Historical Writing in Britain, 1688-1830 explores a series of debates concerning the nature and value of the past in the long eighteenth century. The essays investigate a diverse range of subjects including art history, biography, historical poetry, and novels, as well as addressing more conventional varieties of historical writing.

The British historical novel has often been defined in the terms set by Walter Scott's fiction, as a reflection on a clear break between past and present. Reinventing Liberty challenges this view by returning us to the rich range of historical novels written in the late eighteenth century. It explores how these works participated in a contentious debate concerning political change and British national identity. Ranging across well-known writers, such as William Godwin, Horace Walpole and Frances Burney, to lesser-known figures, including Cornelia Ellis Knight and Jane Porter, Reinventing...

Whilst an important and under-researched example of women's writing, scholars of Romanticism and the nineteenth century will also find much value in this challenging political satire.

How and to what extent did women writers shape and inform the aesthetics of Romanticism? Were undervalued genres such as the romance, gothic fiction, the tale, and the sentimental and philosophical novel part of a revolution leading to newer, more democratic models of taste? Fiona Price takes up these important questions in her wide-ranging study of women's prose writing during an extended Romantic period. While she offers a re-evaluation of major women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith, Price also places emphasis on less well-known...