Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-wxhwt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-08T11:25:48.492Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Godwin's Handshake

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Andrew Franta
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay argues that William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams uses a familiar gesture—the handshake—to contest both radical and conservative responses to the French Revolution. Instead of merely fictionalizing the arguments of his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, as critics have argued, Caleb Williams, through Godwin's representation of the repeated failure of this socially and politically significant gesture, traces an episode in the history of manners. The handshake thus points to a historical development, the emergence of commercial society, that complicates the novel's political stance by undermining the conception of politics that underwrites it.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 3 , May 2007 , pp. 696 - 710
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Andriopoulos, Stefan. “The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel.” ELH 66 (1999): 739–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balfour, Ian. “Promises, Promises: Social and Other Contracts in the English Jacobins (Godwin/Inchbald).” New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice. Ed. Clark, David L. and Goellnicht, Donald C. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. 225–50.Google Scholar
Alan L., Boegehold When a Gesture Was Expected: A Selection of Examples from Archaic and Classical Greek Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Ed. O'Brien, Conor Cruise. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.Google Scholar
Burkert, Walter. Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth. Trans. Peter Bing. 1972. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.Google Scholar
Butler, Marilyn. “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams.” Essays in Criticism 32 (1982): 237–58.Google Scholar
Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.Google Scholar
Cohen, William A. “Manual Conduct in Great Expectations.” ELH 60 (1993): 217–59.Google Scholar
Collings, David. “The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason.” ELH 70 (2003): 847–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbeill, Anthony. Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darnton, Robert. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. 1939. New York: Urizen, 1978.Google Scholar
Esterhammer, Angela. “Godwin's Suspicion of Speech Acts.” Studies in Romanticism 39 (2000): 553–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Frances. Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Firth, Raymond. Symbols: Private and Public. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1973.Google Scholar
Furbank, P. N. “Godwin's Novels.” Essays in Criticism 5 (1955): 214–28.Google Scholar
Godwin, William. Caleb Williams. 1794. Ed. McCracken, David. New York: Norton, 1977.Google Scholar
Godwin, William. Enquiry concerning Political Justice. 1793. Ed. Kramnick, Isaac. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.Google Scholar
Gold, Alex Jr. “It's Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin's Caleb Williams.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 19 (1977): 135–60.Google Scholar
Gabriel, Herman. Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Hertz, Neil. “Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure.” The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. 160–91.Google Scholar
The History behind the Handshake. WildIndigo Dating, Personals and Lifestyle Community. 2003. 26 Feb. 2005 <http://www.wildindigo.com/articles/3/175/432.html>..>Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, E. J. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. 1959. New York: Norton, 1965.Google Scholar
Hume, David. “Of Refinement in the Arts.” Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Ed. Miller, Eugene F. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985. 268–80.Google Scholar
Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.Google Scholar
Klancher, Jon. “Godwin and the Republican Romance: Genre, Politics, and Contingency in Cultural History.” Modern Language Quarterly 56 (1995): 145–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968.Google Scholar
McCracken, David. “Godwin's Caleb Williams: A Fictional Rebuttal of Burke.” Studies in Burke and His Time 11 (1969–70): 1442–52.Google Scholar
Paine, Thomas. Rights of Man. 1791. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.Google Scholar
Paulson, Ronald. Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Pfau, Thomas. “Paranoia Historicized: Legal Fantasy, Social Change, and Satiric Meta-commentary in the 1794 Treason Trials.” Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press. Ed. Behrendt, Stephen C. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997. 30–64.Google Scholar
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.Google Scholar
Pocock, J. G. A. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roodenburg, Herman. “The ‘Hand of Friendship’: Shaking Hands and Other Gestures in the Dutch Republic.” A Cultural History of Gesture. Ed. Bremmer, Jan and Roodenburg, . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. 152–89.Google Scholar
Rowe, Katherine. Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Scarry, Elaine. “Work and the Body in Hardy and Other Nineteenth-Century Novelists.” Resisting Representation. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 49–90.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. 1980. New York: Methuen, 1986.Google Scholar
Sims, Michael. Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form. New York: Viking, 2003.Google Scholar
Speck, W. A. Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760. London: Arnold, 1977.Google Scholar
Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Sociology. Vol. 2. New York: Appleton, 1888.Google Scholar
Thorne, Christian. “Providence in the Early Novel; or, Accident If You Please.” Modern Language Quarterly 64 (2003): 323–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar