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. |
From inside the book
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... Modern English Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987); John Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), and The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987); Philip ...
... modern historiography” centers on continental Europe in the nineteenth century. In one version, we honor the objectivity and protoprofessionalism of Ranke's Berlin seminar, in another the philosophical depth or imaginative power of ...
... modern criticism has helped to obscure the dynamism of other contemporary literatures. (A good way, I think, to gauge the problems we create by reading later literary hierarchies into an earlier period is to imagine for a moment an ...
... Modern Brit- ain, ed. D. Kelley and D. Sacks (Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Cambridge University Press, 1997). Portions of chapter 4 appeared in earlier form as “ 'If Mrs. Mure Be Not Sorry for Poor King Charles': History, the Novel, and ...
... modern letters would be held up to standards still deeply imbued with classical ideals, including the linearity and perspicuity that Henry strained so hard to achieve. My point, then, is not that the tensions we see manifested in Henry ...
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 |