Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism

by Ann Rigney

Overview

Imperfect Histories puts "imperfection" at the heart of a theory of historical representation. Ann Rigney shows how historical writing involves dealing with intractable subjects that resist our efforts to know and to shape them. Those who write history, she says, engage in an ongoing struggle to match up what they find relevant in the past with the information and interpretive models at their disposal. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of historical practice. This is especially evident in the various attempts made over the last two centuries to write an "alternative" history of everyday experience. Focusing on historical writing in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, Rigney analyzes a wide range of works by Walter Scott, Jules Michelet, Augustin Thierry, and Thomas Carlyle. She shows how the attempt to write an alternative history brought historical writing into a close yet fraught relationship with literature. The result is a new account of that relationship as it took shape in the romantic period and as it continues to influence contemporary practices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801438615
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	06/05/2001
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ann Rigney is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution and coeditor of Historians and Social Values.

What People are Saying About This

Hans Kellner

Imperfect Histories offers the best discussion to date of the relation of history and literature. It is also a splended book on the Romantic sense of the past and its powerful affinities to current concerns. With profound scholarship and enviable style, Ann Rigney has addressed the crucial issues of contemporary historical thought. This book will be an invaluable contribution to the field.
—(Hans Kellner, University of Texas, Arlington)

Editorial Reviews

Rigney's principle of selection is novel, and conscientiously pursued; the questions is excludes are also questions it has made newly visible.

European Romantic Review

As a study of a kind of cultural history focused on the 'experience' of the past —and 'experience' is a recurrent term here—Rigney's book is a work of subtle analysis and broad awareness.

American Historical Review

On the whole, Rigney's is an inciting book, stronger on the historical than on the theoretical side, but rich in knowledge and information, useful in the range of topics it approaches, and generally judicious in its ideas.

J. Modern Language Quarterly

Rigney opens this fascinating, persuasive study by defining the features of history writing as 'compromise, failure, provisionality, and dissatisfaction.'... Rigney's dense and illuminating footnotes and her extensive bibliography testify to the research she undertook in literary and historical theory and in contemporaneous and contemporary criticism.

Choice

"Imperfect Histories offers the best discussion to date of the relation of history and literature. It is also a splended book on the Romantic sense of the past and its powerful affinities to current concerns. With profound scholarship and enviable style, Ann Rigney has addressed the crucial issues of contemporary historical thought. This book will be an invaluable contribution to the field."

Hans Kellner

"Rigney opens this fascinating, persuasive study by defining the features of history writing as 'compromise, failure, provisionality, and dissatisfaction.'. . . Rigney's dense and illuminating footnotes and her extensive bibliography testify to the research she undertook in literary and historical theory and in contemporaneous and contemporary criticism."—Choice, February 2002,Vol. 39, No. 6

"Rigney's principle of selection is novel, and conscientiously pursued; the questions is excludes are also questions it has made newly visible."—Ted Underwood, Colby College, European Romantic Review, 14:3, Sept. 2003.

"On the whole, Rigney's is an inciting book, stronger on the historical than on the theoretical side, but rich in knowledge and information, useful in the range of topics it approaches, and generally judicious in its ideas."—Virgil Nemoianu, Catholic University of America, Modern Language Quarterly 64:3, September 2003

"As a study of a kind of cultural history focused on the 'experience' of the past —and 'experience' is a recurrent term here—Rigney's book is a work of subtle analysis and broad awareness."—Lionel Gossman, Princeton University, American Historical Review, April 2003

"Imperfect Histories offers the best discussion to date of the relation of history and literature. It is also a splended book on the Romantic sense of the past and its powerful affinities to current concerns. With profound scholarship and enviable style, Ann Rigney has addressed the crucial issues of contemporary historical thought. This book will be an invaluable contribution to the field."—Hans Kellner, University of Texas, Arlington

From the Publisher