Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism

Ann Rigney

Published by Cornell University Press 2001

Imperfect Histories

The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism

Ann Rigney

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501729683

Overview
Contents

About this book

Imperfect Histories puts "imperfection" at the heart of a theory of historical representation. Ann Rigney shows how historical writing involves dealing with intractable subjects that resist our efforts to know and to shape them. Those who write...

Author / Editor information

Ann Rigney is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution and coeditor of Historians and Social Values.

Reviews

Rigney's principle of selection is novel, and conscientiously pursued; the questions is excludes are also questions it has made newly visible.

Rigney opens this fascinating, persuasive study by defining the features of history writing as 'compromise, failure, provisionality, and dissatisfaction.'... Rigney's dense and illuminating footnotes and her extensive bibliography testify to the research she undertook in literary and historical theory and in contemporaneous and contemporary criticism.

On the whole, Rigney's is an inciting book, stronger on the historical than on the theoretical side, but rich in knowledge and information, useful in the range of topics it approaches, and generally judicious in its ideas.

Hans Kellner, University of Texas, Arlington:

Imperfect Histories offers the best discussion to date of the relation of history and literature. It is also a splended book on the Romantic sense of the past and its powerful affinities to current concerns. With profound scholarship and enviable style, Ann Rigney has addressed the crucial issues of contemporary historical thought. This book will be an invaluable contribution to the field.

As a study of a kind of cultural history focused on the 'experience' of the past —and 'experience' is a recurrent term here—Rigney's book is a work of subtle analysis and broad awareness.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Hybridity: The Case of Sir Walter Scott Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
2. Representability: Cultural History and the Fear of Long Books Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
3. Sublimity: Thomas Carlyle and the Aesthetics of Historical Ignorance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
4. Literature and the Longing for History Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
Appendix Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	143
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 224
Keywords: History

eBook

Published: September 5, 2018
ISBN: 9781501729683