Genre
The Wanderer is a historical novel, part of a new genre that was a response to the French Revolution. During the 1790s and early 19th century, novelists examined the past using fiction. Charlotte Turner Smith analyzed the revolution in Desmond (1792) and The Banished Man (1794) while Jane West's The Loyalists looked at the English Civil War. Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) was published the same year as The Wanderer. Although the novel is set during 1793-94, "the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre", Burney does not fill the text with references to specific historical events. Neither Louis XVI nor Marie Antoinette are mentioned in the novel, for example.
The Wanderer also draws on the conventions of Gothic fiction, specifically "mystery and concealment, spying and flight". Like Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791), the heroine of The Wanderer is unknown and in need of sympathy at the beginning of the story. Throughout the story, the heroine's name is consistently concealed and later only half-revealed.
Read more about this topic: The Wanderer (1814 Novel)
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