Book Review

Methods/Theory

This book challenges the still widely held view—first articulated by nineteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment and restated more recently by R. G. Collingwood, Hayden White, and others—that eighteenth-century historiography failed to do justice to the past because it lacked sympathy with it and because it was blinkered by rationalism and skepticism. Mark Salber Phillips attributes this erroneous view partly to misreadings of the canonical histories of David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and Edward Gibbon and partly to a mistaken tendency to regard history as a single, unified genre unrelated to any context. Phillips, by contrast, treats eighteenth-century British historiography as a "family of related genres" (p. 343) that included biography, antiquarian writings, diaries, memoirs, literary histories, and even some fictional genres; and he shows that it influenced and was influenced by a dynamic literary system. Genre itself, for Phillips, is not something fixed and abstract but a communicative and "contrastive category" (p. 21) that undergoes historical change and can only be recognized and understood with reference to other genres. Viewing history as a "family of genres," Phillips holds, enables us to see a continuity of historical questions and interests that might otherwise remain hidden or manifest themselves in canonical works long after their appearance in the so-called minor genres.

. . .