Disaffected Parties reveals how alienation from politics effected crucial changes to the shape and status of literary form. Recovering the earliest expressions of grumbling, irritability, and cynicism towards politics, this study asks how unsettled partisan legacies converged with more recent discontents to forge a seminal period in the making of English literature, and thereby poses wide-ranging questions about the lines between politics and aesthetics. Reading works including Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, James Boswell's Life of Johnson, the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, and the satirical poetry of Lord Byron in tandem with print culture and partisan activity, this book shows how these writings remained animated by disaffected impulses and recalcitrant energies at odds with available party positions and emerging governmental norms--even as they sought to imagine perspectives that looked beyond the divided political world altogether.

'No one can be more sick of-or indifferent to politics than I am' Lord Byron wrote in 1820. Between the later eighteenth century and the Romantic age, disaffected political attitudes acquired increasingly familiar shapes. Yet this was also a period of ferment in which unrest associated with the global age of revolutions (including a dynamic transatlantic opposition movement) collided with often inchoate assemblages of parties and constituencies. As writers adopted increasingly emphatic removes from the political arena and cultivated familiar stances of cynicism, detachment, and retreat, their estrangement also promised to loop back into political engagement-and to make their works 'parties' all their own.

About the Author:
John Owen Havard, Assistant Professor, Binghamton University

John Owen Havard is Assistant Professor at Binghamton University and received his PhD from the University of Chicago. His articles and essays have appeared in ELH, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Contemporary Literature and in the volumes Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne and Byron: The Poetry of Politics and the Politics of Poetry. His reviews and review essays have appeared in The Scriblerian, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The New Rambler, and the English Historical Review. He has received fellowships from the British Association for American Studies, the Whiting Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.