| Research Abstract |
Edmund Burke exerted a great influence over English novelists in the late 1790s and early 1800s. The novels in this period were shot through with explocot references and allusions to his works such as Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Letter to a Member of the National Asembly (1791) whose influence began to be felt more strongly in the late 1780s and 1790s. Edmund Burke has been either praised or accused for his most conservative beliefs, intentions, and practices. Anti-Jacobins such as Jane West, Charles Lloyd, and Bannah More, for example, approved of Edmund Burke for his glorification of the aristocratic concepts of paternalism, loyality, chivalry and hereditary prinsiple, while Jacobins such as william Godwin, Charlotte Smith and Mary Bays attacked him for defending the ancient constitution, landed property and the patriarchal family. In order to pursue my research, I ordered the books which were out of print, for example, Eliza Fenwick's Sscrecy (1795), Isaac D 'Israeri's Vaurien (1797), George Walker's The vagabond (1799), Charles Lucus's Infernal Quixote (1800), Robert Charles Dallas's Percival (1801), Charlotte Dacre's zofloya (1806), Sydney Owenson's St Clair (1803), and E.S.Barrett's The Heroine (1813) from the British Library in the from of microfish. I illustrated first how above-mentioned novelists reacted to Edmund Burke, and then I proved that his works provided the novels in the Romantic Age, especially sentimental novels with the underlying structures, themes, situations, and catch-words. And I also suggested that novels in the late 1790s and early 1800s were characteristically linked by what might broadly be termed an intertextual relationship mediated through Edmund Burke
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