Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Experience of HistoryRuth Mack's Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in EighteenthCentury Britain (Stanford, 2009) is original. It is the first book-length study of how eighteenth-century literary texts represent historical experience. We already have studies that address the early novel's quite deliberate affiliations with history, but the problem of historical experience has not been central in such studies. A book like Everett Zimmermann's The Boundaries of Fiction (1996) certainly engages the relationship between and fiction, but does so mainly to show how fictions reveal the epistemological limits of writing. In this regard, Zimmermann's study is still firmly attached to the poststructuralist critique of the historian's claims to truth and objectivity that was initiated, some thirty-five years ago, by Hayden White's Metahistory (1973). The debate that followed White's critique, Mack notes, has not really redrawn the boundary between fiction and history. Her book takes fresh look at this boundary by reviving the category of experience as central to how we know about the past.Mack's book suggests that our relationship to the past can never be rational: it is always fraught with emotions, with the impossible dream of entering into different life. Her study does not only align with the arguments made on behalf of experience as category of historical understanding by F. R. Ankersmit (whose Historical Representation [2001] emerges as kind of guiding light for Mack's study), but also with the recent academic interest in historical reenactments (this second alignment goes unmentioned: Jonathan Lamb's and Vanessa Agnew's edited collection, Settler and Creole Reenactment [2009] provides an introduction to reenactments). It is still unclear where the academic interest in reenactment will lead, but it is clear that it wants to reintroduce, just like Mack, the visceral in what we consider to be knowledge about the past. Mack's acceptance of unconscious or half-conscious forces, of imitative impulses, questions the demands for empiricist purity and critical distance that remain powerful in and eighteenth-century studies. It is in this way that Mack stakes her claim in the debate between fiction and truth.This is not to suggest, however, that Mack's book is in itself an attempt to bring experience back into the academic study of the past. I have just described is only the broad intellectual background of Mack's book. The foreground of Mack's book is filled by an argument that shows how eighteenthcentury writers represent different modes of experiencing the past. Mack argues that writers such as Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Horace Walpole, and Laurence Sterne are not really that interested in revealing the shortcomings of or appropriating its prestige. Rather, they explore what might be called a phenomenology of history (19). Their most insistent questions guide Mack's study: What does it mean to be historical, to exist historically? How is our experience of the past similar to or different from our experience of the present world? (19).Literary Historicity argues that eighteenth-century writers responded to crisis in writing - the decline of exemplary - and tried to tackle the freshly urgent problem of how we can experience the past when its examples no longer seem to bear on present that has been transformed by commerce and the discontinuities of several political revolutions. Mack claims that the continuity between past and present assumed by histories that weave their narratives around the deeds of exemplary heroes has lost intuitive acceptance by the time we get the first sustained reflections about how means (Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke is prominent example). The question of how we experience the past becomes pressing as result. Mack locates this shift by following fairly conventional timeline that takes the Glorious Revolution as convenient marker for the dawn of modernity. …
Read full abstract
Apr 27, 2011
Alastair Roy 
Open Access