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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... fiction. Indeed, at an early stage I too was inclined to see the problem in this light. As my knowledge of the material grew, however, I came to realize that the social and sentimental questions that I saw as transforming the reading of ...
... fiction would be to fall into the problem I saw in many studies of the novel, which remap the literary system around one favored genre, to which they assign an experimental energy denied to all other forms of writing—most notably ...
... fiction naturally attracts. The point, rather, is to emulate this success by creating a denser and more sophisticated history of the neglected genres of “nonfiction.” If we could explore the many ages and varieties of historical writing ...
... fictions and romances of monkish ignorance and credulous superstition. . . . Latter [sic] histori- ans have not contented themselves with a sterile narrative of facts, but, by investigating the causes of the facts they relate, and ...
... “expressive” literary views of romantic criticism shifted the grounds on which history and fiction competed, in my essay, “Scott, Macaulay, and the Literary Challenge to Historiography,” Journal of SCENES OF SOCIAL LIFE 23.
Other editions - View all
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 |