Preface

Abstract

Preface An eighteenth-century editor might well begin this preface by sauci­ ly vaunting the Bill of Fare in the hope of titillating the readers’ appetites so they would seek to feast their eyes on the following pages of the proposed menu. However, the editor of this volume ofStudies in Eighteenth-Century Culture lacks the desire to retain the readers from the delights of a bountiful repast, the presumption to entice them to consume a menu which in itself provides sufficient incentive for care­ ful reading and gratification for the discriminating palate, and finally, both the inclination and the talent to imitate Fielding for more than one paragraph. The articles appearing in this volume were selected from papers presented at national and regional conferences of the American Soci­ ety for Eighteenth-Century Studies. They cover a wide range of topics and disciplines. To summarize the diversity of the contents would be a task similar, in a microcosmic way, to attempting to reduce the com­ plexities of the many facets of the Enlightenment expressed by artists, authors, and philosophers in both the Old and New Worlds, to a simple formula. It is perhaps ironic to note that in this very diversity lies a key to the fundamental unity of this volume, a dissonant one­ ness, a parallel for which can be discovered in the shadowy recesses of the Enlightenment, in the contrast between the rational and the irrational, progress and tradition, reality and imagination, truth and illusion. The eighteenth century can be divided in a system of philosophical and artistic dichotomies. Inherent in this organization xi xii / Preface of incongruous couples (whether they represent thesis and antithesis or action and reaction) is the revelation that, living in a state of constant flux, man is uneasy and seeks to resolve the seeming paradoxes of divergent ideas and of living in an imperfect present prescribed by tradition while thinking of perfection and aspiring after the future. The authors whose essays appear in this collection have all per­ ceived some aspect of this duality. They have observed its physical manifestations—the presence of two classes (elite and popular) and two traditions (oral and literate)—and its philosophical expression— liberty and reason vs. oppression and irrationality, the mechanical world vs. utopia, actualism vs. catastrophism, the theories of the Physiocrats and those of the Encyclopedists, or the debates between the neptunists and the vulcanists. The authors have also explored the literary or artistic expressions of duality: type vs. individual, fancy vs. judgment, statement vs. demonstration. The authors have sought to elucidate the nature of these incongruous pairs by explanation, situa­ tion or resolution. The use of papier-mache in the construction of Walpole’s castle is explained as the architectural metaphor for the conflict between illusion and reality. The problem of nature, seen at once as a coy yet seductive maiden, a promiscuous yet chaste consort, is linked to a series of opposites—freedom/restraint, capturer/captive, definer/defined—and is situated in the basic conflict of male/female. The establishment of colleges in America is seen as the solution for the social and moral oppositions of civilization vs. barbarism and virtue and knowledge vs. vice and ignorance. Voltaire’s alphabetical writings are the resolution of possible conflict between form and ex­ pression. The eighteenth-century woman, affected by Locke’s empiri­ cism in her thought and by patriarchal doctrines of traditional wom­ en’s roles in her lifestyle, provides an example of a human irony. Fielding, both a natural historian and a believer in Providence, recon­ ciled wish and belief with double irony in his writings. By positing two readers (self and other), two interpreters, two classes, or two modes of thought, some of the authors in this volume have sought to refine and interpret these antitheses. Rochester is seen to unite all roles in one being: male/female, conquistador of sex/servile Preface I xiii slave of love. Steme the writer and Sterne the editor become one in their serious concern for brilliant style and precise diction. Other authors have hesitated before models which split the world so neatly and have reacted to them by presenting triads, as in the essay on Kant, or...