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  1. Home
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  3. Narratives of Enlightenment
  • Cited by 100
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2009
Print publication year:
1997
Online ISBN:
9780511519079
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511519079
Subjects:
Literature, British History after 1450, History, English Literature 1700-1830, History of Ideas and Intellectual History
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought (34)
Information

Book description

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.

Awards

Winner of the 1999 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize

Reviews

‘Compellingly lucid and elegant.’

Sir Tony Wrigley - President of the British Academy

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