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This essay considers the interdependence of formal and ethical questions about the appropriate use of particular detail by juxtaposing eighteenth-century fiction to contemporary practices of life-writing, especially the use of detail by Johnson in his Lives of the Poets and Boswell in his Life of Johnson . After laying out some premises about what constitutes novelistic detail during this period, the essay explores a productive tension between an ethical argument against “being particular” when writing about real historical figures and an increasingly strong preference for specificity in both fiction and nonfiction.

In his study of Anna Amalia, Joachim Berger has attempted a distinctive new type of biographical study, one that reduces as much as possible the projection of the late-twentieth-century psychological norms into the account and that especially avoids attributing excessive teleology or meaning to the subject's development and behavior. Convinced that the usual narrative structure contributes to a kind of psychologized biography that saturates every act with purpose, Berger sets about devising a form that disrupts these tendencies and that more effectively captures the uncertainties, dead ends, and ordinary failures of lived reality. Drawing on new social science critiques of life writing, he employs a thematic approach in which he systematically examines Anna Amalia's life according to a series of roles she was expected to play. He first describes her activities for each role, and then analyzes and evaluates those activities to demonstrate her "room for action" and the gendered constraints that were placed on her. With this formal structure of investigation, Berger writes a new account of the princess who is renowned for

THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS AGO it might have seemed that David Hume's History of Englandfrom the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James the Second (6 vols., 1754-62) was dead for good. J. B. Black gave it a slightly condescending historiographical evaluation that must have seemed definitive,' and W. C. Abbott recorded its seventy-five years of popularity and subsequent fall from scholarly favor.2 To be sure, whenever a thinker of Hume's stature spends ten years of his life writing a large scale work, there must be something good in it. But its grace of style, its malicious wit, and its thought-provoking philosophical digressions were not enough. The work was disfigured, it was thought, by three fatal defects. In an age of scientific historiography still inspired by Ranke, Hume's methodology seemed slipshod in comparison with, say, Gardiner's. In an age of increasingly sophisticated faiths, Hume's vituperative attacks on "all religions save the true one" seemed crude and antiquated. And the interpretations of English constitutional history which Hume so carefully and artfully developed seemed, as Thomas Preston Peardon remarked in 1933, to be long superseded.3 But in the past generation or so, there have appeared several lines of scholarly interest which converge upon this neglected magnum opus. Hume's epistemological and ethical theories have always been a fruitful object of study. In this century many philosophers of history have become increasingly sceptical of the possibility of a purely objective historical science. This development has interested some scholars in the relation between Hume's scepticism and his views about history. It also reminds us that perhaps Hume's work in history has been unfairly criticized. It is a kind of anachronism on our part if we expect the standards of a Gardiner in Hume, for in the eighteenth century the customs and criteria of historical writing were somewhat different.