Abstract/Summary

Secret history emerged in England during the late seventeenth century and quickly established itself as a distinctive form of history writing that blends sexual and political revelations to revise received narratives of the recent past. This introductory chapter seeks to define the genre at the moment of its early development. In particular, it explores the relationship between secret history and other literary forms including neoclassical ‘perfect’ or explanatory history, romance, satire, and pamphlet polemic. The introduction also highlights correspondences, connections and points of divergence between the individual chapters that follow in this volume of essays. In doing so, it situates this volume within a growing body of scholarship on eighteenth-century secret history in particular and, more broadly, eighteenth-century conceptions of genre.