The French Revolution and the British Novel in the Romantic Period

This book is a major reassessment of the French Revolution’s impact on the English novel of the Romantic period. Focusing particularly – but by no means exclusively – on women writers of the time, it explores the enthusiasm, wariness, or hostility with which the Revolution was interpreted and represented for then-contemporary readers. A team of international scholars study how English Romantic novelists sought to guide the British response to an event that seemed likely to turn the world upside down.

A. D. Cousins is Professor of English at Macquarie University, Australia. A member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he has published widely on early modern British literature and culture; his most recent publication is (with Peter Howarth). Dani Napton is an honorary associate at Macquarie University. Her research is focused on English non-dramatic literature and culture from 1750 to 1900, with special attention to the history of ideas, rhetorical theory and practice, genre, landscape/place narrative and political theory, and historiography and representations of revolution and counterrevolution. Stephanie Russo is a lecturer at Macquarie University. Her research is focused on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, particularly on gender, politics, the history of ideas, and representations of revolution and counter-revolution.

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Contents: A. D. Cousins/Dani Napton/Stephanie Russo: Introduction. The French Revolution and the British Novel in the Romantic Period – M. O. Grenby: ‘Very Naughty Doctrines’: Children, Children’s Literature, Politics and the French Revolution Crisis – Stephanie Russo: ‘A People Driven By Terror’: Charlotte Smith, and the Politics of Counter-Revolution – Gary Kelly: ‘The Sentiments I Have Embodied’: Wollstonecraft’s Feminist Adaptation of the Revolutionary Novel – Stephanie Russo/A. D. Cousins: ‘In a State of Terrour and Misery Indescribable’: Violence, Madness and Revolution in the novels of Frances Burney – Stephanie Russo/A. D. Cousins: ‘Educated in Masculine Habits’: Mary Robinson, Androgyny, and the Ideal Woman – Dani Napton: Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Agency in Scott’s and – Chris Danta: Revolution at a Distance: Jane Austen and Personalised History – Michael Ackland: Towards Rehabilitating ‘The Long Blighted Tree of Knowledge’: Mary Shelley’s Revolutionary Concept of Self-Governance and Dominion in – Deirdre Coleman: ‘Adapted to Her Meridian’: The Novel, The Woman Reader, and the French Revolution.