Steven Blakemore, Intertextual War: Edmund Burke and the French Revolution in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and James Mackintosh. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1997. ISBN: 0-8386-3751-5. Price: US$39.50 (£30). Steven Blakemore, Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and the Rewriting of the French Revolution. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1997. ISBN: 0-8386-3714-0. Price: US$39.50 (£30).

Professor Blakemore's two books cover different aspects of the English debate on the French Revolution. Intertextual War (IW) examines the way in which Wollstonecraft, Paine and Mackintosh responded to Burke's Reflections, emphasising in particular the underlying resemblances between these works and Burke's, and their shared use of a variety of oppositional idioms and languages of the past. For all the polarisation which is associated with the debate, Blakemore wants to emphasise that the war over the Revolution was simultaneously a war over former ideological conflicts in the British polity. In the case of each writer he also identifies a sub-text within their attacks on Burke: for Wollstonecraft, the language of madness and gender; for Paine, that of drama and the radical tradition; for Mackintosh, dissident histories of the Glorious Revolution. In Crisis in Representation (CIR), Blakemore addresses the way in which Paine, Wollstonecraft and Helen Maria Williams responded to the Terror and thus to the disappointment of the hopes for the French Revolution which each had earlier expressed in their writings. Each is seen as adopting a variety of strategies to come to terms with, and also to explain away, the divergence of the Revolution from its foreseen, proper and providentially ordered course, so as to retain their initial support for the ideals it represented. Both books provide detailed readings of a core group of texts, together with some background detail on the biographies of the different authors. Both contain useful information and often interesting comment, along with a great deal of interpretative swagger. The former is to be welcomed; the latter will consign them to a readership entirely comprised of scholars of literature and English romanticism, most of whom will find the often convoluted interpretative postures done better by others. The average historian, biographer or historian of ideas is likely to fall at the first fence of Blakemore's literary rhetoric, and will miss the value which does reside in some of the detail in these books. Consider, for example, the following claim: 'In contrast, Paine, from the beginning, is the Ur-father, linguistically incarnating himself into history in 1776, producing the American Revolution, which causes the French Revolution and all the other revolutions potentially present in his original words ... Conceived in a cosmic love affair with himself, his providential existence in print means, for him, that his pure, ubiquitous presence will be forever preserved' (CIR, p. 86). There is a basic difficulty in knowing what to do with such statements—above all in knowing at what level their claims to validity are being pitched. Are they to be taken as an account of Paine's intentions or his unconscious motivation, is it a reading of his texts which references their intelligibility to a single authorial position, or an account of the place of those texts within a larger discourse? Certainly there is something to the idea that Paine's ego had a significant place in his writings, but Blakemore assumes that it is omnipresent from the beginning, and that Paine's references to himself are pure expressions of his ego, rather than often shrewdly contrived rhetorical devices designed to underline the ordinariness or common sense character of his claims and observations. Blakemore also underplays changes in Paine's position, for example, from the exceptionalist account of America's potential for preserving liberty in Common Sense, through the dawning internationalism in Lettre to the Abbé Raynal, to the call for international revolution in the second part of the Rights of Man and his Letter Addressed to the Addressers. He also ignores the extent to which Paine is voicing common …