Trials of Sincerity: The Novel and Subjecthood in the Age of Revolution

Abstract

This dissertation explores sincerity as an animating force of radical politics—shaping its philosophical commitments alongside its novelistic experiments. Defined as the belief that sustained self-reflection and honest communication could ground political transformation, radical sincerity functioned both as a philosophical method and a formal challenge. As English radicals embraced sincerity as a counter-normative virtue, the novel offered a uniquely dialogic space in which to stage its promises and contradictions, mirroring the epistemological demands of sincerity itself. I contend that the methodology of the radical novel and the practice of sincerity are not merely aligned; they are co-constitutive, each testing the boundaries of truth-telling, ethical consistency, and political legibility. The first chapter traces the political redefinition of sincerity in the wake of the French Revolution, focusing on Richard Price and William Godwin. It argues that sincerity shifts from a private moral disposition to a radical political virtue—one grounded in individual conscience, public critique, and the unfinished legacy of the Glorious Revolution. Chapter Two turns to feminist pedagogical novels by Mary Hays and Elizabeth Inchbald, examining how women writers reframe sincerity as a mode of resistant subject-formation. Against the polite fictions of conduct literature, these texts imagine sincerity as both a feminist ethic and a risky practice of unlearning. The third chapter examines the courtroom as a space of affective management and disciplinary spectacle, where political sincerity is staged, scrutinized, and often rendered illegible. Through readings of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, it shows how the sincere individual is placed at the mercy of juridical massification and emotional containment. The final chapter moves to colonial and racialized contexts in the works of Charlotte Smith and John Thelwall, where the radical ideal of sincerity confronts the contradictions of empire. These novels map fugitive forms of sincerity, yet still gesturing toward epistemological alternatives. Ultimately, this dissertation is not a story about sincerity triumphant, but about what happens when sincerity becomes radical disidentification. Trials of Sincerity follows that praxis into collision with the structures that constrain it, finding in the novel a form capacious enough to hold sincerity in process, not perfection.