Actually, having cribbed those two examples above from a note which I left myself some years ago in Yahoo notepad, I find that another note from the same treasure-trove possibly throws some light on where this all came from, too. It's a quotation from Gibbon's Decline and Fall, chapter IX, which I cut and pasted as I was reading it a few years ago:
On the cultural significance of writing: "let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses but very little his fellow-labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties."
This is a full century earlier than our previous examples, and isn't quite talking about full-blown time-travel, but it is comparing the act of reading and writing history to being able to 'live in distant ages' - i.e. it is characterising historiography as a form of (what we now call) time-travel. So I wonder if the impetus to write fantastical narratives about actually being able to do that follows from the same growing curiosity about the past and understanding that it was very different from the present which also gave rise to the emergence of history as a serious academic discipline?
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Date: 2014-03-25 05:28 pm (UTC)On the cultural significance of writing: "let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses but very little his fellow-labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties."
This is a full century earlier than our previous examples, and isn't quite talking about full-blown time-travel, but it is comparing the act of reading and writing history to being able to 'live in distant ages' - i.e. it is characterising historiography as a form of (what we now call) time-travel. So I wonder if the impetus to write fantastical narratives about actually being able to do that follows from the same growing curiosity about the past and understanding that it was very different from the present which also gave rise to the emergence of history as a serious academic discipline?