Introduction

The essays which make up this volume are drawn from the wide range of papers delivered at a conference on ‘The French Revolution and British Culture’, organized at the University of Leicester in July 1989. The conference was conceived as a co-operative venture by the departments of English and History of Art at Leicester, and although the emphasis throughout the conference fell on cultural products and their meanings, discussion returned constantly to the great sweep of political events in France which formed the intellectual focus of the Romantic epoch in Britain.