William Cobbett

This book offers the first thoroughgoing literary analysis of William Cobbett as a writer. Leonora Nattrass explores the nature and effect of Cobbett's rhetorical strategies, showing through close examination of a broad selection of his polemical writings (from his early American journalism onwards) the complexity, self-consciousness and skill of his stylistic procedures. Her close readings examine the political implications of Cobbett's style within the broader context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political prose and argue that his perceived ideological and stylistic flaws - inconsistency, bigotry, egoism and political nostalgia - are in fact rhetorical strategies designed to appeal to a range of usually polarized reading audiences. Cobbett's ability to imagine and to address socially divided readers within a single text, the book argues, constitutes a politically disruptive challenge to prevailing political and social assumptions about their respective rights, duties, needs and abilities. This rereading revises a prevailing critical consensus that Cobbett is an unselfconscious populist whose writings reflect rather than challenge the ideological paradoxes and problems of his time.

First sentence: In the previous chapter I suggested that the transgression of class boundaries is central to Cobbett's rhetorical authority, and that his early American writings precipitate this state of affairs as his conservative loyalties and literary success as Peter Porcupine briefly ally him with the English ruling class.

Year

1995

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

32

Pages

263

ISBN

9780521033428

Data source: Wikidata