Narrative Order, 1789-1819

GAVIN EDWARDS is a Professor of English at the University of Glamorgan, UK. He is the author of George Crabbe's Poetry on Border Land (1990), and editor of George Crabbe: Selected Poems, (1991) and Walter Tench: Letters from Revolutionary France (2001).

Linking storytelling to other forms of social action, this book argues that the experience of radical social upheaval produced a widespread scepticism about narrative as a linguistic artefact, the transmission of narrative through storytelling and the understanding of individual or collective life as a temporal sequence with a beginning and end.In the decades immediately following the French Revolution, British writers saw the narrative ordering of experience as either superficial, dangerous or impossible. Linking storytelling to other forms of social action, including the making of contracts and promises, Gavin Edwards argues that the experience of radical social upheaval produced a widespread scepticism about narrative as linguistic artefact, the transmission of narrative through storytelling and the understanding of individual or collective life as a temporal sequence with a beginning and an end.