Genres of Evidence: Reading Facts in England from Archives, Historiography and Literature, 1770-1830.

Abstract

Genres of Evidence uses four cases studies to argue that the distinction between historiographic and literary writing sharpened in England between 1770 and 1830, under the conditions of British colonial consolidation, understood as a textual as well as a political and economic enterprise. The dissertation assembles archival, historiographic and literary texts in order to study the collaborative scenarios of interpretation at work in fashioning readers, writers and genres. Genres of Evidence shows how transactions among writers and readers in diverse genres contributed to the crystallization of genre conventions, a process which played a role in the emergence of the concepts of fact and evidence—their origin, their textual form, and their relationship to empirical experience. The opening chapter recovers a story from the India Office Records about the alleged disappearance of a “beautiful Moor woman” from Madras, a colonial town in South India, and the efforts of colonial officials (George Andrew Ram, George Stratton, Lord Pigot, Warren Hastings) to articulate how textual forms of fact in archival documentation differed from those in the literary genre of the oriental tale. The second chapter discusses manipulations of the epistolary form in the Letterbook of John Bruce, the official historian of the East India Company at the turn of the nineteenth century. The third chapter analyzes how textual convergences between Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Catharine Macaulay’s epistolary history affect hierarchies of evidence for the historiography of eighteenth-century women’s writing. The final chapter argues that Lord Byron used genre conventions of oriental tales in “The Giaour” to implicate his readers in his empirical knowledge about Britain’s imperial politics. Engaging closely with scenes of reading and writing conventionally separated by disciplinary divisions, this project proposes a new approach to the study of genre by way of re-imagining the historical relationship between history and literature. Drawing on literary and historical scholarship about the Romantic period, “Genres of Evidence” suggests that textual interactions between the archives conventionally associated with each discipline offer a new and productive model for studying the history of writing.