A Pastoral Romance, From the Ancient British: Godwin’s Rewriting of Comus
Pamela Clemit, University of Durham
Volume 3, no. 3, April 1991
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Godwin is steadily rising in reputation, both as philosopher and as novelist. Over the last few years several biographies have appeared; his ideas have been analysed; and his best-known works, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Caleb Williams (1794) have received considerable scholarly attention. Now his post-revolutionary novels are being recognized as the fictions of an intellectual who was impressive in his own right, not merely because of his association with Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Yet William Godwin’s early novels are still almost completely neglected. In this context Imogen (1784) is of special interest as the first of Godwin’s mature novels, and as a significant addition to the intellectual fiction of the Romantic period.
Other ECF articles on the Topic of “William Godwin” include:
Biography as Autopsy in William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”
by ANGELA MONSAM (ECF 21.1, Fall 2008)
“An Outlandish, Foreign-Made Englishman”: Aristocratic Oppression and Ethnic Anomaly in Caleb Williams
by CHARLIE BONDHUS (ECF 23.1, Fall 2010)
“Extraordinary and dangerous powers”: Prisons, Police, and Literature in Godwin’s Caleb Williams
by QUENTIN BAILEY (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
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