Review
Book Review: Rethinking British Romantic History 1770–1845, ed. Porscha Fermanis and John Regan
The English Historical Review, Vol.132(558), pp.1345-1347
10/2017
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Source: InCites
Abstract
Extract: The collection of essays brought together by Porscha Fermanis and John Regan begins with a bold epigraph taken from Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley: ‘It is not our purpose to intrude upon the province of history’. Walter Scott was indeed encroaching upon the province of history, an aspect of his fiction that won him warm applause from certain critics who celebrated his ‘manly intervention’ in the genre. Such an assertion was necessary as, until Scott wrote Waverley, the historical novel (or, rather, ‘national tale’) was an ostensibly feminine genre, written from the margins, by women who were not of the establishment. Such hybrid texts promiscuously mixed historical fact and fiction, and earned the ire of male reviewers for encroaching upon the masculine terrain of (capital H) History. The appearance of the Waverley novels was welcomed as an ‘incursion of newly awakened male energy into a fictional field enervated by female practices’ (Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels [1991], p. 79).
Details
- Title
- Book Review: Rethinking British Romantic History 1770–1845, ed. Porscha Fermanis and John Regan
- Creators
- Mary Spongberg - University of Sydney
- Publication Details
- The English Historical Review, Vol.132(558), pp.1345-1347
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Identifiers
- 991012979169102368
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2017 Oxford University Press
- Academic Unit
- Office of Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Review