“Making History: Rethinking Master Narratives” spotlights the efforts of distinguished scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British history and literature to reimagine the place of master narratives in our work, to negotiate the methodological problems they introduce, and to revision particular historical master plots. Postmodern scholarship has generated an inordinate number of micro-histories and richly contextualized but narrowly thematic studies. The four speakers featured at this conference will provide an opportunity for historians and literary critics to discuss the role master narratives should or could play in historicist practice, as well as how to reconceive particularly persistent master-narratives that continue to resist critical interrogation.

Two of the papers focus on post-Enlightenment narratives of the subject. Nancy Armstrong argues that both novelists and evolutionary science persuaded the Victorian readership to accept a world view that was hostile to their Enlightenment beliefs in a stable nature and a foundational difference between subject (human consciousness) and object (biological nature), and that they did so by using gothic narrative to situate readers within a world whose biological categories were imagined to be in flux. Dror Wahrman's paper focuses on the persistence of “enchantment” in British subject-formation long beyond the Enlightenment and the secularization narratives it anchors. The other two papers address the narrativization of empire and nationhood. Catherine Hall examines Macauley’s impact on the historicization of empire. Suvir Kaul will analyze a persistent assumption underlying his own body of work: i.e., his claim that the empire of trade and territory was the horizon of all British imaginative thought; his self-analysis proposes to articulate the mediations and qualifications necessary to individuate literary developments while making large historical claims.