Evan Radcliffe

Evan Radcliffe reading the Times Literary Supplement while
traveling in Brazil, where he grew up.
My field is Romantic literature, and my main focus is on the relation of this literature to the controversies around the French Revolution—in particular, the ways in which Romantic literature reflects and responds to the political and moral-philosophical debates of the 1790s, debates about such topics as patriotism, the value of local and family affections, the ideal of universal benevolence, and the ways in which traditions enable or constrict moral choices, topics which all grow out of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy.  I’m also interested in the role that narrative form plays in the discourse on these issues.  Most recently, the question I have been exploring concerns the vexed relation between fellow-feeling and justice, which I argue is entangled with the problems of resentment and revenge.  I’m examining philosophers in the British sentimental tradition like Joseph Butler, David Hume, and Adam Smith; revolutionaries in France like Robespierre and Saint-Just; British controversialists like Edmund Burke (who embraced “sympathetic revenge”) and William Godwin and John Thelwall (who sought to redefine justice and to discount revenge altogether); and Wordsworth’s play The Borderers, which draws in part on his first-hand experiences of the Revolution. Most recently in the graduate program I have been teaching "Revolutionary Decade: the 1790s," a largely year-by-year look at the varied ways in which British writers addressed the French Revolution and its possible implications, often through developing original approaches and forms.

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