Mandeville (1817) is the second of William Godwin’s historical novels, and is set during the period of the English Commonwealth (1649–60). Readers at the time of its publication made comparisons with the ‘German school’ of novel writing, linking it with both the gothic and sturm-und-drang fictional modes. Modern critics have recognised it as a work exploring psychological and cultural trauma, the aftereffects of war on the generation that came after. Godwin cited Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and Joanna Bailie’s De Monfort (1798) as major influences on the novel, and this essay will attempt to use these texts as a vector to explore the direction of Godwin’s ideas. Continue reading →
Perhaps the first question many students, and indeed scholars, of long nineteenth-century Britain will ask upon reading the title of Flame in the Mountains: Williams Pantycelyn, Ann Griffiths and the Welsh Hymn is: just how … Continue reading →
Treading new paths over familiar ground, Talissa J. Ford’s Radical Romantics: Prophets, Pirates and the Space Beyond Nation explores the notion of nation through those who bend and break its ‘literal or figurative boundaries’ (p. 2). … Continue reading →
In her excellent essay on the dramatist Joanna Baillie, Louise Duckling quotes Lord Byron reflecting on Voltaire’s assertion that ‘“the composition of a tragedy required testicles”—If this be true’, Byron writes, ‘Lord knows what Joanna … Continue reading →
