Freud both inform the method, a hybrid hermeneutics of suspicion that does find contradiction to be the most fascinating sign of the depth and wealth of human societies and psyches. The method of argument is thus affiliated more with this broad, modern interpretive tradition than with any one prominent theorist. It also eschews browbeating writers for political transgressions that few if any in their times could avoid. Instead, it is designed to give equal time to the pleasures of the half-thought and inarticulate, and the beautifully imagined and eloquent forms of cultural expression. Above all, in concentrating on so many high-canonical authors whose fates and reputations may seem a book sealed, this literary-cultural study of the passions offers ways to use newer criticism to revise our opinions of an older but still vital canon.
 

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