Histories in solution : atmosphere, prosody, and attitude as modes of encountering the past in British literature, 1760-1830
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.

In the eighteenth century, the horizons of history widened drastically. As historiographers began to adopt empiricist methodologies, creating systems that granted potential relevance to even the most mundane facts, a new public of history readers emerged. For both writers and readers, it became crucial to uncover new strategies for reducing the complexity of what we now call the 'field' of history, a field commonly literalized at the time by the parallel topos of the landscape. Mary Poovey, Lorraine Daston, and other have identified practices by which modern epistemology achieved a kind of operational closure for empiricist knowledge generally. Applied to the prolix and multiplying historical landscapes, such practices generated the latency that modern systems-theory recognizes as a condition for the emergence of stable, if provisional, systematic knowledge. Alan Liu, John Barrell, and others have identified parallel processes in aesthetics of the period, emphasizing the capacity of these aesthetics to effectively de-historicize the landscape. In response, Kevis Goodman has argued that the effaced remainders of modern history lingered in the form of an unpleasant sense of 'presentness' characterized by painful sensations like 'noise.' In this dissertation, I trace the development of aesthetic, critical, and formal strategies for delimiting the prolixity of the historical landscape in three domains of cultural production—landscape painting, prospect poetry, and antiquarian scholarship. Respectively, these strategies include the critical invention of 'keeping' (a sense of wholeness in painting without reference to strict linear perspective), the refinement of prosodic form in prospect poetry, and the cultivation of the historical fancy in antiquarian historiography. In each case, I argue, the latencies embedded in the historical landscape returned to vex historical order, something I see most forcefully in (pre-)Romantic works appearing between 1760 and 1830. Moreover, they did so under the auspices of the very aesthetic processes through which they had been effaced: in painting, through impenetrable visual atmospheres and similar effects that were 'out of keeping'; in poetry, through distortions of the prosodic order and the invention of a new topos that I call the 'misty prospect'; and in antiquarianism, through the caricature of what I term 'antiquarian attitudes.' These manifestations of historical latencies registered new moods (Stimmungen) of historicity characterized by discordant, synesthetic, and ambient effect as well as Gothic themes. They facilitated a kind of immersion in history as a process: an unfolding event. Yet these encounters with the événementiel dimensions of history were not simply chaotic; they also occasioned new modes for engaging meaningfully with history in the present. These modes tended to be performative rather than representational, iterative rather than conclusory, and social rather than solitary. Together, I argue, they evoke histories in solution, to borrow Raymond Williams' term: operating beneath, behind, and often obscuring the more recognizable empirical history of the period. By elucidating these alternative forms for engaging with pastness, including both the long-eighteenth-century practices for restricting the historical landscape and the dissolution of those strictures beginning around the middle of that century, my project catalogues the alternative temporal modalities that shaped the multiple forms that history could take in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.