Abstract:
What happens when history refuses to choose between fact and fiction in the English Enlightenment? This report focuses on long-eighteenth-century English literary secretism, especially how those innovative literary experiments with the genre of secret history blurred public and private, politics and scandal, while borrowing from Procopius, gossip, and allegory. Neither purely historical nor fully novelistic, these literary experiments cultivated a distinctly suspicious style of reading that shaped Whig and Tory imaginations alike. From court intrigue to revolutionary libels, they transformed how readers understood power, virtue, and truth, and it remains an irresistible form of truth-telling in the English-speaking world.
Date and time: 18:00, May 11
Venue: Room 200, East Building of SCA