If the transformation from a hapless Kentucky land-jobber to a best-selling London topographer had been an unlikely change of fortune, Imlay's reinventing himself as a writer of political-sentimental fiction was at first sight an even more startling metamorphosis. Yet, in the experimental and highly politicized print culture of the 1790s, such genre crossing was by no means exceptional. Indeed, to the utmost chagrin of their conservative opponents, generic fluidity became something of a conscious discursive strategy among many radical authors. These Jacobin literati had recently discovered that aesthetic eclecticism allowed them to break up conventional moulds and modes of thinking, while it at the same time rendered their ideas less susceptible to anti-Jacobin satire and diatribe. The best-known cross-genre political writer was William Godwin. In his novel Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin notoriously blended the discourses of political thought with various modes of popular fiction to create that ‘diabolical’ fabrication which the anti-Jacobins referred as a ‘political novel’ – an oxymoronic novelty they believed was aesthetically disgusting, morally revolting and ideologically suspect. Thus, Henry James Pye in his anti-Jacobin novel The Aristocrat:

Sympathizers of the radical school hailed the generic and ideological promiscuity of the ‘political romance’ as a radical modernization of the literary discourse. William Enfield was quick to note the potential of Godwin's Caleb Williams as a tool to popularize political debate in a sympathetic review for the Jacobin Monthly Review: