The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature

The of this collection of essays, as its editors declare in their introduction, is revision or problematization of period, canon, tradition, and genre in eighteenth-century literary studies (p. 14). Though no single book could altogether fulfill such an ambition, The New Eighteenth Century goes a long way toward doing so. The twelve essays gathered by the editors are consistently provocative and fresh, almost always strongly and lucidly written, bold in their rereadings and reassessments of works (and the issues raised in them) by writers as diverse as Dryden and Behn, Fielding and Mary Collier, Smollett and Shaftesbury, Pope and Charlotte Charke, Johnson and Sterne, Radcliffe and John Serle. The approaches vary widely, frequently merging in a single essay; they range from Marxist to feminist, new historicist to deconstructionist. The introductory essay with which the collection begins not only outlines the contributions that follow but also provides a ringing justification for the revisionist project they represent. Always civilized and respectful, but uncompromisingly blunt, Nussbaum and Brown bravely take on the entrenched traditions of eighteenth-century scholarship and criticism, not so much to dismiss or discredit them as to proclaim their inadequacy to our full acceptance and understanding of the age as it really was, and of the great variety of important writing (much of it noncanonical) it produced. Frankly polemical in purpose, the argument of this essay manages also to be scrupulously fairminded. I confess to being more than a little shocked as I read. But I am convinced that Nussbaum and Brown