Society and Sentiment - Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (Hardcover)

"An outstanding book that should attract all readers concerned with eighteenth-century intellectual life and literature. Society and Sentiment's great achievement as a whole is to bring together the period's interest in interiority--evinced, for example, in epistolary and journal fiction, in forms of generic tension and what the author calls 'reframing'--with the wide perspectives of the eighteenth-century 'philosophic' history of manners. In doing so, Phillips's book not only explores past generic instabilities in new ways but also fruitfully transgresses those we ourselves habitually bring to bear on intellectual and cultural history.... The author's nuanced, very lucid, and elegant prose is an essential instrument of the methodological as well as historiographical reappraisal his book offers."--J. W. Burrow, Balliol College, University of Oxford

""Society and Sentiment" is excellent and a pleasure to read; I cannot say how long it has been since I have read a book from which I have learned so much. It is likely to be the standard work for a long time on the history of history writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Demonstrating considerable knowledge about a great variety of texts, and a superior grasp of the principles and theories of history writing during this period, Mark Phillips offers an account both of the many ways history was then written and an analysis of why those directions took place."--J. Paul Hunter, The University of Chicago

""Society and Sentiment" is a demanding, complex, nuanced, and erudite study employing a number of texts that should appeal to scholars of both history and literature . ."--Richard A. Voeltz