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1 results

  • Chapter 2 - Godwin, Bage, Parsons, and Novels as They Are

  • Hannah Doherty Hudson, Suffolk University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    Romantic Fiction and Literary Excess in the Minerva Press Era
    Published online:
    04 May 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023, pp 50-78

  • Summary

    This chapter shows how the new demands of a growing market shaped the development of 1790s political novels. In the wake of the French revolution, the proliferation of English fiction began to strike many observers as particularly dangerous – critics feared that novels might be the vehicle of threateningly radical and immoral ideas, while many authors expressed anxieties about where and by whom their works would be read. Examining novels by writers including Eliza Parsons, William Godwin, and Robert Bage, this chapter argues that political ideas across the spectrum were often conceived and expressed as functions of multiplicity: How many readers, how many epistolary voices, how many viewpoints, how many ideological challenges could one novel handle? Focusing first on the proliferation of voices that a long novel allows, and then on concerns about the alarmingly wide and indiscriminate spread of fiction to its readers, this chapter considers how these two ways of thinking about fiction’s function tie narrative style to the decade’s radical political debates.