Review. Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution. Blakemore, Steven

1999 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 338-338
Author(s):  
W. DOYLE
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Helen Maria Williams ◽  
The French Revolution

The French Revolution Controversy

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The rights of man ‘arrived’ in England, in the sense of beginning to circulate in public discourse and becoming a topic on which people staked out positions, during the final decade of the eighteenth century. The context was debate over the significance of the French Revolution for England (the ‘Revolution controversy’). This chapter initiates discussion of the contested meaning of the rights of man in that debate, examining contributions by Richard Price, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. A vision of the rights of man emerges as the rights of the living to control the political community of which those latter are a part.

Vindications and Reflections: The Lady’s Magazine during the Revolution Controversy (1789–1795)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koenraad Claes
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Women's Magazines ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Ideological Position ◽  
Helen Maria Williams ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
Women's Periodicals ◽  
The Revolution

This essay examines how the French Revolution and the controversy it spawned figure in one of the most important British women’s magazines of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: George Robinson’s Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832). Even though most scholars who have written on the magazine have dismissed it as an organ of female domestication, Koenraad Claes demonstrates that this pioneering publication is uniquely qualified as a document on this politically turbulent period. While the Lady’s Magazine, like most magazines, cannot be said to be a straightforward organ of any ideological position, it consistently made room for radical reformist views of the likes of Catharine Macaulay, Thomas Paine, Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft. Through a detailed analysis of how the successive phases of the Revolution Controversy, Claes reveals how readers of this period’s British women’s periodicals were better informed about ongoing political debates than we have long presumed.

The Labours of History

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Price
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
Commercial Exchange ◽  
Sophia Lee ◽  
The Wanderer ◽  
The French Revolution

Chapter Two examines how the evocation of sympathy in the historical novel generates both radical and reformist historical fictions. The interrogation of chivalric sentiment, which begins with Sophia Lee, accelerates after the French Revolution. Responding to Edmund Burke, radical writers like Charlotte Smith, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft argue for a redistribution of sympathy and for a new, more rational historiography. After the Terror, these notions of history for the ‘mass’ were themselves subject to reformulation, notably in the historical novel of the recent past. Historicising the French Revolution, Charles Dacres (1797), Lioncel; or Adventures of an Emigrant (1803), Edgeworth’s ‘Madame Fleury’ (1809) and Burney’s The Wanderer [1814] explore the possibility of an commercial exchange at once sympathetic and economic. Along with other historical novels including Ann Yearsley’s The Royal Captives [1795] and Montford Castle [1795]), such works implicitly suggest the need for workers to be safely politicised.

scholarly journals SHALL WE TAKE THE LINGUISTIC TURN? BRITISH RADICALISM IN THE ERA OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 583-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM STAFFORD
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Radical Culture ◽  
Harvester Wheatsheaf ◽  
Popular Contention ◽  
The French Revolution

Intertextual war: Edmund Burke and the French Revolution in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and James Mackintosh. By Steven Blakemore. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997. Pp. 256. ISBN 0-8386-3751-5. £32.Radical expression: political language, ritual, and symbol in England, 1790–1850. By James Epstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. xi+233. ISBN 0-19-506550-6. £30.Tom Paine: a political life. By John Keane. London: Bloomsbury, 1996. Pp. xxii+644. ISBN 0-7475-2543-9. £8.99.Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain. By H. L. Malchow. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+335. ISBN 0-8047-2664-7. £35 (hb). ISBN 0-8047-2793-7. £12.95 (pb).Popular contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. By Charles Tilly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pp. xvii+476. ISBN 0-674-68980-1. £31.50.Radical culture: discourse, resistance and surveillance, 1790–1820. By David Worrall. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Pp. ix+236. ISBN 0-7450-0960-3. £40.Most of these books are influenced by current philosophical or methodological concerns which might be labelled, according to taste, as poststructuralism, postmodernism, or the linguistic turn; but they are influenced to very varying degrees. At one end of the spectrum stands Tilly's substantial study, essentially modernist, rejecting the latest fashions. At the other stand the books by Blakemore and Malchow, their colours firmly nailed to the mast of deconstruction. Blakemore teaches in a department of English, and although Malchow's institutional affiliation is as an historian, his book is a hermeneutic of literary texts. The great majority of ‘postmodern’ analyses of texts from this period have come from the stable of literary studies, perhaps especially from scholars concerned, as Malchow is, with the construction of gender, that great growth area of the present time. None of these books subscribes in practice to a postmodern relativism, declaring itself to be merely a construction or representation of the past: all arrive at some kind of closure, explicitly or implicitly asserting the truth of their interpretations. Historians concerned to justify their subject to funding bodies may judge this to be prudent; nevertheless a greater degree of reflexivity, of self-doubt, would have been welcome in some instances, as we shall see.

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