Intertextual war

the long version

On 1 November 1790 Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France precipitated a debate over the French Revolution that has continued for two centuries. Burke's Reflections provoked hundreds of replies, igniting a huge intertextual war. In this study, the author focuses on the three works that continue to be cited in criticism of Burke: Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, and James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae. These writers established the anti-Burke paradigms that continue to reverberate in Anglo-American criticism and the Revolution's historiography. To understand the significance of what they contend is being revealed is to begin to see what is being obscured - striking resemblances between themselves and the enemy they denounce. By dealing with thematic, paradoxical similarities and resemblances, the author begins to redress what has been a scholarly imbalance. Concentrating on resemblances and similarities rather than the conventional distinctions and differences, his focus is on an often obscured view that needs to be incorporated into this discussion. Analyzing how Burke's respondents are profoundly implicated in the "tradition" they rebel against, he argues that this raises fundamental questions about the discourse of difference by which critics conventionally discuss Burke and his revolutionary adversaries.