The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law is a study of the radical novel's critique of the evolving social contract in the 1790s. Focusing on selected novels by Thomas Holcroft, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Robert Bage, William Godwin, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Maria Edgeworth, this book examines narrative investigations into the intricate relationships between theories of rights, the requirements of proprietorship in civil society, and the construction of the legal subject.

The first major collection of essays to provide a comprehensive examination of the British literature of the French Revolution.

Tracing the rise of conduct literature and the didactic novel over the course of the eighteenth century, this book explores how British women used the didactic novel genre to engage in political debate during and immediately after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Although didactic novels were frequently conventional in structure, they provided a venue for women to uphold, to undermine, to interrogate, but most importantly, to write about acceptable social codes and values. The essays discuss the multifaceted ways in which didacticism and women’s writing were connected and demonstrate the reforming potential of this feminine and ostensibly constricting genre. Focusing on works by novelists from Jane West to Susan Ferrier, the collection argues that didactic novels within these decades were particularly feminine; that they were among the few acceptable ways by which women could participate in public political debate; and that they often blurred political and ideological boundaries. The first part addresses both conservative and radical texts of the 1790s to show their shared focus on institutional reform and indebtedness to Mary Wollstonecraft, despite their large ideological range. In the second part, the ideas of Hannah More influence the ways authors after the French revolution often linked the didactic with domestic improvement and national unity. The essays demonstrate the means by which the didactic genre works as a corrective not just on a personal and individual level, but at the political level through its focus on issues such as inheritance, slavery, the roles of women and children, the limits of the novel, and English and Scottish nationalism. This book offers a comprehensive and wide-ranging picture of how women with various ideological and educational foundations were involved in British political discourse during a time of radical partisanship and social change.

Conversion and Reform analyzes the work of those British reformists writing in the 1790s who reshaped the conventions of fiction to reposition the novel as a progressive political tool. Includes new readings of key figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Holcroft.

A lively and far-ranging interest in place, space, and situation characterizes the work of Romantic-era British author Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). Featuring ten original essays, an introduction and an epilogue, this volume offers new insights into Smith’s life and work by exploring two central issues: Smith’s place as a foundational writer in her period, and her contribution to the creation of “place” as a concept of social and literary importance. The contributors analyze themes such as itineracy, the natural world, and patriotism; they also explore the position of Smith’s work and authorial identity in terms of genre, aesthetics, and market dynamics. With its innovative approach to place as a material location, symbolic principle, and literary device, this volume advances our understanding of Smith’s work. Placing Charlotte Smith reveals Smith as an author who not only energizes our interest in domestic concerns, but who also shapes a global discourse constituted by changing ideas about borders, travel, national, and international identities.

Charlotte Turner Smith held a central position during the formative years of the British Romantic period. Smith's work includes eleven novels and two fictional adaptations from the French. This edition reveals the extent to which Smith's work in this form constitutes as significant an achievement as her poetry.

Thomas Holcroft was a central figure of the 1790s, whose texts played an important role in the transition toward Romanticism. In this, the first essay collection devoted to his life and work, the contributors reassess Holcroft's contributions to a remarkable range of literary genres-drama, poetry, fiction, autobiography, political philosophy-and to the project of revolutionary reform in the late eighteenth century. The self-educated son of a cobbler, Holcroft transformed himself into a popular playwright, influential reformist novelist, and controversial political radical. But his work is not important merely because he himself was a remarkable character, but rather because he was a hinge figure between laboring Britons and the dissenting intelligentsia, between Enlightenment traditions and developing 'Romantic' concerns, and between the world of self-made hack writers and that of established critics. Enhanced by an updated and corrected chronology of Holcroft's life and work, key images, and a full bibliography of published scholarship, this volume makes way for more concerted and focused scholarship and teaching on Holcroft. Taken together, the essays in this collection situate Holcroft's self-fashioning as a member of London's literati, his central role among the London radical reformers and intelligentsia, and his theatrical innovations within ongoing explorations of the late eighteenth-century public sphere of letters and debate.

The Age of Reform – the hundred years from 1820 to 1920 - has become synonymous with innovation and change but this period was also in many ways a deeply conservative and cautious one. With reform came reaction and revolution and this was as true of the law as it was of literature, art and technology. The age of Great Exhibitions and Great Reform Acts was also the age of newly systemized police forces, courts and prisons. A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Reform presents an overview of the period with a focus on human stories located in the crush between legal formality and social reform: the newly uniformed police, criminal mugshots, judge and jury, the shame of child labor, and the need for neighborliness in the crowded urban and increasingly industrial landscapes of Europe and the United States. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Law in the Age of Reform presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of justice, constitution, codes, agreements, arguments, property and possession, wrongs, and the legal profession.

Set during the epic Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, Charles Brockden Brown's classic gothic novel Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 connects the outbreak with the upheavals of the revolutionary era and the murderous financial networks of Atlantic slavery. This edition of Arthur Mervyn offers selections from key contemporary texts as well as excerpts from Brown's own writings on slavery, race, and the uses of history in fiction.

On Wieland; or the Transformation: "An impressive edition . . . the most thoroughly satisfying historical and literary contextualization for the novel that I've ever encountered. Shapiro and Barnard offer a rich transatlantic artistic and ideological context that helps pull the whole novel into coherent focus. The footnotes to the novel are incredibly thorough, helpful, and interesting. . . . This Hackett edition of Wieland [is] the freshest and most topical of those now available." --Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University On Ormond; or, the Secret Witness: "Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro have produced an awesome edition of Brown's Ormond by providing copious explanatory notes and helpful documentation of the essential historical context of feminist, radical, egalitarian, and abolitionist expression. Oh, ye patriots, read it and learn!" --Peter Linebaugh, University of Toledo On Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793: "This new edition of Arthur Mervyn far exceeds any previous version of this remarkable American novel. Through exhaustive archival research, the editors have produced a reliable text constructed within the intellectual, cultural, political, and religious contexts of a society informing Brown's efforts to capture and preserve the formation of the early republic for generations of readers and cultural historians. This vital text is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of the United States." --Emory Elliott, University Professor, University of California-Riverside On Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker: "This is now the edition of choice for those of us who teach Brown's fascinating Edgar Huntly. Barnard and Shapiro explore the relevant historical, cultural, and literary backgrounds in their illuminating Introduction; they skillfully annotate the text; they provide useful and up-to-date bibliographies; and they append a number of revealing primary texts for further cultural contextualization. This edition will help to stimulate new thinking about race, empire, and sexuality in Brown's prescient novel of the American frontier." --Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland