Spirits of Liberty

Presented by the English Department

Lecture by Fiona Price, University of Chichester, United Kingdom

Fiona Price is Reader in English Literature at the University of Chichester and author of the monograph Revolutions in Taste 1773 – 1818: Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Ashgate, 2009). She has written widely on historical fiction and on the aesthetics of political change. She has edited two historical novels: Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810; Broadview P, 2007) and Sarah Green’s Private History of the Court of England (1808; Pickering and Chatto, 2011.)

She is editor of a special issue of Women’s Writing entitled “Romantic Women Writers and the Fictions of History” (19.3 [2012]) and has written several chapters on the importance of history writing in the period, including a contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Romantic Women Writers entitled “‘Civilising the Grand Mass’: Femininity, History and the Nation” (CUP, 2013) and a chapter in Reading the (Re)Presented Past: Literature & Historical Consciousness, 1700 to the Present (Palgrave, 2012). Other publications in this area include “Resisting ‘The Spirit of Innovation’: Jane Porter and the Other Historical Novel” (Modern Language Review 101.3 [2006]: 638-52) and “‘Ancient Liberties’: Rewriting the Historical Novel: Thomas Leland, Horace Walpole, and Clara Reeve” (Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.1 [2011]: 19-38).

Fiona is currently working on a monograph Reinventing Liberty: The British Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott, and a Palgrave collection, co-edited with Ben Dew, Visions of History. Fiona is a founding member of the South Coast Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Research Group which aims to provide a dynamic research environment for staff and postgraduates working in the long eighteenth century.