Sarah Pardon studied English and Swedish Linguistics and Literature and Comparative Modern Literature at Ghent University and Literary Studies at the Catholic University of Louvain. She is currently working as a PhD-student at Ghent University. Her research project deals with the representation of the French Revolution in a wide scope of texts, including both factual and fictional accounts, that date from a decade following upon this historical event. The research question is driven by a historical and a conceptual focus. Historically speaking, it concentrates on a comparison of the representation of the French Revolution in Dutch and English texts. The conceptual focus takes its cue from a number of reflections on the concept of historical distance by the historian Mark Salber Phillips. The corpus material is not only distanced from the French Revolution geographically and culturally. What makes these texts particularly remarkab le is their way of distancing the historical experience of the French Revolution despite its chronological proximity. These texts do not want to bring the distant near (Macaulay), they want to distance the near past. In order to get a grip on the specifics of the historical value of literary texts (i.e. of how they function as products and producers of historical experience) the literary corpus will be compared to a range of contemporary periodical and journalistic texts that represent the same historical event. Furthermore, the corpus includes a vast range of literary writings (epistolary, travel and adventure novels, two plays and a fairy-tale) so that the textual construction of historical distance in literary texts can also be studied from a genological perspective.