Ancient Liberties? Rewriting the Historical Novel: Thomas Leland, Horace Walpole and Clara Reeve

2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
FIONA PRICE
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Clara Reeve

Ancient Liberties

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Price
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
Clara Reeve

Chapter One explores how the historical novel emerged in the 1760s as a form which at once employed and interrogated the dominant political narrative of ‘ancient liberties’. The notion of ancient constitutionalism allowed proposals for reform or for limits on monarchical power to be seen as attempts to ensure stability or, at most, (as with the theory of the Norman Yoke) to return to political origin. Yet for Horace Walpole ancient constitutionalism seems at times a troubled jest; Clara Reeve senses that the motif desperately needs reinforcement; and even after the more radical uses of the theory of the Norman Yoke by the Constitutional Society in the 1780s and 90s, Ann Radcliffe considers it a frozen political fable. Haunted by the spectre of the divine right of kings, in the historical novel the narrative of tradition ultimately proves an insufficient underpinning for the constitution.

The Secret of Divine Providence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Natural Occurrence ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Matthew Lewis ◽  
Divine Justice ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Clara Reeve ◽  
The Grotesque

The emphasis on political continuity in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution leads to a specifically Whig providentialism, examined in Chapter 3 through the work of Clara Reeve, Horace Walpole, and Matthew Lewis. In Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron, the country Whig version, stressing links with the medieval past, unites with Newtonian theology in which God’s finger is at work in every ‘natural occurrence’ to render the supernatural revelatory of this providential care. Divine justice and historical inexorability, romance, and realism are conjoined. By contrast, the sceptical Horace Walpole, representative of the Walpolian Whig narrative of political rupture, questions Providence in The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, and substitutes himself as quasi-divine author, whose originality lies in the grotesque mixture of realist and supernatural elements. Matthew Lewis essays an eschewal of Providential mechanisms in The Monk but here grotesque features such as the bleeding nun disclose an aporia which reveals the limit of libertine desire and a negative supernatural.

Reinventing Liberty

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Price
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
National Myth ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Site

Walter Scott is often regarded as the first historical novelist. 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 the formulation of political change and British national identity and its response to political change. 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’. Drawing on the new ways of writing history in this period, upon stadial history, antiquarianism, and debates concerning historical evidence, Reinventing Liberty analyses the anxieties caused by the rise of commerce and the demands for political change. It explores how historical novelists from Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe interrogated the idea of an ancient constitution. It examines the radical energies of the historical novel in post-French Revolution debate and the genre’s position as forerunner to the national tale. It then demonstrates how such ideas recuperated by more conservative historical novelists, who redirected historical concern from issues of individual liberty to matters of nation and empire and who emphasized a Christian version of chivalry. Finally, it positions Scott in relation to this complex tradition. The result is a new definition of the historical novel and of its role in the construction of the national myth of Britain as nation of gradual political change.

scholarly journals GLORIOSOS BASTARDOS E CASAMENTOS DESFEITOS: ANTIQUARIATO, PROVA E O SUBLIME EM HORACE WALPOLE, CLARA REEVE E ANN RADCLIFFE (1764-1791) * GLORIOUS BASTARDS AND BROKEN MARRIAGES: ANTIQUARIANISM, PROOF AND THE SUBLIME IN HORACE WALPOLE, CLARA REEVE AND ANN R

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 304
Author(s):  
Pedro Telles da Silveira
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ann Radcliffe ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Methodological Procedures ◽  
Clara Reeve

<p><strong>Resumo</strong>: O objetivo deste artigo é compreender a relação entre a prática antiquária e o romance gótico na Inglaterra do século XVIII. Procura-se demonstrar como a prática antiquária serve de enquadramento ficcional para uma expansão do conceito de verossímil. Por meio do conjunto de procedimentos metodológicos do antiquário e de sua aproximação com a prática jurídica da época, elementos fantásticos que seriam inverossímeis passam a ser aceitos na trama do romance gótico. Estes elementos, por fim, abrem espaço para a experiência do sublime, de modo que o uso de procedimentos de prova e a escrita ficcional estavam intimamente ligados.  </p><p><strong>Palavras-chave</strong>: Antiquariato; Romance gótico; sublime. </p><p><strong>Abstract</strong>: This paper seeks to study the interrelation between antiquarian practices and the gothic novel in eighteenth-century England. It tries to show how antiquarianism provides a fictional framing for an expansion of the concept of verisimilitude. Because of the methodological procedures developed by the antiquarian and their rapprochement with the judicial practices of its time, fantastical elements that would be otherwise discarded as implausible are accepted in the gothic novel. Therefore those elements create the possibility of experiencing the sublime, so the procedures regarding the ascertainment of truth and proof of historical discourse are intimately entangled with fictional writing. </p><p><strong>Kewyords</strong>: Antiquarianism; Gothic novel; sublime.</p>

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