British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740ÔÇô1830 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)
Cambridge University Press, 10/26/2000
EAN 9780521773294, ISBN10: 0521773296
Hardcover, 324 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
In British Fiction and the Production of Social Order Miranda Burgess examines what Romantic-period writers called 'romance': a hybrid genre defined by a shared role in the negotiation of conflicts between political economy and moral philosophy. Reading a broad range of fictional and non-fictional works published between 1740 and 1830, Burgess places authors such as Richardson, Scott, Austen and Wollstonecraft in a new economic, social and cultural context. She explores the interaction between writing and the formation of community, particularly in relation to issues of legitimacy and gender. Burgess argues that the romance held a key role in remaking the national order of a Britain dependent on ideologies of human nature for justification of its social, economic and political systems.
List of figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
romantic economies
1. Marketing agreement
Richardson's romance of consensus
2. 'Summoned into the machine'
Burney's genres, Sheridan's sentiment, and conservative critique
3. Wollstonecraft and the revolution of economic history
4. Romance at home
Austen, Radcliffe, and the circulation of Britishness
5. Scott, Hazlitt and the ends of legitimacy
Epilogue
Sensibility, genre and the cultural marketplace
Notes.
"A book that offers much insight into eighteenth-century culture, with the added benefit of charting an engaging literary history that connects Romanticism with the literature of sensibility." Wordsworth Circle
"[It] does provide a substantive and valuable expansion to our understanding of the ways in which romance variously intersected with shifting contemporary political discourses." Nineteenth-Century Literature