Literary Historicity: Structuring Historical Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Britain

FAIN: FT-54583-06

Ruth Mack
SUNY Research Foundation, Buffalo State College (Buffalo, NY 14222-1004)

My book project explores how eighteenth-century writers used literary form to conceive of history. Reading eighteenth- century texts in a variety of genres—what we now call fiction, the philosophy of history, historiography, and literary criticism—I argue that before the emergence of the philosophy of history as a formal discipline, the structures of literary texts offered writers the means to pose fundamental questions about how history is constituted as an aspect of consciousness.