Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825 Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions

by Watson, Nicola J.

• ISBN13: 9780198112976
• ISBN10: 0198112971
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1994-03-24
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Whatever happened to the epistolary novel? Why was it that by 1825 the principal narrative form of eighteenth-century fiction has been replaced by the third-person and often historicised models which have predominated ever since?Nicola Watson's original and wide-ranging study charts the suppression of epistolary fiction, exploring the attempted radicalization of the genre by Wollstonecraft and other feminists in the 1790s, its rejection and parody by Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, the increasingly discredited role playedby letters in the historical novels of Jane Porter and Walter Scott, and their troubling, ghostly presence in the Gothic narratives of James Hogg and Charles Maturin. The shift in narrative method is seen as a response to anxieties about the French Revolution, with the epistolary, feminized, andsentimental plot replaced by a more authoritarian third-person mode as part of a wider redrawing of the relation between the individual and the social consensus.This is a brilliant and innovative reading of the place of the novel in the reformulation of British national identity in the Napoleonic period, throwing new light on writers as diverse as Hazlitt, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, Helen Maria Williams, and Byron.

Author Biography

Nicola J. Watson is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Northwestern University, Illinois.

Table of Contents

Frontispiece: Le Coterie Debouche
Introduction: Revolutionary Letters	p. 1
Julie Among the Jacobins: Radicalism and the Sentimental Novel, 1790-1800	p. 13
Redirecting the Letter: Counter-Revolutionary Tactics, 1800-1819	p. 69
Consigning the Heroine to History: National and Historical Tales, 1800-1825	p. 109
Compromising Letters: Shades of the Sentimental, 1811-1815	p. 155
Bibliography	p. 194
Index	p. 211
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