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"This volume brings new depth to the analysis of historical distance by looking at its importance in fields that extend far beyond the usual bounds of history, including psychoanalysis and the visual and performing arts. Its sources include 19th century British sculpture, musical theatre, and late 18th and 19th century fashion plates. The book offers general introductory discussions of how historical distance might best be understood in contemporary historiography, of changing ideals of distance and proximity as they have taken shape in Western thought from the Renaissance to modernity and of historical judgments and their meanings. It includes a range of essays that explore the importance of distance in relation to a number of different problems and periods, including how the use of historical distance as a framework might offer new ways of distinguishing literary fictions from histories, or a new understanding of the changing pattern of biography over the past two centuries. The range of forms and media covered by the essays in this collection greatly expands not only ways of thinking about historical distance, but the nature and meaning of history. By incorporating this wide range of different material and an equally wide range of approaches, the volume gives the discussion of historical distance a new breadth, flexibility and importance. "--
List of contents
Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction: Re-thinking Historical Distance; Mark Salber Phillips PART I: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES 1. A Short History of Distance; Peter Burke 2. Historical Distance, Historical Judgment; Ivan Gaskell 3. The Travels of Fiction: Literature, Distance, and the Representation of the Past; Jurgen Pieters PART II: BIOGRAPHIES AND PSYCHOANALYSIS 4. Biography and the Question of Historical Distance; Barbara Caine 5. Close-Ups; Adam Phillips PART III: THEATRE AND ITS DISTANCES 6. 'Time Has Rendered These Allusions Natural': Re-enacting the Saint-Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1789; Matthew Lauzon 7. Parody and Re-enactment in the Comic Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; Carolyn Williams PART IV: VISUAL STUDIES: SCULPTURE, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND FASHION 8. Sir Francis Chantrey: Sculpture, History, and Geology; M.G. Sullivan 9. Photographic Calculations: Intimate Trauma and Cool Distance in Post-war Japan; Julia Adeney Thomas 10. Fashion, Microcosm, and Romantic Historical Distance; Timothy Campbell PART V: DISTANCE AND POST-COLONIAL PERSPECTIVES 11. 'Distance' and Settler Australia's Black History; Bain Attwood 12. Closing the Distance: Time, Historicity, and Contemporary Indigenous Art; Ruth B. Phillips
