Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon

ISBN-13: 9780521465335 / Angielski / Twarda / 1997 / 268 str.

Karen O'Brien; Howard Erskine-Hill; John Richetti

Opis

Narratives of Enlightenment reappraises the work of five of the most important narrative historians of the eighteenth century--Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, and the historian of the American Revolution, David Ramsay--in the context of political and national debates in France, Scotland, England and America. Where previous studies have emphasized the growth of nationalism in eighteenth-century literature, Karen O'Brien reveals the development of cosmopolitan ways of thinking beyond national cultural issues.

Recenzje

'Compellingly lucid and elegant.' Sir Tony Wrigley, President of the British Academy

Spis treści

Acknowledgements and author's note; 1. Introduction: cosmopolitanism, narrative, history; 2. Voltaire's neoclassical poetics of history; 3. European contexts in Hume's History of England; 4. William Robertson to the rescue of Scottish history; 5. Robertson on the triumph of Europe and its empires; 6. Emulation and revival: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; 7. David Ramsay's sceptical history of the American Revolution; Afterword; Bibliography; Index.