Literary Historicity : Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-Century Britain / Ruth Mack.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mack, Ruth, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (240 p.)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Literary Historicity explores how eighteenth-century British writers considered the past as an aspect of experience. Mack moves between close examinations of literature, historiography, and recent philosophical writing on history, offering a new view of eighteenth-century philosophies of history in Britain. Such philosophies, she argues, could be important literarily without being focused, as has been assumed, on questions of fact and fiction. Eighteenth-century writers—like many twentieth-century philosophers—often used literary form not in order to exhibit a work's fictional status but in order to consider what the relation between the past and present might be. Literary Historicity portrays a British Enlightenment that both embraces the possibility of historical experience and interrogates the terms for such experience, one deeply engaged with historical consciousness not as an inevitability of the modern world, but as something to be understood within it.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Reading and Experiencing the Past

1. Johnson and Historical Authorship

2. Fielding and Historical Character

3. Lennox and Historical Consciousness

4. Walpole, Sterne, and Historical Objects

5. Warburton, Gibbon, and Historical Context

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

1-5036-2717-9

OCLC:

1294423499