Levin (David) History as Romantic Art

VIP免费

2024-12-02 0 0 630.43KB 271 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

PAGE V

Dedication:

For Patricia Marker Levin

PAGE VI

Acknowledgments:

In preparing this book I have received invaluable aid from a number of colleagues and

former teachers. I owe an immense debt to Professor Perry Miller, whose criticism has

helped me immeasurably since the time he was my tutor in Harvard College, and whose

lectures on

Romanticism in American Literature

supplied me with essential insights to

the period. I am grateful, also, to Professor Oscar Handlin for helpful criticisms,

suggestions, and encouragement; and to my colleague Professor Yvor Winters and

Professor Kenneth Murdock, both of whom graciously allowed me to audit their

lectures on American historians as men of letters. Among other kind friends who read

portions of the manuscript, Professors Charles A. Allen, Howard Mumford Jones,

Thomas C. Moser, Thomas Pressly, and Henry Nash Smith should recognize their

valuable suggestions in the text. I am deeply indebted to the Massachusetts Historical

Society for permission to use the papers of George Bancroft, George E. Ellis, Edward

Everett, Francis Parkman, and W. H. Prescott; to Mr. Stephen T. Riley, Director of the

Society; to the editorial staff of the Stanford University Press; and to Mr. Walter W. Isle,

who prepared the Index.

Chapter VII was published in substantially the same form in the Prescott memorial

issue of

The Hispanic-American Historical Review

(February, 1959).

CONTENT

Preliminary Material

Dedication & Acknowledgments

Preface to 1959 Edition

Preface to 1995 Hypertext Edition

* Part One: Romantic Attitudes: Themes and Judgements

Chapter 1 The Historian as Man of Letters

Chapter 2: Nature, Progress, and Moral Judgment

* Part Two: Conventional Characters: Individuals and Races

Chapter 3 Representative Men

Chapter 4 Teutonic Germs

Chapter 5 Priestcraft and Catholicism

Chapter 6 The Infidel: Vanishing Races

* Part Three: The Achievement: History as Romantic Art

Chapter 7 The Conquest of Mexico

Chapter 8 The Rise of the Dutch Republic

Chapter 9 Montcalm and Wolfe

Chapter 10 Conclusion

Additional Materials

About David Levin

Bibliography of Other Works by David Levin

PAGE VII

Preface

Historians and literary critics have always placed William Hickling Prescott, John

Lothrop Motley, and Francis Parkman alongside Henry Adams as the giants of

nineteenth-century American historical writing, and they have usually regarded George

Bancroft as an important, if wayward, pioneer. Of the four older writers, however, only

Parkman has received much critical attention during the last fifty years, and most

studies of Parkman and the others have concentrated more on biography than on the

historical works. The standard literary histories, moreover, recognize some affinity

among the four historians, but then treat them separately, underscoring their

individual differences.

There are good reasons, of course, for emphasizing biography. Bancroft the

transcendental Democrat--who earned a German doctorate in philology, talked with

Goethe about Byron and Coleridge, and then came home to found a progressive school

and to enter politics as campaign biographer, Secretary of the Navy, diplomat--is an

extremely attractive, difficult figure. Although his

History of the United States

expresses a notoriously effusive patriotism that he called "objective," he was capable of

great shrewdness not only in political strategy but in perceiving the subjectivity of

other historians.

Bancroft's close friend Prescott had a much less complex career and much less puzzling

personality. But his biography gains considerable interest from the collegiate injury

that nearly blinded him and from the determination with which, though wealthy

enough to live an easy life, he relied on one eye for his writing and the aid of an oral

reader for his research. A bland, charming conservative, he seems no less different from

the energetically Democratic Bancroft than from Parkman and Motley, both of whom

seem to have suffered from neurotic anxieties.

Motley, too, was comfortably rich, and he spent most of his adult years traveling and

writing in the high society of Boston, England, and the Continent: joining Thackeray

and Macaulay at dinner; living as the guest, first, of the Queen of the Netherlands, and

then, of his old friend Bismarck. But his career also had its gloomier drama. His

passionate devotion to honor and justice spilled out not only onto the pages of his

histories of the Netherlands,

PAGE VIII

but into two diplomatic controversies that cost him his posts as Minister to Austria and

then as Minister to Great Britain.

Parkman's life is surely the best known and the most pathetic of the four. The grim

intensity with which he tracked down historical facts and vigorous experience in

Nature makes a fine subject in itself. But his story becomes irresistible when one

watches him work daily for only a few minutes, after a doctor has warned him that

concentrated thought will drive him mad. His contempt for physical weakness, his

passionate attacks on woman suffrage, and his heroic efforts to continue strenuous

exercise after he had been crippled by arthritis give a peculiar interest to his historical

achievement and his portraits of manly heroes.

These differences are important, and no critic of the histories can ignore them. But they

can too easily tempt one to ignore even more relevant similarities. Although Prescott

and Bancroft were students at Harvard before Motley and Parkman were born, it is

more important to notice that all four went to Harvard; that Motley studied at

Bancroft's Round Hill School; that Parkman read Bancroft's volume on La Salle and the

Jesuits carefully in the year before he decided that he himself would write a history of

France and England in North America. Both Motley and Parkman consulted Bancroft

about various parts of their histories, and Bancroft and Prescott frequently consulted

each other. All four historians, moreover, looked on the Past from a common

geographical and cultural position.

Even if these biographical facts were not available, the massive evidence heaped up in

the histories themselves and in the historians' journals and correspondence would

make the relationship quite clear. In this book, therefore, I have declined to assume

that the uniqueness of a writer's psychological experience or political ideas explains his

most significant literary techniques. The evidence has forced me to ask instead whether

other causes might not have been equally influential. If Bancroft's La Salle differs little

from Parkman's, and if both La Salles resemble some characters of Byron's, then

Parkman's battle with his own mysterious "Enemy" (his undiagnosed malady) does not

necessarily explain his portrayal of La Salle.

For these reasons I have concentrated first on the histories and papers of all four men

and on their relationship to other writers. One cannot understand the individual

history without understanding its vocabulary and its context. In Parts 1 and 2 I have

delineated the literary conventions that function in all these histories, and I have

examined the relationship between the historian's assumptions and his literary

techniques. In short, I have tried here to combine literary and intellectual history with

literary criticism.

PAGE IX

Clarifying the histories has also required me to answer some important questions about

American versions of romantic thought. The common notion that Prescott, Motley, and

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

1PAGEVDedication:ForPatriciaMarkerLevinPAGEVIAcknowledgments:InpreparingthisbookIhavereceivedinvaluableaidfromanumberofcolleaguesandformerteachers.IoweanimmensedebttoProfessorPerryMiller,whosecriticismhashelpedmeimmeasurablysincethetimehewasmytutorinHarvardCollege,andwhoselecturesonRomanticisminAmer...

展开>> 收起<<

Levin (David) History as Romantic Art.pdf

共271页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Levin (David) History as Romantic Art

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: