William Cobbett: The Politics of Style

Leonora Nattrass (Nottingham Trent University)

William Cobbett: The Politics of Style
Format
Hardback
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Country
United Kingdom
Published
12 January 1995
Pages
264
ISBN
9780521460361

William Cobbett: The Politics of Style

Leonora Nattrass (Nottingham Trent University)

This book offers the first thoroughgoing literary analysis of William Cobbett as a writer. Leonora Nattrass explores the nature and effect of Cobbett’s rhetorical strategies, showing through close examination of a broad selection of his polemical writings (from his early American journalism onwards) the complexity, self-consciousness and skill of his stylistic procedures. Her close readings examine the political implications of Cobbett’s style within the broader context of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century political prose, and argue that his perceived ideological and stylistic flaws - inconsistency, bigotry, egoism and political nostalgia - are in fact rhetorical strategies designed to appeal to a range of usually polarised reading audiences. This re-reading revises a prevailing critical concensus that Cobbett is an unselfconscious populist whose writings reflect rather than challenge the ideological paradoxes and problems of his time.

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