Alternate Histories And Nineteenth-century Literature: Untimely Meditations In Britain, France, And America (palgrave Studies In Nineteenth-century Writing And Culture)
by Ben Carver /
2017 / English / PDF
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This book provides the first thematic survey and analysis of
nineteenth-century writing that imagined outcomes that history
might have produced. Narratives of possible worlds and
scenarios―referred to here as “alternate histories”―proliferated
during the nineteenth century and clustered around pressing
themes and emergent disciplines of knowledge. This study examines
accounts of undefeated Napoleons after Waterloo, alternative
genealogies of western civilization from antiquity to the
(nineteenth-century) present day, the imagination of variant
histories on other worlds, lost-world fictions that “discovered”
improved relations between men and women, and the use of
alternate history in America to reconceive the relationship
between the New World and the Old. The “untimely” imagination of
other histories interrogated the impact of new techniques of
knowledge on the nature of history itself. This book sheds light
on the history of speculative thought, and the relationship
between literature and the history of ideas in the nineteenth
century.
This book provides the first thematic survey and analysis of
nineteenth-century writing that imagined outcomes that history
might have produced. Narratives of possible worlds and
scenarios―referred to here as “alternate histories”―proliferated
during the nineteenth century and clustered around pressing
themes and emergent disciplines of knowledge. This study examines
accounts of undefeated Napoleons after Waterloo, alternative
genealogies of western civilization from antiquity to the
(nineteenth-century) present day, the imagination of variant
histories on other worlds, lost-world fictions that “discovered”
improved relations between men and women, and the use of
alternate history in America to reconceive the relationship
between the New World and the Old. The “untimely” imagination of
other histories interrogated the impact of new techniques of
knowledge on the nature of history itself. This book sheds light
on the history of speculative thought, and the relationship
between literature and the history of ideas in the nineteenth
century.