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  • Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel, 1790–1805
  • Shawn Lisa Maurer (bio)
Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel, 1790–1805, by Miriam L. Wallace. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2009. 314 pp. $65.00.

In Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel, 1790–1805, Miriam L. Wallace examines a wide range of narrative fiction by the period’s English radical and reforming writers as “founding cultural documents in the construction of modern political subjects” (p. 17). In these works, the passionate engagement with late eighteenth-century discussions of [End Page 464] human rights, citizenship, and emerging notions of selfhood is necessarily framed by a double movement between text and audience as each author strives “to represent the development of political consciousness in fictional characters while creating a real political consciousness in the reader” (p. 14). Wallace’s highly innovative study is likewise founded in a comparable double movement between historical criticism and current critical theory. Thoroughly historicized and thoughtfully theorized, Wallace’s book demonstrates how debates over social change and individual identity as fictionalized within these novels became the driving questions of our present literary theory. Through these connections between past and present, Wallace addresses her reader’s own investment in modern critical discourses surrounding human rights, political agency, and the construction of individual subjectivity. Foremost among these is feminism, albeit a feminism informed by careful attention to masculine gendered identity.

Resisting the dualistic (and thereby static) construction of such categories as “masculine” and “feminine,” “Jacobin” and “Anti-Jacobin,” the book looks instead to the relational and the dialogic in its structure and methodology. The first two chapters bring together, to excellent effect, canonical works by William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft with lesser-known contemporary novels by Eliza Fenwick and Mary Hays; the third chapter focuses on the vexed construction of “Revolutionary Masculinities” in Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives (1792) and Robert Bage’s Hermsprong (1796). While shedding much-needed light on more peripheral works, Wallace’s pairings also function to expose significant gaps or tensions within the canonical works themselves. Thus reading Godwin’s acclaimed Things As They Are (1794) in conjunction with Fenwick’s little-known Secresy (1795) reveals not just important similarities between the two works but also the ways in which “Godwin’s focus on the larger philosophical issues misses the specific liability of the sexed and gendered female body” (p. 58). Furthermore, the contradictions in Wollstonecraft’s ground-breaking analysis of women’s rights become powerfully elucidated through dialogue with Mary Hays’s very different representations of female agency and feminine sensibility in her novel Emma Courtney (1796).

Throughout the book, the skillful interweaving of male- and female-authored texts moves away from a strict “women writers” approach to explore “how gendered subjects are made under ideological pressure,” raising crucial questions about the effects of male and female embodiment in human rights and familial relations (p. 34). In addition, Wallace addresses important developments within individual authors’ works by contrasting earlier novels by Hays and Holcroft with their later, and less idealistic, efforts. In one of the book’s most compelling chapters, Wallace uses trauma theory and the importance of “witnessing” to explore relations among sexual violence, female subjectivity, and the creation of an alternative [End Page 465] female community in Hays’s second novel, The Victim of Prejudice (1799). Although the novel’s ultimate focus on “worthy and suffering objects,” similar to that in Holcroft’s own final work, the little-known Memoirs of Bryan Perdue (1805), functions to undermine “the larger systemic critique” at which both authors aim (p. 183), Wallace’s own readings underscore the political significance of the “engaged reader”—both then and now (p. 60). Finally, challenging the rigid ideological and temporal divide between so-called Jacobin and anti-Jacobin writers, Wallace instead argues for a “continuum of fiction in the reformist tradition” (p. 248); her study concludes with thought-provoking analyses of Charles Lloyd’s Edmund Oliver (1798), Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1804), and Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)—three revisionary novels whose ambiguities reveal the “more complex and more conflicted,” as well as ongoing, nature of the 1790s debates (p. 188...

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