Abstract
It is now widely accepted that both Godwin’s treatise, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), and his major work of narrative fiction, Things as They Are; or, Caleb Williams (1794), are ‘designed to achieve change and also designed to refute the case for the status quo familiarized, above all, by Burke’.1 Nevertheless, the two books must be designed to fulfil this objective in different ways, if only because the design — the form — of a novel and a treatise are different.
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Notes
Marilyn Butler, ‘Godwin, Burke and Caleb Williams’, Essays in Criticism, xxxii (July 1982), pp. 237–57, p. 242.
Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976;
Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993;
Jon Klancher, ‘Godwin and the Genre Reformers: On Necessity and Contingency in Romantic Narrative Theory’, in Romanticism, History and the Possibilities of Genre: Reforming Literature, 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 21–38.
Quoted by Raymond Williams in his entry on ‘family’ in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London: Fontana/Croom Helm, 1976, revised edn, 1983, pp. 130–4.
Naomi Tadmor, ‘The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 151, May 1996, pp. 111–40 (120);
Anna Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 7.
see Gavin Edwards, ‘Narrative, Rites of Passage and the Early Modern Life-Cycle’, Trivium, 23, 1988, pp. 115–26.
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© 2006 Gavin Edwards
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Edwards, G. (2006). William Godwin: Stories and Families. In: Narrative Order, 1789–1819. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502246_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502246_5
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