British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830

by Miranda J. Burgess

Overview

In British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, Miranda Burgess examines what Romantic-period writers called "romance." Reading a broad range of fictional and nonfictional 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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521773294
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/26/2000
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #43
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.87(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher