#British Historical Fiction Before Scott PDF

In the half century before Walter Scott's Waverley , dozens of popular novelists produced historical fictions for circulating libraries. This book examines eighty-five popular historical novels published between 1762 and 1813, looking at how the conventions of the genre developed through a process of imitation and experimentation.

Through an examination of a representative body of nonfiction prose from the French Revolution debate and a variety of subgenres of the novel from the 1790-1814 period, this study traces the development of the discursive phenomenon it describes as “the struggle for history's authority” and the consequences thereof for the British novel.

This collection of essays that examines historical fiction from the eighteenth century to the present. In doing so, it provides a clear sense of both the shifts and continuities in the way historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices intersect.

Historical Writing in Britain, 1688-1830 explores a series of debates concerning the nature and value of the past in the long eighteenth century. The essays investigate a diverse range of subjects including art history, biography, historical poetry, and novels, as well as addressing more conventional varieties of historical writing.

Studiul aduce o lumină nouă asupra operei lui Walter Scott, arătând relevanța ei în contextul contemporan. Combinând într-o abordare neo-formalistă teoriile lui Hayden White, Bogdan Ștefănescu și Mikhail Bakhtin, volumul de față demonstrează modul în care alteritatea, în ficțiunea lui Scott, aduce remediile necesare societății, dacă societatea permite existența alterității alături de ea, fără încercarea de a-i șterge diferențele. Importante sunt momentele de suspendare temporară a codurilor culturale, în stilul conservator al parodiei lui Bakhtin, permițând astfel o supapă de evacuare a tensiunilor sociale. Dincolo de jargonul tehnic, cartea pune în fața cititorului pasajele cele mai distractive din opera vastă a lui Scott, precum și un studiu interesant al iluminismului scoțian și al sferei publice care a reușit să încorporeze feedback-ul culturii populare, ajungând la început de secol XIX să exporte modelul său de succes în întreaga lume.

Female Gothic Histories traces the development of women’s Gothic historical fiction from Sophia Lee’s The Recess in the late eighteenth century through the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt to the bestselling novels of Sarah Waters in the twenty-first century. Often left out of traditional historical narratives, women writers have turned to Gothic historical fiction as a mode of writing which can both reinsert them into history and symbolise their exclusion. This study breaks new ground in bringing together thinking about the Gothic and the historical novel, and in combining psychoanalytic theory with historical contextualisation.

Although the emergence of the English novel is generally regarded as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, this is the first book to be published professing to cover the 'eighteenth-century English novel' in its entirety. This Handbook surveys the development of the English novel during the 'long' eighteenth century-in other words, from the later seventeenth century right through to the first three decades of the nineteenth century when, with the publication of the novels of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, 'the novel' finally gained critical acceptance and assumed the position of cultural hegemony it enjoyed for over a century. By situating the novels of the period which are still read today against the background of the hundreds published between 1660 and 1830, this Handbook not only covers those 'masters and mistresses' of early prose fiction-such as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Scott and Austen-who are still acknowledged to be seminal figures in the emergence and development of the English novel, but also the significant number of recently-rediscovered novelists who were popular in their own day. At the same time, its comprehensive coverage of cultural contexts not considered by any existing study, but which are central to the emergence of the novel, such as the book trade and the mechanics of book production, copyright and censorship, the growth of the reading public, the economics of culture both in London and in the provinces, and the re-printing of popular fiction after 1774, offers unique insight into the making of the English novel.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829 offers a compelling account of the development of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ireland. Countering traditional scholarly views of the ‘rise’ of ‘the gothic novel’ on the one hand, and, on the other, Irish Romantic literature, this study persuasively re-integrates a body of now overlooked works into the history of the literary gothic as it emerged across Ireland, Britain, and Europe between 1760 and 1829. Its twinned quantitative and qualitative analysis of neglected Irish texts produces a new formal, generic, and ideological map of gothic literary production in this period, persuasively positioning Irish works and authors at the centre of a new critical paradigm with which to understand both Irish Romantic and gothic literary production.

For the first time in the literary tradition, the contemporary woman's historical novel (post-1970) is surveyed from a transnational feminist perspective. Analyzing the maternal (the genre's central theme) reveals that historical fiction is a transnational feminist means for challenging historical erasures, silences, normative sexuality, political exclusion, and divisions of labor. (Series: Contributions to Transnational Feminism - Vol. 5)

Redefines the British historical novel as a key site in the construction of British national identityThe British historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott's fiction, as a reflection on a clear break between past and present. Returning to the range of historical fiction written before Scott, Reinventing Liberty challenges this view by returning us to the rich range of historical novels written in the late eighteenth-century. It explores how these works participated in a contentious debate concerning political change and British national identity. Ranging across well-known writers, like William Godwin, Horace Walpole and Frances Burney, to lesser-known figures, such as Cornelia Ellis Knight and Jane Porter, Reinventing Liberty reveals how history becomes a site to rethink Britain as 'land of liberty' and it positions Scott in relation to this tradition.Key FeaturesRecovers the richness of the historical novel and history writing before Walter Scott, including the contribution of women writers to this debateExplores how historical fiction probes anxieties at the rise of commerce, the question of empire, and radical political changeRewrites our understanding of Scott and his relation to the earlier British historical novel

This book contributes to the development of contemporary historical fiction studies by analysing neo-Georgian fiction, which, unlike neo-Victorian fiction, has so far received little critical attention. The essays included in this collection study the ways in which the selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels recreate the Georgian period in order to view its ideologies through the lens of such modern critical theories as performativity, post-colonialism, feminism or visual theories. They also demonstrate the rich repertoire of subgenres of neo-Georgian fiction, ranging from biographical fiction, epistolary novels to magical realism. The included studies of the diverse novelistic conventions used to re-contextualise the Georgian reality reflect the way we see its relevance and relation to the present and trace the indebtedness of the new forms of the contemporary novel to the traditional novelistic genres.

Historical Style connects the birth of eighteenth-century British consumer society to the rise of historical self-consciousness. Prior to the eighteenth century, British style was slow to change and followed the cultural and economic imperatives of monarchical regimes. By the 1750s, however, a growing fashion press extolled, in writing and illustration, the new phenomenon of periodized fashion trends. As fashion fads came in and out of style, and as fashion texts circulated and obsolesced, Britons were forced to confront the material persistence of out-of-date fashions. Timothy Campbell argues that these fashion texts and objects shaped British perception of time and history by producing new curiosity about the very recent past, as well as a new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be understood. In a panoptic sweep, Historical Style brings together art history, philosophy, and literary history to portray an era increasingly aware of itself. Burgeoning consumer society, Campbell contends, highlighted the distinction between the past and the present, created an expectation of continual change, and forged a sense of history as something that could be tracked through material objects. Campbell assembles a wide range of writings, images, and objects to render this eighteenth-century landscape: commercial dress displays and David Hume's ideas of novelty as historical form; popular illustrations of recent fashion trends and Sir Joshua Reynolds's aesthetic precepts; fashion periodicals and Sir Walter Scott's costume-saturated historical fiction. In foregrounding fashion to trace eighteenth-century historicism, Historical Style draws upon the interdisciplinary, multimedia archival impressions that fashionable dress has left behind, as well as the historical and conceptual resources within the field of fashion studies that literary and cultural historians of eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain have often neglected.