ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book is structured to test both the notion that the non-political fiction of the Revolution is responding to the events in France and the idea that trauma theory shed light on the ways in which novelists responded to the Revolution. In order to balance the need for detailed readings of texts in context with an overall view of narrative production during the 1790s, the book uses a variety of approaches. The literary journals of the Revolutionary decade have attracted less attention than those of the pre-Revolutionary period, largely because they are not considered to reflect the changing political reality. Nevertheless, the production of literary reviews does continue throughout the decade, and the choice of texts for review reveals much about the aesthetic crisis affecting the French novel at the time. The book takes as its basis the review sections of the major Ancien Regime journals.
