Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson

By Leo Damrosch

Book Overview

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 real 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299123804
• ISBN13: 9780299123802
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.