| Fabricating History: English Writers on the French Revolution Subjects: English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; France -- History -- Revolution 1789–1799 -- Literature and the revolution; Napoleonic Wars 1800–1814 -- Literature and the wars; France in literature; Revolutions in literature; War in litera; Barton Friedman demonstrates the ways in which English men of letters in the nineteenth century attempted to grasp the dynamics of history and to fashion order, however fragile, out of its apparent chaos. The authors he discusses--Blake, Scott, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Dickens, and Hardy--found in the French Revolution an event more compelling as a paradigm of history than their own "Glorious Revolution." To them the French Revolution seemed universally significant--a microcosm, in short. For these writers maintaining the distinction between "history" and "fiction" was less important than making sense of epochal historical events in symbolic terms. Their works on the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars occupy the boundary between history and fiction, and Fabricating History advances the current lively discussion of that boundary. |