Historical Writing in Britain, 1688-1830 Visions of History

Historical Writing in Britain, 1688-1830 is concerned with developments in historical discourse during the long eighteenth century. The collection investigates a number of interrelated themes: the contested and unstable nature of generic boundaries surrounding historical literature; history's contribution to changing notions of national identity; and the ways that history operated as a site for the articulation of new forms of community. In order to capture the diversity of the period's understanding of history, a variety of subjects are considered including historical poetry, the historical novel, biography, and art history, as well as more conventional, 'classical' modes of historical writing. Taken together, the chapters in the volume demonstrate that eighteenth-century history shaped, and was shaped by, a series of revolutionary changes in ideas regarding historical genre, nationhood, and identity.

Ben Dew is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. His research is concerned with the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, specifically in relation to the histories of political economy and history.

Fiona Price is Reader in English Literature at the University of Chichester and author of the monograph Revolutions in Taste 1773 – 1818: Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (2009). She is editor of Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs (2007) and Sarah Green's Private History of the Court of England (2011).

Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
1. Introduction: Visions of History; Ben Dew and Fiona Price
2. Female Worthies and the Genres of Women's History; Philip Hicks
3. Reading the past: women writers and the afterlives of Lady Rachel Russell; Amy Culley
4. Constructing the 'English School': Contested Narratives of Nation in the Writing of Richard Graham and Bainbrigg Buckeridge; Caroline Good
5. An Economic Turn?: Commerce and Finance in the Historical Writing of Paul de Rapin Thoyras, William Guthrie and David Hume; Ben Dew
6. 'Caledonian plagiary': The Role and Meaning of Ireland in The Poems of Ossian; Dafydd Moore
7. Tracing a Meridian through the Map of Time: Fact, Conjecture and the Scientific Method in William Robertson's History of America; Charlotte Roberts
8. Lyricist in Britain; Mathematical Empiricist in France: Volney's Divided Legacy; Sanja Perovic
9. Making History: Social Unrest, Work and the Post-French Revolution Historical Novel; Fiona Price
10. Don Quixote and the Sentimental Reader of History in the works of William Godwin; Noelle Gallagher
11. Fictions of History, Evangelical Whiggism, and the Debate over Old Mortality in Scotland and Nova Scotia; Valerie Wallace
Bibliography
Index