Emily Rohrbach
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823267965
- eISBN:
- 9780823272440
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823267965.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Chapter one traces the conceptions of the future in historical writing from the mid-eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment to William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age. In Scottish Enlightenment ...
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Chapter one traces the conceptions of the future in historical writing from the mid-eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment to William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age. In Scottish Enlightenment philosophical historiography and thought by David Hume, Hugh Blair, William Robertson and others, one imagines futurity primarily based on precedent. In the 1790s, however, precedent fails to account for the political changes of the moment, as evidenced by the work of William Godwin and Helen Maria Williams. In The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt develops a lateral temporal organization and heterogeneous poetics for his work, foregoing not only the explanatory power of precedent but also the Enlightenment necessity of a single, unifying explanatory system.Less
Chapter one traces the conceptions of the future in historical writing from the mid-eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment to William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age. In Scottish Enlightenment philosophical historiography and thought by David Hume, Hugh Blair, William Robertson and others, one imagines futurity primarily based on precedent. In the 1790s, however, precedent fails to account for the political changes of the moment, as evidenced by the work of William Godwin and Helen Maria Williams. In The Spirit of the Age (1825), William Hazlitt develops a lateral temporal organization and heterogeneous poetics for his work, foregoing not only the explanatory power of precedent but also the Enlightenment necessity of a single, unifying explanatory system.
