Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson

During the second half of the 18th century the most powerful literary work in Britain was nonfictional - philosophy, history, biography, and political controversy, Leo Damrosch argues that this tendency is no accident; at the beginning of the modern age, writers were consciously aware of the role of cultural fictions, and they sought to ground those fictions in a real world beyond the text. Their political conservatism was a considered response to a world in which meaning was inseparable from consensus, and in which consensus was increasingly under attack.