Kevin M. Gilmartin's Research
My research extends and complicates our understanding of British literature in the Age of Revolution, both by offering a more nuanced and finely-grained account of the politics of culture, and by looking beyond traditional Romantic literary texts to a range of newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets. My primary interest in the cultural history of British radicalism has led me to explore conservative writing as well, and to consider how social and political unrest broadly reshaped the role of the writer in society.
I am currently working on two book projects. The first, provisionally titled Critical Contradictions, is a study of William Hazlitt, the leading literary journalist of the early nineteenth century and an increasingly prominent figure in Romantic studies. The interpretive tendency has been to fix his position on a range of political, aesthetic, and philosophical matters. I am interested instead in exploring the way he drew upon contradictory traditions of protest and analysis to produce a distinctively mobile and disenchanted form of critical commentary. Despite an abiding commitment to the French Revolution, Hazlitt expressed the dilemma of the post-revolutionary intellectual by working across the boundaries of power and resistance, of historical memory and progressive expectation.
The second, Discovering the Poor, is a study of shifting representations of rural and urban poverty in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Perhaps the poor have always been with us, but in this period there was no end to the way in which poverty was discovered and reconceived, as an element of social and (increasingly) cultural order. With easy assumptions about the natural loyalty of the people becoming less tenable, writers and activists debated ways to improve the condition of the “lower orders” so that they could be incorporated into a stable yet progressive polity. Narrative and visual representation, quantitative measure and sentimental response, charitable provision and moral discipline—all were brought to bear with increasing intensity upon the lives and habits of the poor.
Last updated: August 21, 2009 14:59
