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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... poetic act” by which the historian “prefigures” the historical field. The accompanying emphasis on “deep structure” shifts attention from what is most manifest in historical narratives to what is often most hidden, even from the ...
... Poet (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970). This newfound confidence is evident in proliferating celebrations of the historiographical achievements of the age: “Among the various improvements of the eighteenth century, the ad- vances in ...
... Poetry, Aristotle says, is the imitation of action, but when we undertake the biography of a poet (as dozens of eighteenth-century biographers pointed out) there is often very little in the way of “action” to recount. Nonetheless, one ...
... poetry. Only the truly great historian will be able to reconcile the analytic power of political economy with the poetry of Herodotus. Michelet's famous definition of the goals of history is equally pertinent and even more self ...
... poetry—but in the terms I have underlined they evidently had a special relevance to historical writing.30 In general, as narratives move toward a focus on the mimetic, they concen- trate on recording the concreteness of events. Given ...
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 |