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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... moral, and religious knowledge; of a vast variety of elegant and useful arts; of an almost unbounded trade, which pours the productions of every climate at our feet, to all which our forefathers were once strangers? And have we no ...
... moral philosophy, or even the novel. What did set history apart from most other literatures, however, was the extent to which this reconceptualization complicated the central conventions of the genre, shaped as they had been for so long ...
... Moral Sentiments (1st ed. 1759). And yet—crucially for the situation of historical narratives—the prestige of these works was not accompanied by a movement to jettison classical models of historical narrative. On the contrary, in many ...
... moral purpose and decorum. If, however, we change the angle of questioning by placing under discussion a text that clearly belongs to a different part of this period's historical interests, we get a very different idea of the consensus ...
... moral instruction. But the humanist conviction that this ethical content also amounted to an effective political analysis could hardly stand up when history could no longer define its terms as exclusively concerned with either males or ...
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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 |