British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830

In British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, Miranda Burgess examines what Romantic-period writers called "romance." Reading a broad range of fictional and nonfictional works published between 1740 and 1830, Burgess places authors such as Richardson, Scott, Austen and Wollstonecraft in a new economic, social, and cultural context. She argues that the romance held a key role in remaking the national order of a Britain dependent on ideologies of human nature for justification of its social, economic, and political systems.