The Nineteenth Century: The Romantic Period: 3. Prose Fiction.

This section discusses publications from 2001 about prose fiction in the Romantic period. In their introduction to the special issue of Novel on the Romantic-era novel, Amanda Gilroy and Wil Verhoeven aver that the fiction of the Romantic period has remained one of the most underresearched or unevenly researched areas of English literature, alluding to the fact that generic studies of the novel, by and large, ignored the diversity of the fiction of this period, concentrating instead on a very small number of authors. The most significant study of Romantic prose fiction to appear in 2001, Anti-Jacobian Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution, by M. O. Grenby, takes up the question of occluded history. In a survey of almost 200 novels Grenby concludes that there were in excess of fifty novels published between 1790 and 1805 which were suffused with anti-Jacobinism, with perhaps as many again which were anti-Jacobin in parts or to a limited extent.