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'A field-changing book. Price brings an encyclopedic knowledge, informed eye, and nuanced understanding to the early British novel. Questioning critical categories then and now, she energizes period debates about the novel's inventiveness, politics and generic stability. Price's reach is extensive - women feature prominently. Her analysis is incisive, her conclusions challenging.'
Caroline McCracken-Flesher, University of Wyoming
'Reinventing Liberty demonstrates at every turn a wide and deep knowledge of the historical novel. Refusing to position Waverley as historical fiction's origin or telos, the book revises our sense of Scott's relationship to his innovative predecessors. Their historical novels have rarely been given their due or the careful attention that Price rightly and admirably provides in this groundbreaking book.'
Devoney Looser, Arizona State University
Redefines the British historical novel as a key site in the construction of British national identity
The British historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott's fiction, as a reflection on a clear break between past and present. Reinventing Liberty challenges this view by returning us to the rich range of historical novels written in the late eighteenth century. It explores how these works participated in a contentious debate concerning political change and British national identity. Ranging across well-known writers, such as William Godwin, Horace Walpole and Frances Burney, to lesser-known figures, including Cornelia Ellis Knight and Jane Porter, Reinventing Liberty reveals how history becomes a site to rethink Britain as a 'land of liberty' and positions Scott in relation to this tradition.
Fiona Price is Professor of English Literature at the University of Chichester. She has published extensively on historical fiction, the Romantic novel and women's writing. Her latest publications include Revolutions in Taste: 1773-1818: Women Writers, the Aesthetics of Romanticism (2009) and Historical Writing in Britain, co-edited with Ben Dew (2014).
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List of contents
Introduction; 1. Ancient Liberties; 2. The Labours of History; 3. Uneasy Alliances: Liberty and the Nation; 4. Conserving Histories: Chivalry, Science and Liberty; 5. The End of History? Scott, his Precursors and the Violent Past; Conclusion; Bibliography.
About the author
Fiona Price is the author of
Revolutions in Taste: 1773-1818: Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (2009), co-editor with Ben Dew of
Historical Writing in Britain 1688-1830: Visions of History (Palgrave, 2014) and editor of two historical novels,
Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs (1810; 2007) and Sarah Green's Private History of the Court of England (1808; 2011). She has published extensively on historical fiction, the Romantic novel, and women's writing.
