Abstract
My thesis builds upon the surge of scholarship on women novelists in recent decades, and proposes an alternative view of counter-revolutionary women writers’ contribution to British literary culture during the years of the French Revolution. My study is structured around four successful female novelists whose novels obtained an impressive readership in their contemporary culture but remain a comparatively neglected area of study: Jane West, Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, and Hannah More.This thesis will show that women authors were by no means less critical of contemporary society than their male contemporaries, and achieved a full participation in the world of politics in this period. I will argue for these women writers’ literary achievement and contribution to the reshaping of British society at a politically turbulent time, and the extent to which they inspired future enquiry on the relationship between female authorship and the genre of the novel. I hope that my study will restore their share in the literary tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and enable a fuller rendition of the true story of the British novel.
| Date of Award | 2016 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Rowan Boyson (Supervisor) & Elizabeth Eger (Supervisor) |