Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, William Godwin - Gary Handwerk (essay date winter 1993)
Gary Handwerk (essay date winter 1993)
SOURCE: Handwerk, Gary. “Of Caleb's Guilt and Godwin's Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams.” ELH 60, no. 4 (winter 1993): 939-60.
[In the following essay, Handwerk studies the relationship between Godwin's novel and his political treatise, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.]
For a moralizing solution, like any essentializing gesture, serves the ideological function of masking the more difficult cultural and ethicopolitical issues.
—Dominick LaCapra, History, Politics, and the Novel
I
Despite a recent resurgence of interest in his life and in certain of his works, William Godwin remains an elusive and little-noticed figure of English literary and intellectual history. Known as much for his personal links to other figures—to Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, or Shelley—as for his own writing, Godwin remains largely unread...
[The entire page is 10262 words long]
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