Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890

by Mike Goode

• ISBN13: 9780521898591
• ISBN10: 0521898595
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-05-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Mike Goode challenges received accounts of the development of modern historical thought, arguing that, in Romantic and Victorian Britain, struggles over historical authority were as much disputes over the nature of proper masculinity as they were contests over ideas and interpretations. Drawing on primary materials from such diverse fields as political economy, moral philosophy, medicine, antiquarian study, and visual satire, Goode uncovers a Romantic historical tradition one most influentially realized by historical novels which held that historians must be manly and sentimental in order to understand history properly. Goode further shows how and why, by later in the nineteenth century, the bodies and feelings but not the gender of historians came to be regarded as irrelevant to their scholarly projects. The result is an unconventional account of the rise of history, one that focuses more on novelists, political philosophers, and caricaturists than on historians.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vi
List of abbreviations	p. viii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
The feeling of history	p. 1
Edmund Burke and the erotics of Romantic historicism	p. 26
Refections in the print shop windows: Caricaturing and contesting historical sense in the Revolution controversy	p. 51
Morbid antiquaries and vital men of feeling: The gender of history in the Waverley novels	p. 87
Boredom and the excitements of history: Settling interests, nerves, and narratives in Rob Roy and Northanger Abbey	p. 119
Uneven manliness and the separate spheres of Victorian history	p. 147
Coda Living history, reenacting, and the period rush	p. 172
Notes	p. 184
Bibliography	p. 223
Index	p. 246
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