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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... literatures and institutions that intellectual history in the ordinary sense was rendered unnecessary. As an ... Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990); and Robert Canary and Henry Kozicki, eds., The Writing of History (Madison ...
... literatures of social description. For this reason, it may be useful to say something about the relationship between my historiographical concerns and the very rich literature on the “rise of the novel.”4 Students of the novel will ...
... literatures. (A good way, I think, to gauge the problems we create by reading later literary hierarchies into an ... literature to works of “imagination” has divided history and other “nonfictional” genres from a redefined literary ...
... literature are certainly as much pragmatic as intellectual, and I can only say that I hope the picture as I have sketched it will be complemented by others more cosmopolitan in scope. By the same token, I have chosen to focus primarily ...
... literatures, however, was the extent to which this reconceptualization complicated the central conventions of the ... literature of social description, in short, was the formal problem of narrative so significant to the continued iden ...
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 |