This dissertation addresses two distinct but related questions. First, how should we conceive of social freedom? Second, given this conception, what ideals would best satisfy the demands we are under as citizens and moral agents? In answer to the first question, I defend a novel account of social freedom, where...
This dissertation argues that the nineteenth-century construction of “emotional susceptibility” turned a much-derided quirk of psychology—the long retention of one’s earliest affective impressions—into a basis for radical interventions into thinking about attachment, ethics, and the Victorian novel. I focus in particular on the work of Henry Mackenzie, Charlotte Brontë, George...