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Countering the Counter-Factual: Joanne Baillie’s Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821) and the Paratexts of History
Author(s)
Date Issued
2012-04-03
Date Available
2020-07-10T12:46:02Z
Abstract
This essay considers Joanna Baillie's intense and ongoing concern about the flexibility of distinctions between history and fiction, focusing in particular on her rejection of counterfactual narratives in Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821). It is argued that the dense scholarly apparatus of prefaces, endnotes and appendices attached to the volume represents an attempt to banish romance and contingency from the literary text, while ultimately offering an insight into the complex nature of historiographical practice by undermining the very factual stability and unity of vision that the legends seek to project. The generic, epistemological and methodological ambiguities within Metrical Legends also point to a broader tension in Romantic women's writing between promoting female values and emulating masculine discourses, which itself mirrors the Romantics wider preoccupation with the increasing division between literary and non-literary discourses at the end of the eighteenth century.
Type of Material
Journal Article
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Journal
Women's Writing
Volume
19
Issue
3
Start Page
333
End Page
350
Copyright (Published Version)
2012 Taylor & Francis
Language
English
Status of Item
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0969-9082
This item is made available under a Creative Commons License
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Owning collection
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