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Lost Worlds:

The Emergence of French Social History, 18151970

ISBN-13: 9780271058665
Publisher: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Imprint: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
By Jonathan Dewald
Price: AUD $67.99
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Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 24/10/2012
Format: Paperback 256 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: Political science & theory [JPA]

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Table of Contents

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Today’s interest in social history and private life is often seen as a twentieth-century innovation. Most often Lucien Febvre and the Annales school in France are credited with making social history a widely accepted way for historians to approach the past. In Lost Worlds historian Jonathan Dewald shows that we need to look back further in time, into the nineteenth century, when numerous French intellectuals developed many of the key concepts that historians employ today.

According to Dewald, we need to view Febvre and other Annales historians as participants in an ongoing cultural debate over the shape and meanings of French history, rather than as inventors of new topics of study. He closely examines the work of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine, the antiquarian Alfred Franklin, Febvre himself, the twentieth-century historian Philippe Ariès, and several others. A final chapter compares specifically French approaches to social history with those of German historians between 1930 and 1970. Through such close readings Dewald looks beyond programmatic statements of historians’ intentions to reveal how history was actually practiced during these years.

A bold work of intellectual history, Lost Worlds sheds much-needed light on how contemporary ideas about the historian’s task came into being. Understanding this larger context enables us to appreciate the ideological functions performed by historical writing through the twentieth century.

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Historians and Modernity

1. “À la Table de Magny”: Men of Letters and Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century Paris

2. Ordering Time: The Problem of French Chronology

3. God and the Historian: Sainte-Beuve’s Port-Royal

4. Lost Worlds: Lucien Febvre and the Alien Past

5. Private Lives and Historical Knowledge

6. Nobles as Signifiers: Making Sense of a Class Structure

7. An Alternative Path to Rural History

Conclusion: On the Politics of Social History

Index

“The book offers a series of intelligent and engaging close readings of unfamiliar texts, and the analysis, while at times overstated, is thought provoking.”

—Siân Reynolds, European History Quarterly

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Lost Worlds:

The Emergence of French Social History, 18151970