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14 - Post-Revolutionary Novels

from Part III - After the Revolution: The Novel in the Long Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2021

By
Katherine Astbury
Edited by
Adam Watt
Adam Watt
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

This chapter re-examines the idea that the development of the novel was hampered by politics during the French Revolution and that literary production was mediocre and ill-suited to the new social order. It studies the shift in the literary scene after the storming of the Bastille and the role of writers in regenerating the nation before considering the propagandistic works of republican writers during the radical phase of the Revolution. The death of the radical leader Robespierre in 1794 resulted in a clear shift in literary activity and prompted a move towards setting novels during the early 1790s which denounce the excesses of Robespierre and his supporters. The chapter places particular emphasis on the under-researched Directory period (1795-99) which is marked by a vogue for the Gothic and for fiction by and about émigrés.

Keywords

Revolutionsentimental novelpastoralGothicemigrationpropagandahistorical fictionTerror
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Novel in French , pp. 257 - 274
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Astbury, Katherine, Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution (Oxford: Legenda, 2012)Google Scholar
Cook, Malcolm, ‘Politics in the Fiction of the French Revolution, 1789–1794’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 201 (1982), 233–340Google Scholar
Darlow, Mark (ed.), Revolutionary Culture: Continuity and Change (Nottingham French Studies, 45.1) (2006)Google Scholar
Denby, David J., Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aude, Déruelle and Rollin, Jean-Marie (eds.), Les Romans de la révolution 1790–1912 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014)Google Scholar
Didier, Béatrice, La Littérature de la Révolution française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988)Google Scholar
Douthwaite, Julia V., The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Daniel, French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005)Google Scholar
Hesse, Carla, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunt, Lynn, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar
Jaquier, Claire, Lotterie, Florence and Seth, Catriona (eds.), Destins romanesques de l’émigration (Paris: Desjonquères, 2007)Google Scholar
Krief, Huguette (ed.), Vivre libre ou mourir: anthologie des romancières de la période révolutionnaire, 1789–1800 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2005)Google Scholar
Web source: https://whatyoumustknowaboutthefrenchrevolutionli.wordpress.com/ (accessed July 2019)Google Scholar

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