Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelizing the Revolution/Revolutionizing the Novel

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 369-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Kelly
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

scholarly journals Understanding Violence in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-48
Author(s):  
Mohammed Rasul Murad Akoi
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Psychological Approach ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Inherent Part ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This paper, Understanding Violence in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, deals with violence in its various forms in Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities. The novel recounts the French Revolution of 1789. In the novel, Dickens portrays a terrifying scene of blood and brutality. Violence appears in different forms. Critics have paid attention to Charles Dickens’ own fear of a similar revolution in England. The paper attempts to find the substance of that fear. The paper will discuss the three forms of violence in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities; namely, violence as an inherent part of the French Revolution; violence committed by the crowds or mobs, and the evil that rises and grows as the Revolution continues. It will be argued that Dickens’ depiction of the crowd and mob behavior in A Tale of Two Cities captures the potential which is in the mentality of any crowd to grow violent. That is, a seemingly innocent start could lead to evil. A socio-psychological approach will also be consulted to analyze violence in the novel; violence as part of the revolution; violence committed by the mobs, and finally how the revolutionary masses turn evil.

The Novel Wars of 1790–1804

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Mee
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
English Novel ◽  
British System ◽  
Constitutional Monarchy ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter explores the novel in the period 1790–1804. The French Revolution profoundly shaped the English novel in the 1790s. Originally, the Revolution was welcomed by sections of the reading public, many of whom regarded it as bringing France into line with the liberty under law perceived as the British system of constitutional monarchy. Opinion began to change significantly after Edmund Burke's attack on the Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Accounts of the novels written in the decade after Burke's assault on the Revolution are now routinely organized around the two poles of ‘Jacobin’ and ‘Anti-Jacobin’ fiction. Certainly, the novel in this decade did find itself shaped by the ‘war of ideas’, but—like the pamphlet war itself—it was neither conducted as a straightforward exchange of fire between two distinct ideological camps, nor was it untouched by developments in the novel as a form.

scholarly journals Gender, the novel and the modern order of time

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (34) ◽  
pp. 173-199
Author(s):  
Renata Dal Sasso Freitas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Frances Burney ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Wanderer ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This article aims to analyze the 1814 novel The Wanderer, or female difficulties by English writer Frances Burney and how its depiction of Britain at the time of the French Revolution can contribute to the understanding of the emergence of what François Hartog called the modern regime of historicity. Like many authors analyzed by Hartog in his books Regimes of Historicityand Croire en Histoire, Burney was personally affected by the French revolutionary process, a fact that is reflected in her last work. However, the time of its publication – when the Napoleonic Wars were at their end – made it outdated, something that was compounded by the debates regarding the Revolution and issues of gender that it was steeped in. By analyzing this novel, I will argue that issues of gender also played a role in the changes of how men and women related to time at this period as part of the transformations in the concept of History that occurred at the turn of the eighteenth century.

The Revolutionizing of the Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
French Government ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In 1792, the French Revolution became a thing in itself, an uncontrollable force that might eventually spend itself but which no one could direct or guide. The governments set up in Paris in the following years all faced the problem of holding together against forces more revolutionary than themselves. This chapter distinguishes two such forces for analytical purposes. There was a popular upheaval, an upsurge from below, sans-culottisme, which occurred only in France. Second, there was the “international” revolutionary agitation, which was not international in any strict sense, but only concurrent within the boundaries of various states as then organized. From the French point of view these were the “foreign” revolutionaries or sympathizers. The most radical of the “foreign” revolutionaries were seldom more than advanced political democrats. Repeatedly, however, from 1792 to 1799, these two forces tended to converge into one force in opposition to the French government of the moment.

‘The greatest irregular’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Scurr
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Thomas Carlyle claimed that his history of the French Revolution was ‘a wild savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution …’. This chapter considers his stylistic approaches to creating the illusion of immediacy: his presentation of seemingly unmediated fact through the transformation of memoir and other kinds of historical record into a compelling dramatic narrative. Closely examining the ways in which he worked biographical anecdote into the fabric of his text raises questions about Carlyle’s wider historical purposes. Pressing the question of what it means to think through style, or to distinguish expressive emotive writing from abstract understanding, is an opportunity to reconsider Carlyle’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries writing on the Revolution in English.

