Narratives of Enlightenment
Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon

A reappraisal of the work of five major narrative historians (Voltaire, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon and Ramsay) in eighteenth-century Europe and America.

Karen O'Brien (Author)

9780521619448, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 17 February 2005

268 pages
22.8 x 15 x 2 cm, 0.418 kg

'Compellingly lucid and elegant.' Sir Tony Wrigley, President of the British Academy

Narratives of Enlightenment is an interdisciplinary study of cosmopolitan approaches to the past. It reappraises the work of five of the most important narrative historians of the century - Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon and the historian of the American Revolution, David Ramsay - in the context of political and national debates in France, Scotland, England and America; and it investigates the nature and degree of their intellectual investment in the idea of a common European civilisation. Karen O'Brien combines the methodologies of literary criticism and intellectual history to explore debates about Enlightenments and the political uses of narrative. Where previous studies have emphasised the growth of nationalism in eighteenth-century literature, she reveals the development of cosmopolitan ways of thinking beyond national cultural issues.

Acknowledgements and author's note
1. Introduction: cosmopolitanism, narrative, history
2. Voltaire's neoclassical poetics of history
3. European contexts in Hume's History of England
4. William Robertson to the rescue of Scottish history
5. Robertson on the triumph of Europe and its empires
6. Emulation and revival: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
7. David Ramsay's sceptical history of the American Revolution
Afterword
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]