DAVID HUME E JANE AUSTEN

O SENTIMENTO E A CONSTRUÇÃO DA MODERNA ISTORIOGRAFIA INGLESA

Resumen

This paper discusses the relationship between historiography and romance through the analysis of some works of David Hume and the novelist Jane Austen. Hume produced a historical program that uses sentiment as explanatory categories of the historical process. From Hume’s perspective it was essential to produced identification between the reader and the historical narrative personages. In the “History of England” Hume makes use of sentimentality in the composition of his female character. In several passages of her novels, parodies and letters, Jane Austen seems to argue in favor of a modern concept of historiography against the classic models that the Hume’s project has rejected.