The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500-1800 (Woodrow Wilson Center Press)

Cambridge University Press, 8/22/2002
EAN 9780521521239, ISBN10: 0521521238

Paperback, 392 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

This collection of essays by some of the most distinguished historians and literary scholars in the English-speaking world explores the overlap, interplay, and interaction between history and fiction in British imaginative and historical writing from the Tudor period to the Enlightenment. The historians discuss the questions of truth, fiction, and the contours of early modern historical culture, while the literary scholars consider some of the fictional aspects of history, and the historical aspects of fiction, in prose narratives of many sorts. The interests and inquiries of these learned, imaginative, and venturesome scholars cross at many points, casting significant light on and offering numerous insights into the problematic and interdisciplinary areas where 'history' and 'story' meet, interact, and sometimes compete. Despite the theoretical questions posed, the discussions primarily focus on concrete works, including those of Thomas More, John Foxe, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and Edward Gibbon.

1. Introduction Donald Kelley and David Harris Sacks
2. Example and truth
Deggory Wheare and the ars historica J. H. M. Salmon
3. Truth, lies and fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant historiography Patrick Collinson
4. Thomas More and the English Renaissance
history and fiction in Utopia Joseph Levine
5. Ancestral and antiquarian
Little Crosby and early modern historical culture Daniel Woolf
6. Murder in Faversham
Holinshed's impertinent history Richard Helgerson
7. Foul, his Wife, the Mayor, and Foul's Mare
anecdote in Tudor historiography Annabel Patterson
8. Thomas Hobbes' Machiavellian moments David Wooton
9. The background of Hobbes' Behemoth Fritz Levy
10. Leviathan, mythic history, and natural historiography Patricia Springborg
11. Adam Smith and the history of private life Mark Phillips
12. Protesting fiction, constructing history Paul Hunter
13. Contemplative heroes and Gibbon's historical imagination Patricia Craddock
14. Experience, truth, and natural history in early English gardening books Rebecca Bushnell.