Works focusing on political and philosophical writings of the Romantic period published in 2015 include both author-specific studies and broader studies of Romantic-era philosophy and its permeation in literary works. These works will be dealt with in the first part of this section. It will then move on to discuss recent work in the field of women's writing, focusing on three longer works, and articles on Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Felicia Hemans, Mary Tighe, and articles focusing on specific male writers. Finally, this section will deal with works in the field of material and print culture, which account for many of the general and prose works published in 2015.
The eighteenth-century radical Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) devoted himself to communicating truth in all his writings. But to what extent is this dedication to truth-telling undermined by Holcroft’s use of deceit and duplicity to test the omnipotence of truth, especially when deceit threatens to overpower truth? In this article, I examine a series of scenes in Holcroft’s plays and novels wherein truth is not always adequately expressed in language. As a result, performance gains importance. Holcroft develops an increasingly subtle understanding of the relation between truth and the modes of its communication. Performance, even as it may seem to destabilize speech, can be used to intensify it and ultimately to clarify the transmission of truth, which is Holcroft’s great aim. By the end of his career, in his final novel Memoirs of Bryan Perdue (1805) Holcroft’s understanding of the efficacy of clear speech and performance is strengthened and developed by a new appreciation of what the body of the truth-teller, silent or speaking, can convey.
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