Monstrous Society

Monstrous Society focuses on competing representations of reciprocity in England in the decades around 1800. It argues that in the eighteenth-century moral economy, power was divided between official authority and the counterpower of plebeians. This tacit, mutual understanding comes under attack when influential political thinkers, such as Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and T. R. Mathus, attempt to discipline the social body, to make state power immune from popular response. But once negated, counterpower persists, even if in the demands of a debased, inhuman body. Such a response is writ large in Gothic tales, especially Matthew Lewis's The Monk and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and in the innovative, embodied political practices of the mass movements for Reform and the Charter. Far from establishing itself on an incontestable basis, disciplinary power transforms reciprocity into a Gothic scenario, into an interchange between official power and its excluded, monstrous counterpart. By interpreting the formation of modern English culture through the early modern practice of reciprocity, this book constructs a "non-modern" mode of analysis, one that sees modernity not as a break from the past but as the result of attempts to transform traditions that, however, distorted, nevertheless remain broadly in force. David Collings is Professor of English at Bowdoin College.