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 27
... Romantic historians, which amounts to much the same thing. But equally, Henry,s History points to the ways in which consideration of narrative form opens out onto larger issues that are social and historical. For Robert Henry ...
... Romantic tradition reversed this aspect of their classical inheritance and built a newly heroic image of the historian as a genius capable of meeting and transcending a contradiction that was now treated as self-evident.28 The ...
... ways in which the “expressive” literary views of romantic criticism shifted the grounds on which history and fiction competed, in my essay, “Scott, Macaulay, and the Literary Challenge to Historiography,” Journal of SCENES OF SOCIAL LIFE ...
You have reached your viewing limit for this book.
You have reached your viewing limit for this book.
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 |