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Henry Adams and the forms of historical explanation
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Text
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Title
Henry Adams and the forms of historical explanation
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ETD_2419
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http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.000052115
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eng
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theses
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Adams, Henry, 1838-1918--Criticism and interpretation
Subject
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Topic
Literatures in English
Abstract
Henry Adams' thinking began and ended with forms, the models he was given that no longer worked, and the new forms he sought that might shape a future, or project its pattern. Dismayed by the experience of accelerating change, he tried to use history to identify and explain the forces at work. This dissertation explores Adams' search for an adequate explanation as a series of experiments in form. An examination of his major works, the History of the United States, Democracy and Esther, the Memoirs of Arii Taimai, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams, reveals the extent to which Adams always wrote as a historian and yet in resistance to the prescriptions of history. His experiments started with inherited models, which he tried to remake for a new age, but what Adams usually produced was not a reformation, but a proliferation of forms. Whatever their genre, Adams' texts continually rebel against expectations. By resisting a conventional emplotment, which is action fitted to historical time, in effect they rebel against history. Adams' experiments end in impasse, uncertainty, and questions, but his failures authorize new investigations. Adams' writing is full of irreconcilable elements and dialectics that can never be resolved; foremost among these is sexual difference. Treated as alternating polarities of form, these conflicts can be a source of creative tension and imaginative possibility. Adams insisted on history as both art and science despite the uneasy coexistence of the two. What scientific history meant to him shifted from a belief in a Rankean methodology, to the adoption of the explanatory language of the social and physical sciences, to the dream of a great generalization putting all human history under law. The legacy of his name made him a historian, yet one with an orientation to ultimate ends rather than origins. For Adams, history was written with a civic purpose. Questions of form could not be separated from that purpose, nor the vexed problem of finding an audience.
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electronic resource
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vi, 601 p.
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Ph.D.
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Includes bibliographical references (p. 581-600)
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by Virginia Gilmartin
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Gilmartin
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Virginia
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1950-
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Virginia Gilmartin
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Jehlen
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Myra
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Myra Jehlen
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Evans
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Brad
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Brad Evans
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Jackson
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Gregory
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Gregory Jackson
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Lears
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Jackson
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Jackson Lears
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Rutgers University
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Graduate School - New Brunswick
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2010
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2010-01
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xx
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Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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ETD
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Graduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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rucore19991600001
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doi:10.7282/T3P84C1K
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ETD doctoral
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Rights
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The author owns the copyright to this work.
Copyright
Status
Copyright protected
Notice
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Open
Reason
Permission or license
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Gilmartin
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Virginia
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2010-01-06 16:53:43
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Virginia Gilmartin
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Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
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I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.
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2011-06-01
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Access to this PDF has been restricted at the author's request. It will be publicly available after June 1, 2014.
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