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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... history; on the other we find those for whom historical writing is at bottom an act of imagination to be understood ... philosophical ideas, as well as those who approach the subject in light of the history of scholarship.1 Historians of ...
... philosophers and literary critics, but historians themselves have too often failed to subject their own assumptions about history to the modesty of historical reflection. In short, I have attempted to respond to two kinds of ...
... history to many of the salient intellectual enterprises of the Enlightenment ... philosophical and literary interests of the British Enlightenment. Its ... History did not abandon its traditional concern with public life, but it ...
... Philosophical history came into its own with the appearance of Hume,s History of England, the first two volumes of which were published in 1754 and 1757, and with Voltaire,s Essai sur les moeurs (1756), while for conjectural history ...
... philosophical ideas have read historical texts in terms of their doctrinal ... history of historical writing.8 In practice, White's analyses prove to have ... history, arguing that there is no essential difference between the works of the ...
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 |