Romantic Pasts: History, Fiction and Feeling in Britain, 1790-1850

Working against the long—standing belief that romantic—era history is primarily sentimental, Romantic Pasts argues that historians from Mary Wollstonecraft to Thomas Carlyle developed a new kind of cognitive or psychological historicism that was as much concerned with motive as with affect. Recognising that feelings could be a viable object of historical study as well as a sentimental or affective mode, these historians increasingly reconfigured psycho—physiological and behavioural processe...