Fantasies of Ambivalence: Romance and Historical Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

“Fantasies of Ambivalence: Romance and Historical Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Britain” examines the relationship between romance and partisan history-writing in Britain following the English Civil War and 1688 Revolution. Considering works of fiction by Delarivier Manley, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Horace Walpole, Ann Yearsley, and Walter Scott alongside works of traditional historical and political discourse, this dissertation argues that that historical romance maintained a continuously evolving literary presence in eighteenth-century Britain. During this period, the quintessentially romantic formal characteristics of anachrony, structural repetition, function-driven narrative, and complex allegory reappeared across multiple genres, including the keyed secret history and the Gothic novel, each of which may be considered a form of “historical romance” and each of which played their own roles in meditating British consciousness of the relationship between past and present. The formal characteristics of historical romance made it exceptionally able to register conflicting viewpoints, sentiments, or beliefs simultaneously without subordinating one to the other or otherwise reconciling them. In many cases, writers deployed this capability to act as the handmaidens of political ideology, using romance forms to conceal the contradictions or fissures in partisan visions of the British past. Yet, in certain cases, writers of historical romance also acted as challengers to ideology, exposing those contradictions and fissures. Increasingly, as the hyper-partisanship of the early eighteenth century yielded to the doubts of the mid-century and the disenchantment of the 1790s, historical romance served more as a mechanism of ideological critique than of partisan reinforcement. I track this shift by observing the transition from the literary predominance of the keyed secret history in the early eighteenth century to that of the palimpsestic neo-Gothic romance in later decades, a transition which saw the replacement of romance’s long-standing historiography of fantasy by a historiography of fantasy echoes.