Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-Century Britain - Hardcover

"... overall the book offers 18th-century specialists and historians of the novel much to ponder." -- CHOICE "The arrangement of the volume is skillful and balanced. The approach combines particularity and generality, theorization with close attention to a text, and is one of selective instantiation... This is a properly ambitious, well-planned, and potentially important book." -- Philip Smallwood "Literary Historicity is an ambitious study that offers stunningly original treatments of the changing understandings of consciousness and representation in eighteenth-century Britain. Its general historical and theoretical contributions have implications that should resonate far beyond its titular chronological and geographical loci." -- Martine Watson Brownley * Emory University * "This intelligent brief study follows its genuinely original concerns into the densest and least expected contexts of comparison and emerges with an ingenious critical perspective. Its central interest in consciousness as a formative notion of historical selfhood places the study in potential dialogue with contemporary useful discussions of consciousness and cognition." -- Timothy Erwin * Scriblerian * "Ruth Mack's Literary Historicity is a must-read for those engaged in conversations about the boundaries of eighteenth-century history and literature. Tackling the knotty relations among representation, experience, and form, Mack deftly responds to and moves beyond poststructuralist and constructivist approaches. In her engaging readings of works by Fielding, Gibbon, Johnson, Lennox, Walpole, and others, she argues convincingly that eighteenth-century literary texts, broadly defined, are the most fruitful places to look to chart innovations in Enlightenment historiography. This provocative book offers a compelling call-to literary critics and historians alike-to shift the terrain on which we investigate the histories of history." -- Devoney Looser * University of Missouri-Columbia *

Literary Historicity explores how eighteenth-century British writers considered the past as an aspect of experience.