CHAPTER FIVE. Transnational Sympathies, Imaginary Communities

Alliston, April

doi:10.1515/9781400829514.133

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“…For them, popular eighteenth-and nineteenth-century texts by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Germaine de Staël and others induce an 'emotional connection that transcends nations' by appealing to a wide community of readers not limited by national borders. 10 Mary Shelley gives this concept a political dimension: she suggests that 'fellow feeling' for liberty allows one to comprehend Europe in terms of transnational political principles, rather than as separate national identities. In this way, Europe's past and future are defined by 'sympathy' for libertarian causes.…”

Section: The European Tradition Of Freedommentioning

confidence: 99%

Liberty and Independence: The Shelley–Byron Circle and the State(s) of Europe

Stock

2009

Romanticism

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Section: The European Tradition Of Freedommentioning

confidence: 99%

Liberty and Independence: The Shelley–Byron Circle and the State(s) of Europe

Stock

2009

Romanticism

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The Shelleys and the idea of “Europe”

Stock

2008

European Romantic Review

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This document is the author's final manuscript accepted version of the journal article, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer review process. Some differences between this version and the published version may remain. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. respect therefore, debates about "Europe" in the period encompass wider complexities beyond the immediate political concerns of the Shelley circle. Frankenstein and the "European" Anxiety "European" is the first adjective used to describe Frankenstein when he appears in Mary Shelley's novel. Chancing upon Frankenstein and his creation in the Arctic wastes, the explorer Walton frames their relationship in terms of a confrontation between European and non-European: "he was not, as the other traveller [the Creature] seemed to be, a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but an European" (Frankenstein, 13). Frankenstein himself emphasises this difference throughout the novel, insisting that the Creature "quit Europe forever, and every other place in the neighbourhood of man" (122), as if he has no right to live alongside Europeans. Frankenstein's fear of the non-European outsider is all-consuming; he worries that if the Creature and his bride "were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world […] a race of devils [would] be propagated upon the earth" (138). And yet, as his obsession grows, he becomes an outsider himself, "banished from my native country", "a friendless outcast over the earth" (161). Walton defines him as a European, but Frankenstein becomes increasingly estranged and isolated, wandering in the border regions of "Tartary and Russia", at the very edges of European society. But what is specifically "European" about Frankenstein? According to his own testimony in chapter one, he hails from a multinational family, he speaks many languages and is very well travelled, building precise (and rather exacting) criteria for who a "European" might be. More importantly, he is associated with radical causes, choosing to conduct his experiment at Ingolstadt university. Revolution-era works like John Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797) and Augustin Barruel's History of Jacobinism (1797), traced the founding of the Illuminati order to Ingolstadt, and purported to demonstrate how that shadowy society had masterminded the French Revolution (St Clair, 437). Frankenstein's experimentation is therefore associated with the unorthodoxy and social radicalism of Revolutionary ideas, just as "the raising

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Vicarious Narratives

Britton¹

2019

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In 1759, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments defines sympathy as a series of shifts in perspective by which one sees from a different point of view. British and French novels published over the following century redefine sympathy through narrative form—shifting perspectives or “stories within stories” in which one character adopts the voice and perspective of another. Fiction follows Smith’s emphasis on sympathy’s shifting perspectives, but this formal echo coincides with a challenge. For Smith and other Enlightenment philosophers, the experience of sympathy relies on human resemblance. In novels, by contrast, characters who are separated by nationality, race, or species experience a version of sympathy that struggles to accommodate such differences. Encounters between these characters produce shifts in perspective or framed tales as one character sympathizes with another and begins to tell his story, echoing Smith’s definition of sympathy in their form while challenging Enlightenment philosophy’s insistence on human resemblance. Works of sentimental and gothic fiction published between 1750 and 1850 generate a novelistic version of sympathy by manipulating traditional narrative forms (epistolary fiction, embedded tales) and new publication practices (the anthology, the novelistic extract). Second-hand stories transform the vocal mobility, emotional immediacy, and multiple perspectives associated with the declining genre of epistolary fiction into the narrative levels and shifting speakers of nineteenth-century frame tales. Vicarious Narratives argues that fiction redefines sympathy as the struggle to overcome difference through the active engagement with narrative—by listening to, retelling, and transcribing the stories of others.

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CHAPTER FIVE. Transnational Sympathies, Imaginary Communities

Cited by 14 publications

References 0 publications

Liberty and Independence: The Shelley–Byron Circle and the State(s) of Europe

Liberty and Independence: The Shelley–Byron Circle and the State(s) of Europe

The Shelleys and the idea of “Europe”

Vicarious Narratives

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