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"Historical Writing in Britain, 1688-1830 is concerned with developments in historical discourse during the long eighteenth century. The collection investigates a number of interrelated themes: the contested and unstable nature of generic boundaries surrounding historical literature; history's contribution to changing notions of national identity; and the ways that history operated as a site for the articulation of new forms of community. In order to capture the diversity of the period's understanding ofhistory, a variety of subjects are considered including historical poetry, the historical novel, biography, and art history, as well as more conventional, 'classical' modes of historical writing. Taken together, the chapters in the volume demonstrate that eighteenth-century history shaped, and was shaped by, a series of revolutionary changes in ideas regarding historical genre, nationhood, and identity"--
List of contents
Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors 1. Introduction: Visions of History; Ben Dew and Fiona Price 2. Female Worthies and the Genres of Women's History; Philip Hicks 3. Reading the past: women writers and the afterlives of Lady Rachel Russell; Amy Culley 4. Constructing the 'English School': Contested Narratives of Nation in the Writing of Richard Graham and Bainbrigg Buckeridge; Caroline Good 5. An Economic Turn?: Commerce and Finance in the Historical Writing of Paul de Rapin Thoyras, William Guthrie and David Hume; Ben Dew 6. 'Caledonian plagiary': The Role and Meaning of Ireland in The Poems of Ossian ; Dafydd Moore 7. Tracing a Meridian through the Map of Time: Fact, Conjecture and the Scientific Method in William Robertson's History of America ; Charlotte Roberts 8. Lyricist in Britain; Mathematical Empiricist in France: Volney's Divided Legacy; Sanja Perovic 9. Making History: Social Unrest, Work and the Post-French Revolution Historical Novel; Fiona Price 10. Don Quixote and the Sentimental Reader of History in the works of William Godwin; Noelle Gallagher 11. Fictions of History, Evangelical Whiggism, and the Debate over Old Mortality in Scotland and Nova Scotia; Valerie Wallace Bibliography Index
About the author
Amy Culley, University of Lincoln, UK
Ben Dew, University of Portsmouth, UK
Noelle Dückmann Gallagher, University of Manchester, UK
Caroline Good, University of York, UK
Philip Hicks, Saint Mary's College, USA
Dafydd Moore, Plymouth University, UK
Sanja Perovic, King's College London, UK
Fiona Price, University of Chichester, UK
Charlotte Roberts, University College London, UK
Valerie Wallace, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
