Anecdotes of Enlightenment

Anecdotes of Enlightenment is the first literary history of the anecdote in English. In this wide-ranging account, James Robert Wood explores the animating effects anecdotes had on intellectual and literary cultures over the long eighteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research and emphasizing the anecdote as a way of thinking, he shows that an intimate relationship developed between the anecdote and the Enlightenment concept of human nature. Anecdotes drew attention to odd phenomena o