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
Results 1-5 of 93
... READERS ix xix 3 31 33 60 79 3. Tensions and Accommodations: Varieties of Structure in Eighteenth-Century Narrative 81 4. History, the Novel, and the Sentimental Reader 103 LIVES, MANNERS, AND “THE HISTORY OF MAN” 129 5. Biography and ...
... readers will find a number of points of convergence. 2 For a fine overview of this approach, see Frank Ankersmit's introduction to A New Philosophy of History, ed. Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995). Some of the ...
... readers. In my view, the communicative function of genre com- bined with its historical changeability promise to make genre study an ap- proach to historiography that is both sensitive to literary structure and a guide to wider contexts ...
... readers alike. For the first time, evocation became an im- portant goal of historical narrative, and sympathetic identification came to be seen as one of the pleasures of historical reading. Scholars have generally associated the ...
... readers may well lose pa- tience with an expository method that they might not feel is required by my need to explore little-known works or to convey the textures of larger ones. In the end these are matters more of tact than of ...
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 |