he genre of political fiction seems inhabited by certain formative disjunctions.To cast political theory in narrative or dramatic form is to disclose the fictions used in the political world.But on the other hand, the presence of political themes in a literary text assumes an extra textual referent and demands that we confront the problem of how texts are related to the world.The dialectical use of the form as a mixed genre is not inevitable.But the novels of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, in contrast to those of Thomas Holcroft, for instance, cross a particularly 'romantic' threshold in the history of the genre, in that they raise the problem of the textuality of political writing. 1 We are aware that Holcroft in a novel like Hugh Trevor is constructing a textual world in which characters are invented to fill plot functions, events are related to 'themes,' and captions at the head of each chapter instruct us on how to read.But the purpose of these devices is rhetorical rather than self reflexive.In constructing an internally coherent paper world, Holcroft simply uses fiction to illustrate ideology and render it persuasive.Wollstonecraft and Godwin, however, use fiction self-consciously to make us aware of reality as a 'text' or system of misrepresentation, but also of ideology as a form of textual desire.As in much romantic litera ture, the problem of textuality proves inseparable from its ramifications for action and application, but the very notion of application is itself enmeshed in that of representation.1My sense of what makes the political novel 'romantic' is different from that of Gary Kelly, who assumes that Jacobin novelists become 'romantic' at the point where they turn from the political to the domestic: The English Jacobin Novel,
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