Description
Book SynopsisIn the decades immediately following the French Revolution, British writers saw the narrative ordering of experience as either superficial, dangerous or impossible. Linking storytelling to other forms of social action, including the making of contracts and promises, Gavin Edwards argues that the experience of radical social upheaval produced a widespread scepticism about narrative as linguistic artefact, the transmission of narrative through storytelling and the understanding of individual or collective life as a temporal sequence with a beginning and an end.
Trade Review'This is a very scholarly volume.' Roger Sales - Literature and History
'Gavin Edwards has written a truly original book that should be read by scholars with an interest in narratology, in the relationships between language and politics, or in any of the authors Edwards discusses...This work demands intellectual exertion from the reader, but it amply rewards that effort.' Eric Birdsall, British Association for Romantic Studies
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements PART ONE Narrative Order Samuel Johnson and the Order of Time PART TWO Edmund Burke: Middles versus Beginnings and End Watkin Tench and the Cold Track of Narrative William Godwin: Stories and Families Wordsworth's Moving Accidents Crabbe's Parables Relations: Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley The Still Unravished Bride of Lammermoor Notes Bibliography Index
