First published 2005
The French Revolution shattered more than political order. It broke British writers' trust in stories themselves. Gavin Edwards examines how authors between 1789 and 1819 began to view narrative as shallow, harmful, or simply impossible. Writers who once believed stories could make sense of life now questioned whether experience could be organized into meaningful sequences with clear beginnings and endings. Edwards connects this crisis of storytelling to broader social practices like making contracts and promises. When revolution upended society, it revealed narrative as just another fragile construction. The book traces how radical upheaval created deep skepticism about stories as cultural artifacts, about the act of telling them, and about understanding human life as coherent temporal progression. Edwards shows that this period produced not just political transformation but a fundamental questioning of how language shapes experience and meaning.
Genres: history, non-fiction, 19th-century, academic
Vibes: academic, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: crisis-of-storytelling, questioning-of-experience
Setting: Britain, France
Period: 1789-1819
215 pages · Hardcover · Palgrave Macmillan