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This thesis discusses different narrative forms of cultural memory in the historical fiction of James Hogg and Walter Scott. The introduction explains the variety of post-Enlightenment discourse on ‘history’:  certain works of popular history were subject to new appreciation while canonical histories from the eighteenth century were now criticised in periodical reviews, the leading cultural arbiters of the day. Chapter 1 focuses on the ‘ballad collection’ as a literary genre within an antiquarian matrix.  The chapter considers Scott and Hogg’s differing approaches to the textual protocols of antiquarianism when writing on ‘legendary’ history. Chapter 2 surveys the persistence of a providentialist historiography with regard to the ‘anecdote’, particularly as this narrative sub-genre featured extensively in compendia of popular history. Chapter 3 compares the ‘epic’ discourse of <i>The Tale of Old Mortality </i>with the ‘lowlier’ narrative forms canvassed in <i>The Heart of Mid-Lothian, </i>the chronicle and the family saga. Chapter 4 reads Scott and Hogg’s late works on Highland history in relation to the ‘national tale’ genre.  These works do not belong properly to either ‘folk’ or ‘novel’ discourse and they formulate most clearly an anti-progressivist notion of history. The Conclusion considers how the practice of ‘reviving’ history is determined in large part by the narrative forms and conventions in which history is written, with the additional consideration that for Scott and Hogg an aesthetic of multiformity arises from the fact that they are often writing the spoken.  Rather than ‘explain’ the past both authors use narrative structure to destabilise accepted versions of the past and keep in play the kinds of stories ‘histories’ often forgets.

In Letters to a Young Man (1801) Jane West states that “no character is so difficult to invent or support as that of a gentleman” (74). The invention of that character, determining what qualities, qualifications, and behaviour befits a gentleman, preoccupied writers and thinkers throughout the eighteenth century. This thesis traces the evolution of the masculine ideals – chivalry, republican virtue, professional merit – that informed what it meant to be a gentleman. Because gentlemanliness had implications for citizenship and political rights, Defoe, Richardson, Rousseau, and the other men who sought to define gentlemanliness increasingly connected it and citizenship to gendered virtue rather than socio-economic status. Women writers were equally concerned with the developing gentlemanly ideal and, as I will show, its political implications. This thesis brings together masculinity studies and feminist literary history, but also combines the gendered social history that often frames studies of women’s writing with the political and military history traditionally associated with men. Doody (1988) suggests that novels are influenced by three separate histories: “the life of the individual, the cultural life of the surrounding society, and the tradition of the chosen art” (9). With the feminocentric novel, however, the historical context is often circumscribed by a concern for what is ‘feminine’ and what polite lady novelists might be responding to. With the exception of women’s participation in the 1790s debates, eighteenth-century women writers have been seen as shying away from divisive political topics, including war. However, I will show that masculinity is central to re-evaluating the ways in which women writers engaged with politics through the courtship plot, because, as McCormack (2005) stresses, “politics and the family were inseparable in Georgian England” (13). Furthermore, as Russell (1995) observes, war is a cultural event that affects and alters “the textures of thought, feeling, and behaviour” (2-3). Focusing on late-eighteenth-century wars, this thesis will explore how political and military events influenced masculine ideals – particularly independence – and how these changes were negotiated in women's novels. Beginning with Frances Burney, this thesis explores the ways in which women writers offered solutions to the problem of masculinity while promoting a (proto)feminist project of equality. By rejecting chivalry and creating a model of manliness that builds on republican virtue and adopts the emerging professional ethic, women writers created heroes defined by personal merit, not accidents of birth. Burney begins this process in Evelina (1778) before problematising the lack of manly independence in Cecilia (1782). Charlotte Smith and Jane West take the problems Burney’s work exposes and offer alternatives to chivalric masculinity amidst the heightened concerns about liberty and citizenship surrounding the French revolution. Finally, Maria Edgeworth’s and Jane Austen’s Napoleonic-era novels promote professionalism as a path to gentility but also as a meritocratic alternative to landed and aristocratic social models. Though the solutions offered by these writers differ, in their opposition to chivalric masculinity they demonstrate that liberating men from the shackles of feudal dependence is essential to freeing women from patriarchal tyranny.