Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820Princeton University Press, 2000 M05 1 - 369 pages A deepening interest in both social and interior experience was a distinguishing feature of the cultural life of eighteenth-century Britain, influencing writers in all genres from fiction to philosophy. Focusing on this interplay of ideas and genres, Mark Phillips explores the ways in which writers and readers of history, memoir, biography and related literatures responded to the social and sentimental concerns of a modern, commercial society. He shows that the writing of history, which once concentrated exclusively on political events, widened its horizons in ways that often paralleled better-known developments in the contemporary novel. Ultimately, Phillips proposes a new model for the study of historiographical narrative. Countering tropological readings identified with Hayden White, he offers a more historically nuanced approach that stresses questions of genre and reception as a guide to understanding how narratives were reshaped by new audiences and new social needs. |
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... experience that characterized the philosophical and literary interests of the British Enlightenment. Its central chapters explore the ways in which histori- ans, biographers, antiquarians, memorialists, literary historians, and others ...
... experiences that are best defined as social. This redrawing of boundaries on so much wider a scale certainly did not mean the elimination of political-military history, and in the most literal sense, political narrative retained its ...
... experience, incorporat- ing for the first time “the more permanent and peaceful scenes of social life.” At the same time, Henry's comments indicate that he also expected his readers' curiosity to be enlarged by a corresponding ...
... experience, literary and extraliterary. An investigation of eighteenth- century historical writing must obviously ask what subjects eighteenth-century writers and their audiences considered appropriate to historical representation, and ...
... experience was understood, and especially to the tensions that arose when new areas of experience were being annexed to the traditional competen- cies of historical narrative. For a modern historian, one of the most intriguing aspects ...
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Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 Mark Phillips No preview available - 2000 |
Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 Mark Phillips No preview available - 2000 |