Language

Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s shows for the first time how the radical Jacobin poets, and their ideas of a revolutionary poetry, were impelled - even invented - by the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. For too long the revolutionary Romanticism and poetic experiments of the 1790s have been understood as responses to the American and French revolutions or attributed to the intellectual influence of Rousseau. The author counters these assumptions, by tracing threads of influence from Lockes ideas of arbitrary language and tyranny, through Tookes attacks on terms such as majesty and law, to the supposedly real language of Wordsworthian Romanticism. She breaks new ground in establishing Maria Edgeworths place in Lockes anti-authoritarian tradition, contending that Edgeworths work, produced in the shadow of the United Irishmen uprising, revives the politicisation of the idea of common language displaced in Wordsworths neutralizing of Lockes radical impulse in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. The authors original and engaging book will appeal to scholars of 1790s radicalism, eighteenth-century linguistic theory, womens writing, and the relations between Britain and Ireland.