History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman

by David Levin

Although much interest has been shown in the nineteenth century American historians Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman, this book is the first to explore thoroughly the similarity of themes and techniques in their historical writing and to examine the relationship between their historical assumptions and literary techniques. One of the author's main purposes is to illuminate the individual histories of these writers by studying conventional themes, characters, and language in all of them.

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a slog but I enjoyed it, at least in theory. How can you not enthuse over the idea of histories evaluated for their literary qualities? Any sentence that begins "Although the succession of subordinate clauses in the third sentence threatens to escape Prescott's control...", where Prescott is a historian, swells my bosom. I wish English professors would critique today's history writers like this.