The Social Contract and the Romantic Canon: The Individual and Society in the Works of Wordsworth, Godwin and Mary Shelley

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social contract philosophy altered the relationship between the individual and society. In this period, society shifted from the previous model of the body politic, to a new concept whereby a diverse group of individuals unite to protect their private rights by forming a social contract. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all struggle to develop a model of society which places the individual first. Empiricist critics of this tradition such as Hume and Smith were also influenced by the social contract's revolutionary individualism, but more skeptical of its model of community. The social contract perspective and its problems directly influenced the French Revolution, and -- by extension -- British Romantic literature. But the social contract has received little attention in a critical tradition dominated by an interest in German idealism, and by a firm belief in Romanticism's avoidance of socio-historical context. This study of the social contract tradition's influence on canonical Romantic-era texts seeks to refocus Romanticism's political self-awareness. My dissertation adds to a recent interest in empiricist contexts, expanding existent discussion to focus on the social contract in several exemplary Romantic-era works.;William Wordsworth's Prelude is arguably the archetypal Romantic poem, and also the target of recent new historicist criticism. I trace its dynamic dialogue with Rousseau over its long editorial history. Wordsworth encounters similar difficulties to Rousseau's alienated modern subjects, who experience society as hostile to individual desires. I then examine William Godwin's ambivalent dialogue with social contract philosophy, comparing Enquiry Concerning Political Justice to Fleetwood, which is critical of individualistic social theories. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley critiques the social contract myth of originary independence, drawing directly on Rousseau and also on Mary Wollstonecraft's references to him. These Romantic texts, written a generation after The Social Contract and in the wake of the French Revolution, engage in a new concern with forming a society of isolated individuals. Two hundred years later, this problem remains at the foreground of political theory, partially explaining the contemporary fascination with Romantic icons, such as Wordsworthian nature, the Romantic-Godwinian solitary and Frankenstein's creature.