Re-Writing the Radical

The essays in this volume discuss the overlap between philosophical, aesthetic, and political concerns in the 1790s either in the work of individuals or in the transfer of cultural materials across national borders, which tended to entail adaptation and transformation. What emerges is a clearer understanding of the fate of the Enlightenment, its radicalization and its overcoming in aesthetic and political terms, and of the way in which political paranoia, generated by the fear of a spreading revolutionary radicalism, facilitated and influenced the cultural transfer of the radical.