Crisis in representation : Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the rewriting of the French Revolution

Resource Information

The work Crisis in representation : Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the rewriting of the French Revolution represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri-St. Louis Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Crisis in representation : Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the rewriting of the French Revolution

Title remainder

Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the rewriting of the French Revolution

Statement of responsibility

Steven Blakemore

Creator

• Blakemore, Steven

Subject

• France -- Histoire -- 1789-1799 (Révolution) -- Littérature et Révolution
• France -- Histoire -- 1789-1799 (Révolution) -- Opinion publique étrangère
• France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Foreign public opinion
• France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Historiography
• France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Literature and the revolution
• Franse Revolutie
• France -- Histoire -- 1789-1799 (Révolution) -- Historiographie
• Paine, Thomas, 1737-1809
• Paine, Thomas, 1737-1809 -- Et la Révolution française
• Williams, Helen Maria, 1762-1827
• Williams, Helen Maria, 1762-1827 -- Et la Révolution française
• Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797
• Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759-1797 -- Et la Révolution française
• Geschiedschrijving

Language

eng

Summary

• This study describes how three prominent Anglo-American writers changed their early views of the French Revolution after the Terror of 1793-94. Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Helen Maria Williams illustrate the crisis in representation confronting writers who had previously committed themselves to the Revolution of 1789. They were the principal participants in the ongoing revision of the French Revolution, not only because of their contemporary prominence, but also because they were living in revolutionary France during the Terror. The crisis in representation was, for them, intensely public and personal
• All three responded by "writing out" the crisis - in the simultaneous sense of erasure and exposure - by reconceiving the Revolution through strategies and themes of repetition. Wollstonecraft and Williams explained the Terror as a "counterrevolutionary" return to the past, and both represented it as a repetitive version of Shakespeare's Macbeth. This intertextual revision is also resonant in the works of Thomas Paine. His historical contribution to the crisis was the recreation of himself as the revolutionary writer who had literally authored the American Revolution that, in turn, had "caused" the French Revolution
• For Paine, Wollstonecraft, and Williams, the crisis in representation was actually a variety of representational crises. That they returned to the paradigms of the past to resolve the crisis signified that they were rewriting the Revolution within the textual space of the tradition they had originally opposed

Biography type

contains biographical information

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

944.04

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

DC158.8

LC item number

.B55 1997

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography