"The Meaning(s) of History in the Scottish Enlightenment"
Proposed Special Session, MLA 2001
Maureen Harkin, Stanford University
Recently the rich corpus of reflections on the nature and writing of
history by eighteenth-century Scottish authors has begun to be explored
in important new works by Mary Poovey (_A History of the Modern
Fact_), James Chandler (_England in 1819_), Mark Salber Phillips
(_Society and Sentiment_) and others. As Mark Salber Phillips points
out, in
the eighteenth century history is not just one genre among others but in
effect _the_ prestigious and dominant category of narrative writing,
as well as a basic mode of apprehension. This panel aims to
present some of the important new work being done on this topic,
as well as to direct attention to the need for further enquiry.
The particularly acute historical sensibility of Scottish intellectuals
of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is an important and
still under-recognized force in shaping the literary-intellectual
climate
of Scotland and Britain in the period. The peculiar double status of
Scotland at this time--both "primitive" outpost and part of a
modernizing Britain--produced an extensive body of influential
meditations on the nature of history, modernity, and the primitive
across
a variety of genres.
This panel seeks to bring together work on, for example, Hume's model of
history writing, the stadial thesis of the Scottish Historical School
developed by James Millar, Adam Smith, and Lord Kames, Dugald Stewart's
comments on the invention of a new kind of "conjectural history" in the
work of Smith, the historical fiction of Walter Scott, and the questions
of Scottish identity in relation to rapid modernization (especially
after
1745) raised in the work of Henry Mackenzie, James Boswell and visitors
like Samuel Johnson. The span includes historical texts, fiction,
poetry,
philosophy or journalism from the 1740s up to the 1820s.
I am especially interested in work that analyzes concepts of historical
advance or decay, the nature of historical narrative (especially as it
is
opposed to fictional narrative), primitivism, nostalgia for a feudal
past, the nature and problems of modernity, and critiques of
commercialism.
Please send 1-page abstracts by March 15th to Maureen Harkin. (E-mail
submission preferred) [log in to unmask]
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