Reviews for Imperfect Histories: The Elusive past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism

The average rating for Imperfect Histories: The Elusive past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-12-07 00:00:00 Anthony Sims Imperfect Histories is about the writing of history (historiography). It's fascinating if you are into that kind of thing (which I am). I wish I'd been able to read it when I was in grad school but it hadn't been written yet. The description above mentions the resistance of history to being written, the struggle, the dissatisfaction....the imperfections. But what the description above does not capture is how Rigney also evokes what drives the attempts---what she calls the sublime (in the aesthetic sense), the gap between knowing and not knowing, the unreachable "otherness" of the past. Rigney's examples of "imperfect histories" are 18th and 19th century European writers Walter Scott, Jules Michelet, Augustin Thierry, and Thomas Carlyle among others (mainly French), and it is an academic text. I gave it five stars not because I think Rigney said everything there is to be said on the topic or better than anybody else, or because she's right, or because her choice of examples are the best but because of how consistently focussed on the problem it seems throughout all the chapters...rather than a series of thematic essays the way many academic texts seem to be.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-05-17 00:00:00 Jeromy Curnutt I love the book Frankenstein so wanted to read more about the author and to learn what led her to write such a fascinating book. Unfortunately, I ended up skimming or skipping much of Mellor's book because she focused on feminism, incest, immorality, etc, but I did learn 2 interesting things: 1) 200 years ago, when Mary Shelley wrote about putting together a man out of body parts gathered from animals and cemeteries, then giving him the "spark of life", there were actually many scientists attempting to bring dead things to life. Some scientists attached electric wires to dead creatures and could get the bodies to sit up, open an eye, even clench a fist. Creepy, but amazing! 2) Mary Shelley is showing that if someone (i.e. Victor) goes about creating offspring without both a father and a mother, the child would not turn out emotionally healthy and could even turn out to be a monster. I found this argument VERY interesting given the big conflict in California over same-sex marriage. Children deserve both a father and a mother, and the book Frankenstein is just one more proof of the importance to society of bringing children to the world in the "traditional" way! Yes on prop 8! Yes on traditional marriage!