The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution

Description

The French Revolution sparked an ideological debate which also brought Britain to the brink of revolution in the 1790s. Just as radicals wrote 'Jacobin' fiction, so the fear of rebellion prompted conservatives to respond with novels of their own; indeed, these soon outnumbered the Jacobin novels. This was the first survey of the full range of conservative novels produced in Britain during the 1790s and early 1800s. M. O. Grenby examines the strategies used by conservatives in their fiction, thus shedding new light on how the anti-Jacobin campaign was understood and organised in Britain. Chapters cover the representation of revolution and rebellion, the attack on the 'new philosophy' of radicals such as Godwin and Wollstonecraft, and the way in which hierarchy is defended in these novels. Grenby's book offers an insight into the society which produced and consumed anti-Jacobin novels, and presents a case for reexamining these neglected texts.

M. O Grenby is Hockliffe Research Fellow in the English Department at De Montfort University. He has written for a number of scholarly journals, and is a regular contributor to History: the Journal of the Historical Association. This is his first book.

'M. O. Grenby offers a beautifully written and illuminating account of a neglected but useful literary source for the British conservative response to the French Revolution and the 'Revolution crisis' in Britain ... this is a thorough study, yet one written with pace, cogency and brio, enlivened by many apt excerpts from the pithy, sometimes enjoyably caustic summaries of Dr Grenby's raw materials.' History 'Filling in a long-standing blank in our perception of the Romantic-era novel, The Anti-Jacobin Novel offers a valuable contribution to British literary history, as well as powerful arguments for revisiting the way in which literary criticism has tended to represent British politics and society of the 1790s in the last few decades. For these, and other reasons, Grenby has done the critical community a great service. ... ground-breaking ...'. Romanticism