SOURCE: von Mücke, Dorothea. “‘To Love a Murderer’—Fantasy, Sexuality, and the Political Novel: The Case of Caleb Williams.” In Cultural Institutions of the Novel, edited by Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner, pp. 306-34. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, von Mücke explores Godwin's use of language as a means of creating subjective realities within fictional representations.

The popularity of William Godwin's novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (first published in 1794) was short-lived. One might wonder why this relatively unknown and inconsequential book should be of interest to anybody besides scholars of eighteenth-century literature. And yet, one of the first consciously “political” novels, this text provides a very interesting test case for an analysis of the relationships between literature and politics, ideology and sexuality. Caleb Williams challenges the reductionist understanding of the political that depends on a straightforward...