Individualism and Community in Robert Bage’s Hermsprong
Abstract
This paper explores the tension between individualism and community in Robert Bage’s Jacobin novel,
Hermsprong: or, Man As He is Not (1796). Published in the midst of the heated French Revolution debates,
the novel responds to the view that, by positing the individual as the agent of political, economic, and moral
authority, individualism threatened the dissolution of the ties between the individual, the community, and
the state. The critical work of J. Hillis Miller, which incorporates various community theories into literary
criticism, is used as a guideline for this analysis. This study argues that Bage drew attention to the
exclusionary and self-destructive nature of traditional communities by depicting individualistic characters
in conflict with the legal, religious, and social apparatus of the community they inhabit and that the novel
presents three possible solutions to this conflict: the formation of subcommunities, the shift to a more
contract-based social model, and emigration.
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