Fictions of reality in the age of Hume and Johnson

Abstract

During the second half of the 18th century the most powerful literary work in Britain was nonfictional - philosophy, history, biography, and political controversy, Leo Damrosch argues that this tendency is no accident; at the beginning of the modern age, writers were consciously aware of the role of cultural fictions, and they sought to ground those fictions in a world beyond the text. Their political conservatism was a considered response to a world in which meaning was inseparable from consensus, and in which consensus was increasingly under attack. Damrosch finds affinities between writers who are usually described as antagonists. The first chapter places Hume and Johnson in dialogue, showing that their responses to the challenge of their age have deep similarities and subsequent chapters explore the interrelationship of the fictional and the real in a wide range of works by Boswell, Gibbon, White, Burke, and Godwin. Damrosch argues throughout that different temperaments respond differently to the pressures of the age. In its combination of literary, philosophical, and cultural criticism, this book will appeal to scholars in many fields as well as to non-academic readers interested in intellectual history.

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