Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelizing the Revolution/Revolutionizing the Novel
Gary Kelly, University of Keele
Volume 6, no. 4, July 1994
©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
The French Revolution was a cultural as well as political event: Revolutionary politics were enacted in cultural ways, among others. Yet fictionalizations of the Revolution might still seem either tangential to its political realities or a submission of literature, which is supposedly transhistorical, to mere temporality, in the form of propaganda. Much writing of the time remains outside the modern literary canon for precisely this reason. Even critical opinion of the time saw the novel as an unpromising vehicle for serious discussion of political ideas, let alone ideas inspired by an event that was considered historically unprecedented in its magnitude, consequences, and nature. Moreover, the novel was then widely if erroneously regarded as a “feminine” form, mainly read and written by women, and as a consequence outside the public, political sphere in which revolutions occurred.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “French Revolution” include:
The Trans-National Dimensions of the Émigré Novel during the French Revolution
by KATHERINE ASTBURY (ECF 23.4, Summer 2011)
The Crocodile Strikes Back: Saint-Martin’s Interpretation of the French Revolution
by FABIENNE MOORE (ECF 19.1-2, Fall-Winter 2006-7)
How to Be Sociable: Charrière’s Dialogue with Rousseau in Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d’émigrés
by GIULIA PACINI (ECF 17.2, April 2005)
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