Victorian narratives of the recent past : memory, history, fiction /
This book explains why narrating the recent past is always challenging, and shows how it was particularly fraught in the nineteenth century. The legacy of Romantic historicism, the professionalization of the historical discipline, and even the growth of social history, all heightened the stakes. Thi...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Palgrave Macmillan,
[2017]
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| Series: | Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture.
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Table of Contents:
- Introduction: who's afraid of contemporary history?
- Part I. A contemporary framework
- History as a temporal continuum: from Walter Scott to William Stubbs
- The social continuum: history without heroes from William Hazlitt to J. R. Seeley
- Gendered genres: professional history versus antiquarianism and the historical novel
- Part II. Victorian historians and the recent past: Harriet Martineau, J. R. Green, Spencer Walpole, and Charlotte M. Yonge
- Immersion and overview in histories without hindsight
- Power to the people? Proto-social history
- Part III. Victorian novelists and the recent past: Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot
- In defence of living memory: "sixty years since" or less
- "Unhistoric" individuals in the provincial novel
- Conclusions.