Authoring the revolution, 1819-1848/49: radical German and English literature and the shift from political to social revolution

This thesis addresses, from a comparative perspective, an important lacuna in the research devoted to German and English revolutionary literature in the period from 1819 up to the European revolutions of 1848/49. It illustrates that a major shift from a concept of political revolution to one of social revolution took place within these years which is reflected in radical literature between the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ (1819) and the failure of the bourgeois political revolution of 1848/49. Theoretically based on selected writings of the early Marx and Engels on ideology, consciousness and political and social revolution as well as on more recent Marxist theories of cultural studies, this study shows how the contemporary philosophical, socio-political, socio-economic and literary discourse on revolution must be regarded as closely interlinked. This interconnection is not limited to an ideological, but also extends to a rhetorical and even metaphorical level. However, although it foregrounds these shared textual elements, the purpose of this thesis is not to add yet another philological analysis of literary works, but rather to flesh out the shared ideological involvement of the fictional and non-fictional revolutionary discourse. Texts and authors include in the British context of 1819 Percy Bysshe Shelley and British radical journalists such as Richard Carlile. In order to analyse the shift in revolutionary discourse in the years between the French bourgeois July Revolution of 1830 and the early 1840s, texts by the literary revolutionary writers Ludwig Börne, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Georg Büchner are contextualised with the pamphlets and writings by the most radically socio-revolutionary among the French early socialists, Louis Auguste Blanqui, by rebellious weavers, by the Parisian German early proletarian movement as well as Marx’s earliest socio-philosophical justification of a proletarian social revolution, the “Einleitung Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechts-Philosophie” (1844)