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Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827

Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827 Women, Writing; and Riwolution, I 790-1 82 7. By Gary Kelly. Oxford: Clarendon, ‘993. 328 pp. $49.95. British romantic fiction has rarely been an analytical category of more than dubious utility for literary studies. Either too overtly didactic or too aesthetically amorphous to satisfy much critical taste, most narrative texts from this period have been relegated to an interpretive void somewhere between the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century and the flourishing of Victorian fiction. To be sure, two of the era’s authors have attracted considerable critical a t t e n t i o n l a n e Austen and Sir Walter Scott. But Austen was most often read as a continuation of eighteenth-century traditions and values-in any case, scarcely a romantic author-and the romantic elements in Scott’s fiction can easily be read as subordinate to his broader ideological purposes and his larger generic relation to historical fiction. Likewise, those prose subgenres that did receive critical scrutiny-notably the Gothic novelhave, despite their affiliations with romantic aesthetics, remained hard to place within any coherent, developing narrative tradition. For many critics (and even more classroom syllabi), this left Frankenstein as a curiously solitary instance of genuine http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History Duke University Press

Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790-1827

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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 1995 by University of Washington
ISSN
0026-7929
eISSN
1527-1943
DOI
10.1215/00267929-56-3-384
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Women, Writing; and Riwolution, I 790-1 82 7. By Gary Kelly. Oxford: Clarendon, ‘993. 328 pp. $49.95. British romantic fiction has rarely been an analytical category of more than dubious utility for literary studies. Either too overtly didactic or too aesthetically amorphous to satisfy much critical taste, most narrative texts from this period have been relegated to an interpretive void somewhere between the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century and the flourishing of Victorian fiction. To be sure, two of the era’s authors have attracted considerable critical a t t e n t i o n l a n e Austen and Sir Walter Scott. But Austen was most often read as a continuation of eighteenth-century traditions and values-in any case, scarcely a romantic author-and the romantic elements in Scott’s fiction can easily be read as subordinate to his broader ideological purposes and his larger generic relation to historical fiction. Likewise, those prose subgenres that did receive critical scrutiny-notably the Gothic novelhave, despite their affiliations with romantic aesthetics, remained hard to place within any coherent, developing narrative tradition. For many critics (and even more classroom syllabi), this left Frankenstein as a curiously solitary instance of genuine

Journal

Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 1995

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