Recovering the Radicals: Women Writers, Reform, and Nationalist Modes of Revolutionary Discourse

This dissertation is the culmination of long hours of sometimes futile research, enlightening conversations with faculty members and colleagues, and the all-important but often overlooked identification of those points of intersection where scholarly interest meets viable and valid topics. My desire to know more about the political history of early modem England was first nourished by Dr. John Curran in engaging class discussions and their continuance during his office hours while other students were clamoring for an audience. This interest was merged with the primary focus of this study through my introduction to the women writers of the eighteenth century by Dr. Diane Hoeveler in the summer of 2002 in a course entitled Sensibility and its Discontents. As its title would indicate, the focus of the course was on variations and divergences within critically established traditions, and the textual betrayal of all-encompassing unifiers. After a number of conversations with Dr. Hoeveler on critical approaches to representative texts, I produced a paper on Amelia Opie\u27s Adeline Mowbray, which kindled a greater interest in the political potential of these novels often dismissed by contemporaries as pulp. While very little of that paper was adapted for the current project, it began the process and perhaps serves as a testament to the organic and ever-changing nature of the dissertation...