The Glory and the Sorrow

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Tackett
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Small Time ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Ordinary Citizen ◽  
Best Friend ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Intermediary ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The book describes the life and the world of a small-time lawyer, Adrien-Joseph Colson, who lived in central Paris from the end of the Old Regime through the first eight years of the French Revolution. It is based on over a thousand letters written by Colson about twice a week to his best friend living in the French province of Berry. By means of this correspondence, and of a variety of other sources, the book examines what it was like for an “ordinary citizen” to live through extraordinary times, and how Colson, in his position as a “social and cultural intermediary,” can provide insight into the life of a whole neighborhood on the central Right Bank, both before and during the Revolution. It explores the day-to-day experience of the Revolution: not only the thrill, the joy, and the enthusiasm, but also the uncertainty, the confusion, the anxiety, the disappointments—often all mixed together. It also throws light on some of the questions long debated by historians concerning the origins, the radicalization, the growth of violence, and the end of that Revolution.

Contemporary visions of France: the Revolution, Women and History: A Summary of the 1989 Fall Colloquia, New York University’s Institute of French Studies

1990 ◽  
Vol 10 (x) ◽  
pp. 287-307
Author(s):  
Richard Cicchillo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
French Society ◽  
French Studies ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

The seven colloquia held at New York University’s Institute of French Studies during the Fall 1989 semester offered some new perspectives on the French Revolution, and took stock of various elements of French Society and history two hundred years after the taking of the Bastille.

Sovereignty, Politics, and Reason in the Post-Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 146-162
Author(s):  
James Livesey
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
International Order ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Direct Effects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter focuses on the French Revolution as one of the most important moments in the entangled history of local cosmopolitanisms. Such ideas as rights, property, and democracy were consciously articulated during the Revolution as universals with cosmopolitan spheres of application, and those ideas had profound global consequences over the following two centuries. Alongside this impact on states and legal structures, the Revolution also had direct effects in every community in France and touched communities outside the hexagon, from India to Ireland. The Revolution transformed the most general contexts, putting the nation-state rather than empire as the organizing principle at the heart of the international order, but it also put the most intimate experiences, such as family and emotion, under new light. The drama of the Revolution exemplified the power of ideas and the ambition to create a rational political order.

Innovative Recent Perspectives

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter considers Salo Baron's writings on Jewish history. Recent historians have come to reject the supernaturally grounded assumption of unending Jewish suffering during the supposed third exile; many of them have also distanced themselves from the modern and naturalistic continuations of this sense of interminable Jewish suffering. The first major challenge to the received wisdom came in 1928 from Salo Baron, newly arrived in the United States from his native Europe. In an essay titled “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revisit the Traditional View?” he undertook a fairly limited assault on traditional Jewish thinking about exilic pain. Focusing on the French Revolution and the beginnings of the process of emancipation of Western Jewry, Baron examined the centuries immediately preceding the revolution and the immediate post-Emancipation period. He argued that the former was nowhere near so horrific as usually projected and that the latter was nowhere near so idyllic.

scholarly journals Danton. Wektory interpretacji filmu Andrzeja Wajdy

2017 ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Włodzimierz Szturc
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Current Model ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Andrzej Wajda ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

In this paper, the author presents the final period of the French Revolution as interpretated by Andrzej Wajda. The screenplay was prepared by Jean-Claude Carrière based on Stanisława Przybyszewska’s drama (also used by Wajda as a screenplay in many dramas). It helped the director to describe the reality of the intense time of Robespierre’s terror and Jacobin efforts to guillotine Danton and his allies. Wajda reveals the same mechanisms of crime, manipulation and lies which became the backdrop for political events in Poland between 1981-1983 (especially with the introduction of martial law in Poland in 1981). The model of Danton’s fall and the strengthening of totalitarian rule are considered the current model of history, which is based on cruelty and the struggle for power. The film forms the basis for a broader view of history as the tragic entanglement of events, which is the result of hubris and the desire for material goods, and is the origin of totalitarian rule. References to the emblems of the revolution, allegories, and the symbolism of art (paintings of David) are the fundamental ekphrasis of meanings set by the film. Wajda’s analysis of Danton shows some typical ways of understanding and interpreting the signs of culture and history.

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