Conclusion

The Conclusion looks ahead to the political and literary changes that accompanied the transition into the Victorian age, drawing a contrast between recent critical discussions of the ‘liberal’ subject and this book’s more unsettled account of the interaction between literary forms and the political arena. The 1820s and ’30s—examined here with reference to contemporary accounts of Byron and Austen as well as George Eliot’s later Felix Holt (1866)—look ahead to subsequent efforts to harmonize literary and political domains and to subsume earlier political divides within changed conceptions of governance and of the political nation. As the Conclusion demonstrates, these appeals to a coming age of equipoise not only consigned the unrest around the French Revolution to a closed past; neglect of the directly preceding decades amounted, at least in places, to strategic erasure, as the Conclusion shows through a series of examples including the novels of Sir Walter Scott. By contrast with these later efforts to maintain an autonomous literary or artistic domain, the authors addressed in this book emphasize an account of authorship as in the thick or the margins of a messy political world (whether the authors in question liked this fact or not). Literature thereby helped, directly or otherwise, to introduce alternative possibilities into the political arena, if only as a reimagined role for literary authorship itself.