The Social Circulation of the Past English Historical Culture 1500-1730

by Woolf, Daniel

• ISBN13: 9780199257782
• ISBN10: 0199257787
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-06-12
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Woolf details here the ways in which English men and women first became seriously aware of and interested in their own and the world's past. Previous works have focused exclusively on the writings of a small minority of historians, yet, through using a variety of manuscript and printed sources, this study examines the wider 'historical culture' within which historical and antiquarian studies could emerge.

Table of Contents

A Note on Conventions	xiii
List of Figures	xiv
List of Abbreviations	xvi
Introduction	1	(18)
Part I. The Past and the Present
1. Consciousness of Change	19	(25)
2. Old and New	44	(29)
Part II. The Ancestral Past
3. The Cultivation of Heredity	73	(26)
4. The Genealogical Imagination	99	(42)
Part III. The Tangible Past
5. Varieties of Antiquarianism	141	(42)
6. Seeing the Past	183	(38)
7. The Archaeological Economy	221	(38)
Part IV. The Past Remembered
8. Ways of Remembering	259	(133)
9. Popular Beliefs about the Past 300
10. Oral Tradition 352
Conclusion	392	(9)
Index	401
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User's Manual for Prometheus Revisited: Enlarging the Globalization Debate	xi
Preface: The Double Wall before the Future	xv
Introduction: The Other Prometheus	I
Shelley's Romantic Prometheanism
The Dual Character of Promethean Modernity
Part I. The Rise and Decline of the Modern Prometheus	37	(82)
Chapter One. The Nationalist Face of Prometheus	39	(24)
Strategies of Liberal Capitalism
Illusions of Nationalism
Components of the Nationalist Apocalypse
Chapter Two. Socialism, the Welfare State, and the Heritage of the Left: Solutions Swallowed Up by the Problem	63	(28)
Promethean Modernity and Scientific Enlightenment
Origins of the Modern Left
From Arcadian Dreams to socialist Prometheanism
Anatomy of Defeat
Downsizing, the "End of Work," and Job Export
Neoliberalism, Social Dumping, and the Demise of Homo faber
The Twilight of the European Left
Chapter Three. Consumer Paradise: Another Failed Theodicy	91	(28)
The Consumer as Promethean Hero
Critics of Consumption
Consumer Society as Carnival
Carnivalesque Transgression or social Integration?
Oil, Growth, and Unsustainability
Part 11. Prometheus Redeemed	119	(114)
Chapter Four. Theoretical Interlude: The Question of Needs and Nature	121	(32)
Ideals of Consumption and Production
Psycho-anthropological Summary
Schachtel's Theory
Chapter Five. The Gathering Global Revolt against Corporate Capitalism	153	(49)
Preliminary Note
Movements of Resistance
The French Case
Seattle and the Emergence of a New International Opposition
The Significance of the New Social Movements
Chapter Six. Another World Is Possible	202	(31)
Prometheus or Pandora?
Sustainable Democracies in a Noncapitalist Global Economy
Problems
The Historical Foundations of Social Justice
Conclusion: Against Despair	233	(8)
Postscript: Notes from a Hijacked Planet	241	(8)
Notes	249	(46)
Bibliography	295	(12)
Index	307