http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/477836774

Literary history writing, 1770-1820

The conjunction of print and political revolutions between 1770 and 1820 generated a body of literary history writing whose competing narratives serve functions distinct from the consolidating and regulatory ones implicit in the genre's modern identification with canonicity. This first full-length investigation of period literary history argues that it accommodated adversarial positions as well as consensus, spoke to multiple readerships, fostered provisionality along with the search for certainty, and advanced a sense of historical locatedness. After 1820, however, its mediatory powers withered in response to the ascendancy of literary criticism, unease about the numbers and diversity of readers, and the perception of a national crisis post-Peterloo. Drawing on collective biography, memoir, antiquarianism, the novel, secret history, specimens, reviews and Institutional lectures, the study invites a fundamental rethinking of the place of literary history in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century print culture, and hence in the wider social and political movements it was both shaped by and itself helped shape.

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