Tangible Pasts
The Novel, Material Culture, and the Making of Historical Knowledge, 1700–1830
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Publishing:12th Nov '26
£81.00
This title is due to be published on 12th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Tangible Pasts recasts our understanding of the historical imagination of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by revealing the foundational role that antiquarian practices played in the evolution of the novel—an emerging literary genre that was popular, experimental, and keenly attuned to the historicity of the past and present. The book restores to view an alternative genealogy of the historical novel by assembling a diverse group of writers not often read together—including Laurence Sterne, William Stukeley, Charlotte Lennox, William Borlase, Sarah Scott, Horace Walpole, Walter Scott, Joseph Strutt, Thomas Pownall, and Ann Radcliffe—who shared an interest in conjectural practices and concepts such as fictionality, probability, and verisimilitude that were central both to the antiquaries' speculative reconstruction of the past and to the early development of the novel. The writers featured in Tangible Pasts did not seek to exorcize, but rather took inspiration from antiquarianism's disordered, additive, conjectural, and centrifugal impulses. They contemplated their works' ability to mediate, store, and transmit the past by placing the novel in relation to the techniques of material modelling central to antiquarian conjecturing, including reconstructive visual representations, mapmaking, early forms of reenactment, and three-dimensional mock-ups. Novelists found in these antiquarian media experiments not so much a way of conjuring reality effects, but a new way to understand their genre's ability to entertain plural pasts that were still in the making.
In exploring how antiquarian speculation about fragmentary, unfinished relics deployed and refined imaginative practices that both borrowed from and contributed to the novel, Tangible Pasts brilliantly traces the innovative ways eighteenth-century writers used material artefacts to reconceptualize the relation of past to present. Focusing on the conjectural practices and concepts central both to the antiquarian's reconstruction of the past and to the evolution of the novel, Katharina Boehm offers an electrifying new account of the relationship between antiquarian practice and literary history. Tangible Pasts is essential reading for anyone interested in material culture, antiquarianism, the emergence of the novel, and the modes of historical thought that shape our understanding of Enlightenment modernity. * Lynn Festa, Distinguished Professor of English, Rutgers University *
Sophisticated, often surprising, and always delightful Tangible Pasts transforms our understanding of the eighteenth-century making of historical knowledge and the emergence of the historical novel. This is a rich and original account of the media experiments that in that period engaged novelists and antiquaries alike and which had them rethinking, both in collaboration and competition, the uses and the affordances of the printed codex. * Deidre Lynch, Harvard University *
This splendid book reveals an unsuspected range of affinities between novel writing and antiquarian practice: both sought imaginative transport by way of material models, including the book, that embodied a lived relationship to the past and encouraged conjecture. The historical novel, Boehm shows, evolved as part of a broad collaboration among male and female readers, collectors, and researchers during a century in which people came to imagine themselves as "participants in historical possibility." * Noah Heringman, Curators' Professor of English, University of Missouri *
ISBN: 9780198952435
Dimensions: 18mm x 156mm x 234mm
Weight: 578g
258 pages