Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel

大不列顛帝國和歷史小說中的經紀文化探討了19世紀英美“浪漫主義者”的歷史敏感性與18世紀帝國對話者用來想像和批評自己對英國分散而脆弱的經歷概念框架之間的關係。

Salyer認為，這種文化經歷比盧卡奇在拿破崙（Napoleon）之後寫大眾歷史意識時所想到的要多，它催生了沃爾特·斯科特（Walter Scott），詹姆斯·費尼莫爾·庫珀（James Fenimore Cooper），查爾斯·布羅克登·布朗和弗雷德里克·馬里亞特等作家的浪漫主義史學方法。本書對帝國歷史問題的許多原型創新回應，追溯了18世紀帝國演說家向19世紀的“浪漫”英雄的轉變，包括《年鑑》中的埃德蒙·伯克和著名的詹姆斯案。安妮斯利，等等。

作者認為，斯科特（Scott）的韋弗利（Waverley）和庫珀（Cooper）的《先驅者》（The Pioneers）等浪漫小說將敘述18世紀帝國的政治地理環境問題轉換為歷史論述，將談判帝國權威的歷史現實置於19世紀的核心，該項目虛構了現代民族國家政治歷史機構的可能性和局限性。

Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel examines the relationship between the historical sensibilities of nineteenth-century British and American "romancers" and the conceptual frameworks that eighteenth-century imperial interlocutors used to imagine and critique their own experiences of Britain's diffused, tenuous, and often accidental authority. Salyer argues that this cultural experience, more than what Lukacs had in mind when he wrote of a mass historical consciousness after Napoleon, gave rise to the Romantic historiographical approach of writers such as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown and Frederick Marryat. This book traces the conversion of the eighteenth-century imperial speaker into the nineteenth-century "romance" hero through a number of proto-novelistic responses to the problem of Imperial history, including Edmund Burke in the Annual Register and the celebrated court case of James Annesley, among others.

The author argues that popular Romantic novels such as Scott's Waverley and Cooper's The Pioneers convert the problem of narrating the political geographies of eighteenth-century Empire into a discourse of history, placing the historical realities of negotiating Imperial authority at the heart of a nineteenth-century project that fictionalized the possibilities and limits of political historical agency in the modern nation state.

Matthew C. Salyer  (Auther) 

Publisher:Lexington Books 

 ISBN:978-1498562904