Cultural Politics in the 1790s examines the relationships between sentimental and Romantic literature, political activism and the public sphere at a crucial period in British history. Drawing on the work of Habermas, Marcuse, Negt and Kluge, and Foucault, it demonstrates how major literary and political figures of the 1790s, and the ideological controversies in which they were involved, can be read in terms of the broader dynamics that typify modernity.

Through discussions of Edmund Burke, William Godwin, John Thelwall, Mary Wollstonecraft, Matthew Lewis, Maria Edgeworth and the diverse cultural and political milieus they represented, Andrew McCann examines tensions between the aesthetic and the political, consumption and critique and the private and the public, arguing that the negotiation of these tensions was central to the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony and the containment of radical politics in the aftermath of the French Revolution.