The University of Wisconsin Press


Literature & Criticism

 

Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson
Leo Damrosch


During the second half of the eighteenth 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 (often neglected by modern scholars) was an extensively thought out response to a world in which meaning was inseparable from consensus, and in which consensus was increasingly under attack.

Damrosch finds strong affinities between writers who are usually described as antagonists. The first chapter places Hume and Johnson in dialogue, showing that their responses to the challenge of their age have deep similarities, and that their thinking points forward in significant ways to twentieth-century pragmatism. Subsequent chapters explore the interrelationship of the fictive and the “real” in a wide range of works by Boswell, Gibbon, White, Burke, and Godwin.

In its combination of literary, philosophical, and cultural criticism, this book will appeal to scholars in many fields as well as to nonacademic readers interested in intellectual history.


Leo Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University and author of numerous books, including God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius.

Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)


February 1990
LC: 89-016619 PR
262 pp. 6 x 9
ISBN-10: 0-299-12384-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-299-12384-0
Paper $16.95 s


The 1990 cloth edition of this book is out of print, but the paperback is still available.


Add this book to cart
Review cart contents
Secure checkout

Add titles to your shopping cart by clicking on the "Add this book to cart" link above. You can submit your order electronically, paying for it with your credit card.
Click here for a further explanation of the shopping cart feature

Never ordered from us before?
Read this first.

 

Home | Books | Journals | Events | Textbooks | Authors | Related | Search | Order | Contact

If you have trouble accessing any page in this web site, contact our Web manager.
E-mail: webmaster@uwpress.wisc.edu.

Updated July 2, 2010

© 2009, The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System