Historical Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.

Borderlands of Identity and the Aesthetics of Disjuncture: An Introduction to Scottish Gothic

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Carol Margaret Davison ◽  
Monica Germanà
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
British History ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Cultural Image ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
A Site ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

The idea of a ‘Gothic Scotland’, however, did not prove difficult to conceptualise in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth when a Romanticised portrait of Scotland furnished the nation’s most prevalent cultural image. As Ian Duncan astutely observes in regard to the politics of literary history, it was ‘Scotland’s fate to have become a Romantic object or commodity’ rather than a site of Romantic production (Duncan et al. 2004: 2). Such an objectification was ironic given the existence of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and its rationally fuelled preoccupations. That objectification was also, notably, expressed in two forms – in both the lighter and darker, more Gothic, shades of Romanticism. Despite the differences in these two manifestations, the Highlands served in both as a synecdoche for a Scotland that exemplified two primary attitudes towards ‘British’ history and rapid modernisation.

The Female Companion in a World of Men: Friendship and Concubinage in Late Eighteenth-century Marwar

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-116
Author(s):  
Priyanka Khanna
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Hierarchical Relationship ◽  
Local Evidence ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This article maps the journey of the intimate companionship between a concubine and a Rajput ruler—Gulabrai and Vijay Singh, respectively—in the late eighteenth-century kingdom of Marwar in western Rajasthan. Based on hitherto unexamined local evidence, the article explores the ways in which a bond of friendship was constituted and unfolded in the everyday spheres of interaction between the concubine and the ruler. By turning attention to their evident emotions, such as of grief, trust, loyalty and love for each other, and shared partnership in spheres of religion and administration, this article suggests that friendship co-existed and overlapped with other forms of attachments in the overtly hierarchical relationship between the concubinage partners in focus. To emphasize the distinct form of this intimate companionship, the article also takes note of other forms of friendships that were centred on the agency of the concubine in the Rajput polity, and, in this way this article advances on the limited historical knowledge on concubinage in Rajput households and opens the possibility of including cross-sex associations in the discourse on friendship in early modern South Asia.

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