Reliving or collecting the past?: A new frame for Robert Southey’s historiographical proposal

Abstract

The aim of this article is to situate Robert Southey in a new discursive context, different from the usual romantic one, to better understand his historiographical position, especially regarding the History of Brazil (1810-1819). In Brazil, Maria Odila da Silva Dias’s statements, especially in O fardo do homem branco (1974), became prominent for the understanding of the History of Brazil. In this book, as in her master’s dissertation, Dias presents the History of Brazil as a precursor of English Romanticism and as being largely concerned with reliving the past. I argue, throughout this paper, other research hypothesis which locates Southey in another discursive context, related to documentary research and the monumentalization of the past. For this, at first, I provide an overview of recent criticism on Romanticism within literary criticism and then undertake a brief comparison between Southey’s and Thomas Babington Macaulay’s historiographies, based on the analysis of articles that both wrote, in the same period, on Henry Hallam’s Constitutional History of England. Ironically, Macaulay seems to argue in favor of the historiographical approach that Dias attributed to Southey. Thus, I aim to show the complete mismatch that exists between what Southey thought he was doing and the main characteristics of Romanticism. Finally, I provide a specific analysis of some parts of Dias’s work, which served to prove her hypothesis that Southey’s main historiographical concern was reliving the past.

Keywords: History of historiography, Romanticism, Robert Southey.