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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... sense was rendered unnecessary. As an intellectual historian, I begin with a sense that my subject should include the full range of historical writing, noncanonical as well as canonical, and a commitment to understanding all of this in ...
... sense of earlier traditions and flatters the professionalism of our own times with a false sense of its own distinctive accomplishments.3 Not only philosophers and literary critics, but historians themselves have too often failed to ...
... sense, political narrative retained its priority. But in this enlarged context, there was an inevitable displacement of the older narrative within the broadly drawn horizons of a new history that took society, not politics, as its ...
... sense of this invitation and responded with her own characteristic spirit. “I am now laying in a stock of intelligence to pour out on you as my share of Conversation,” she told a friend, announcing that she was now reading Henry's ...
... sense of having successfully faced a distinctive set of chal- lenges operated not only to stimulate innovation but also to confer a sense of concrete and indisputable progress. Nothing else, I believe, can so fully explain that sense 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 |