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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... narrative structures. In short, historiographical studies of this sort operate without much attention to what Hayden White calls a “theory of the historical text,” and insofar as history is felt to possess its own distinctive practices ...
... narrative of politics—the story of the public actions of public men. The result, it is important to emphasize, was not only a need to reconcep- tualize many traditional assumptions about historical knowledge, but also a good deal of ...
... historical writing with even a small part of the loving attention that generations of critics have brought to ... narrative is a sort of literary grace added, so to speak, after the fact. Rather, Mink argued in a series of influential essays, ...
... narrative itself is as much open to a historical mode of understanding as it is to a theoreti- cal (or structural) one. Indeed, historical narrative has had a long and complex history, which, like any other great subject, calls for ...
Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 Mark Salber Phillips. Introduction “The More Permanent and Peaceful Scenes of Social Life” ROBERT HENRY'S History ... narrative arrangements, is more revealing of the tensions that shaped ...
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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 |