Front cover image for Imperfect histories : the elusive past and the legacy of romantic historicism

Imperfect histories : the elusive past and the legacy of romantic historicism

Ann Rigney
"Imperfect Histories puts "imperfection" at the heart of a theory of historical representation. Ann Rigney shows how historical writing involves dealing with intractable subjects that resist our efforts to know and to shape them. Those who write history, she says, engage in an ongoing struggle to match up what they find relevant in the past with the information and interpretive models at their disposal. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of historical practice. This dissatisfaction is especially evident in the various attempts made over the last two centuries to write an "alternative" history of everyday experience."
Print Book, English, 2001
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2001
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xii, 209 pages ; 24 cm
9780801438615, 0801438616
45284574
Acknowledgmentsxi
Introduction1(12)
Hybridity: The Case of Sir Walter Scott
13(46)
Representability: Cultural History and the Fear of Long Books
59(40)
Sublimity: Thomas Carlyle and the Aesthetics of Historical Ignorance
99(22)
Literature and the Longing for History
121(22)
Appendix143(2)
Notes145(38)
Bibliography183(22)
Index205
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