History and Wonder is a refreshing new take on the idea of history that tracks the entanglement of history and philosophy over time through the key idea of wonder.
From Ancient Greek histories and wonder works, to Islamic curiosities and Chinese strange histories, through to European historical cabinets of curiosity and on to histories that grapple with the horrors of the Holocaust, Marnie Hughes-Warrington unpacks the ways in which historians throughout the ages have tried to make sense of the world, and to change it. This book considers histories and historians across time and space, including the Ancient Greek historian Polybius, the medieval texts by historians such as Bede in England and Ibn Khaldun in Islamic Historiography, and the more recent works by Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray and Ranajit Guha among others. It explores the different ways in which historians have called upon wonder to cross boundaries between the past and the present, the universal and the particular, the old and the new, and the ordinary and the extraordinary. Promising to both delight and unsettle, it shows how wonder works as the beginning of historiography.
Accessible, engaging and wide-ranging, History as Wonder provides an original addition to the field of historiography that is ideal for those both new to and familiar with the study of history.
Author(s): Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Edition: 1st
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 235
City: London ; New York, NY
Tags: Historiography; History--Europe; History---World;
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction xi
1 Sense and non-sense in Ancient Greek histories: Plato |
Herodotus | Thucydides | Phlegon | Polybius | Aristotle 1
2 Wonderful and curious histories in pre-modern Europe: Gerald
of Wales | Bede | Gervase of Tilbury | Augustine of Hippo |
Thomas Aquinas | Roger Bacon 21
3 The wonders of history in the pre-modern Islamic world: Al Tusi
| Al Qazwini | Al Tabari | Ibn Khaldun | Ibn Sina | Ibn Rushd 42
4 Wonder against ritual: strange Chinese histories: Sima Qian |
Confucius | Duan Chengshi | Pu Songling | Yuan Mei |
Ji Yun 62
5 Historical cabinets of curiosity in early modern Europe: Jean
Bodin | Francis Bacon | Walter Ralegh | Nathaniel Wanley |
René Descartes | Thomas Hobbes 81
6 Spirited histories in modern Europe: Immanuel Kant | George
William Frederick Hegel | Daniel Defoe | William Howitt |
Sarah Josepha Hale | Leopold von Ranke 100
7 Seeing the wonder trick in histories of the moving image:
Lynne Kirby | Tom Gunning | Walter Benjamin | Roland
Barthes | Jonathan Crary | Mary Anne Doane | 120
8 History’s others, history’s ethics: Joan Wallach Scott | Lynn
Hunt | Merry Wiesner-Hanks | Luce Irigaray | Jacques
Derrida | Hélène Cixous | Marguerite La Caze 139
9 Renewing wonder in postcolonial histories: Ranajit Guha |
Gayatri Spivak | Romila Thapar | Rabindranath Tagore |
Kalidāsā| Abhinavagupta 158
10 The banality of history: Martin Heidegger | Hannah Arendt 178
Conclusion: I wonder as I wander: everyday historiography,
everyday metaphysics? 189
Bibliography 192
Index 206
