Inheritance and Indebtedness in William Godwin’s Fictions

Sophia Lange

Inheritance and Indebtedness in William Godwin’s Fictions. A New Approach to the Godwinian Novel

ISBN 978-3-98940-073-3, 202 S., 2 Abb., kt., € 29,50 (2025)

(Studien zur Englischen Romantik, Bd. 25)

erscheint voraussichtlich 15.05.2025

In his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), published only a few days after the guillotining of King Louis XVI of France, English philosopher and political thinker William Godwin openly criticizes oppressive governments that inhibit social progress by suppressing rational discourse and morality. While Political Justice shaped the Revolution Debate of the 1790s, Godwin’s texts, and especially the novels published after his stellar success Caleb Williams, often remain overlooked despite their innovative fusions of fact and fiction. Located at the crossroads of history and literary imagination, Godwin’s novels present fictional case studies grounded in both the realities of the novels’ settings and the philosopher’s contemporary Britain, which offer powerful commentary on the pressures exerted over citizens in systems of patriarchal oppression. This work makes a significant contribution to scholarship on William Godwin, especially by paying serious attention to his hitherto neglected later novels. Focusing on the period between 1790 and 1830, the book investigates economic relations, property rights, proto-feminist thought, and individual and collective trauma in Godwin’s writings. Generational, gender-based, and socio-economic hierarchies are interpreted as relationships of inheritance and indebtedness which shed light on the specific ‘structures of feeling’ that emerge in both the author’s and his narrators’ socio-political, historical, and material realities. By offering new close readings of his fictional oeuvre, the book contributes to our understanding of Godwin’s later novels after Caleb Williams (1794), demonstrating how his political philosophy was shaped by his own life events in its discussion of the relationship between individual character and social circumstances. The modern progressivity of Godwin’s novels, namely the political potential of constructing novel reading as interventionist practice, is highlighted throughout.

Buchvorschau / Inhaltsverzeichnis (pdf)