Author
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Liberalism and Revolutionary philosophy (puritan revolution in endland+
locke, hume+frenc philosophes and encyclopedists+godwin, price, paine,etc)
and belief in reason, human improvement through education.
o Power of education and environment to shape character
o Godwinian axiom: wealth and rank pervert the understanding
o It's incumbent on enlightened individual feel benevolence towards
mankind, as an active rational principle, not sporadic emotion.
o Oversanguine faith in the capacity of reason to overturn terror
Read William godwin's political justice.
Alcuin: A dialogue 1798 about the rights of women. influenced by mary
wollstonecraft
Other themes in his works
o Novel and american life
o Science
o Gothic: rational not supernatural gothic
o Seduction and epistolary from Richardson
o German romance
o Mental and physiological phenomena
o Romantic?
 Liberal advances in society
 Love of picturesque nature
 Byronic traits in Carwin
o German: kotzebue, gessner, ifland, wieland, haller, schiller, goethe.
o Reason as humanitarian instead of pietistic or theological.
o Anti-Classics:
 Middle class morals: sensual, obscene; impractical
 Rationalism: superstition
 Radical: aristocratic
Influence:
o Hawthorne, on states of mind
o Poe, morbid psychology
o Mary shelley, frankenstein.
o Read by peacock, keats, shelley
Novel as a genre
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Realism, instruction+amusement against prejudice from:
o Immoral: Puritan regligous feeling, revivified by methodism.
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Idle: Middle-class suspicion of aristocratic amusements and the belief
that novel is a distraction from more suerious pursuits.
The difficulty of american novel: broan attributed it to lack of international
copyright. Gentlemanly tradition of authoriship/professional man
of letters didn't emerge.
Ormond
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Introducing character and go nameless for long.
Absence of local details
Details from Caleb Williams
Character
Ormond: Illuminati/perfectibilians in germany.
I.E. Rosenberg
S.C.
Stephen Dudley: New York. Painter--shop where he was unhappy for
the tedious and gain-oriented work.
Sarah Baxter 48
Balfour 66 C's savior.
Ormond 78
Helena Cleves 98
Plot
Stephen Dudley, a Philadelphia merchant, is blinded and later bankrupted because of embezzlement by
Thomas Craig, so that his daughter Constantia must work as a seamstress to support him. They live
through a yellow-fever epidemic, but when out of work Constantia seeks aid from Osmond, a wealthy
eccentric, who finds she belies his theory about the mental inferiority of women. He employs her as a
seamstress for his mistress, Helena Cleves, who commits suicide when Ormond will not marry her.
Helena leaves her wealth to the Dudleys, returning them to affluence and making possible an operation
that restores Stephen's sight. Because he will not let Ormond marry Constantia, Stephen is murdered by
Craig on Ormond's orders. In turn Ormond murders Craig, brings the body one night to Constantia, and
then tries to rape her. After she stabs him to death, a friend establishes her innocence and takes her to
live in England
Theme (index)
yellow fever
Quote
Men in the abstract and men as they are. 92
No single being could rectify the error..
Questions