Abstract

Focussing on three major eighteenth-century English novelists, Carol Kay explores the connections between institutional politics, political philosophy, and fiction. Drawing from Hobbes's Leviathan a political "problematic," a complex of interconnected topics, Kay offers an alternative to current critical theories that overlook the importance of political institutions in literary analysis. She considers Hobbes's though a key to what has been called the growth of political stability in England during this period, a consolidation of national authority which was brutal in some respects and a matter of intense controversy. Political Constructions shows how the fictional creations of Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne challenge but ultimately support Hobbes's diagnosis of a fundamental human ignorance and competition which require the political solution of consent to authority. Although they testified to the potential for social conflict, Kay concludes, the works of novelists and philosophers helped make England the prototype of the settled state, the country that did not have a modern revolution.