Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England
Kevin Gilmartin, Marilyn Butler (Editor), James ChandlerBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Print Politics is the first literary study of the culture of the popular radical movement for parliamentary reform in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The period was characterized by popular agitation and repressive political measures including trials for seditious and blasphemous libel. Kevin Gilmartin explores the styles and strategies of radical opposition in the periodical press, and in the public culture of the time. He argues that writers and editors including William Cobbett, T. J. Wooler, Richard Carlile, John Wade, and Leigh Hunt committed themselves to a complex, flexible, and often contradictory project of independent political opposition. They sought to maintain a political resistance uncompromised by the influence of a corrupt "system" even while addressing and imitating its practices to further their oppositional ends.Editorials
From the Publisher
"While anchored in a rich historical contextualization and punctuated by ideologically edged perceptions, Gilmartin's study of the early nineteenth-century radical culture is most notable for its nuanced description of and appreciation for that culture's rhetorical and literary achievements." Michael Scrivener, Victorian Periodicals Review"In his finely written book Print Politics: The press and radical opposition in early ninteenth-century England, Kevin Gilmartin argues that Romantic-era reformist journalism was at once limited and empowered by the paradox of 'radical opposition'." Kim Wheatley, The Wordsworth Circle
"This is a profoundly important plebeian study which will prove indispensable to scholars of the period." Romantic Movement
"It is a book written by a young literary scholar that is so rich in historical insight that historians of popular radicalism cannot afford to ignore it. ...a canonical text within radical scholarship." Philip Harling, Albion