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.
Acknowledgements PART ONE Narrative Order Samuel Johnson and the Order of Time PART TWO Edmund Burke: Middles versus Beginnings and End Watkin Tench and the Cold Track of Narrative William Godwin: Stories and Families Wordsworth's Moving Accidents Crabbe's Parables Relations: Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley The Still Unravished Bride of Lammermoor Notes Bibliography Index
