Romantic Pasts

Rethinks the characterisation of romantic-era written history as primarily sentimental.

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Working against the long-standing belief that romantic-era history is primarily sentimental, Romantic Pasts argues that historians from Mary Wollstonecraft to Thomas Carlyle developed a new kind of cognitive or psychological historicism that was as much concerned with motive as with affect. Recognising that feelings could be a viable object of historical study as well as a sentimental or affective mode, these historians increasingly reconfigured psycho-physiological and behavioural processes as situated and historically variable phenomena that could reflect changes in social and historical contexts. Weaving together literary criticism, the history of emotions, theories of the novel and philosophies of history, this book rethinks the paradigm of resurrection or revivification that has come to stand for romantic history, as well as that history's place within the development of modern historiography.