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The volume offers an overview of how British writers interpreted the French Enlightenment and Revolution against the backdrop of the Terror and the rise and fall of Napoleon, these events welcomed by few and feared by many in Britain as likely to foment a second revolution in that state as the United Irish insurrection had attempted to do in Ireland. Deane’s focus is on the intellectual careers of Edmund Burke, James Mackintosh, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Hazlitt, though there are slighter cameos also of William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, John Wilson Croker, Francis Jeffrey, Thomas Holcroft, Thomas Paine, and Joseph Priestley. The study teases out how the main figures here engaged conceptually with some of their leading French counterparts including Jean Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Baron d’Holbach, La Mettrie, Helvétius, and others. It examines instances of the intricate relay of ideas of freedom and liberty as they migrated from England into the works of the eighteenth-century French philosophes and then travelled from there back to nineteenth-century England, where French writings were rejected or reabsorbed by some of the leading English writers of the apocalyptic years between Burke’s late career and those that ended the first Romantic generation.
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