Stedman’s Myrmecology: Decolonizing Analogy in Suriname

REVIEWS

The changing role of “the public” figures prominently in both legal and literary studies of the eighteenth century. Trevor Ross’s Writing in Public (2018) demonstrates how legal changes relating to copyright, defamation, and seditious libel shaped the emergence of a new category of literature in the later eighteenth century. The work develops a schematic and idealist account of the changing relationship between norms of law and literature as mediated by the idea of “the public” that might be enhanced by further attention to the continued diversity of literary expression and literary sociability that has characterized a substantial amount of recent scholarship on the eighteenth century. It also remains unclear as to whether the eighteenth-century notions of publicity were really novel, especially in the light of work on medieval and renaissance era notions of public opinion that demonstrate that the concept has a long history that is not unique to the modern era.

Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print

<i>Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature</i>, ed. Liisa Steinby and Aino Mäkikalli.

REVIEWS

The Strategy of Faculty of Letters:Advocating Eighteenth-Century Studies Curriculum on a Budget Heather King (bio) Like most faculty in eighteenth-century studies, I am the sole practitioner in our English department. This is hardly surprising: of the twenty eighteenth-century-related tenure-track jobs to begin in Fall 2017 discussed on the "Restoration and Eighteenth Century" Academic Jobs Wiki, the bulk of them sought candidates able to teach "transatlantic" or "postcolonial" material and to cover the entirety of the long eighteenth century, across genres, often throwing in Milton, Shakespeare, or Romanticism for good measure.1 That trend didn't change in jobs that will begin in Fall 2018—of nineteen jobs, the majority explicitly requested interdisciplinary interests. We are teaching in the age of the historical generalist, the pre–1800 literature job opening. There is a strong case to be made that such a generalist approach actually suits eighteenth-century studies. After all, the figures whom we study did not consider themselves bound by narrow disciplinary divisions and might in fact have mocked narrowly focused "virtuosi."2 Adam Smith lectured on belle lettres and jurisprudence as well as advancing moral philosophy and establishing the field of economics. Dramatists like John Dryden and William Davenant made it clear that texts could be endlessly refashioned across generic modes like tragedy and comedy and, indeed, across genres, like [End Page 377] turning William Shakespeare's Tempest into an opera. The practice of active, engaged relationships with respected texts is equally instructive to us today. If we combine our love of the eighteenth century with the interdisciplinary models that characterize it, we can find surprising ways to infiltrate multiple areas of our curricula, perhaps especially at small schools with smaller budgets. Taking seriously the intellectual and artistic practices that cross genres in our period—such as adaptation or embracing innovations in textual dissemination—has led me to questions that transcend my department and strategies for promoting my field as part of the humanities. Interdisciplinary connections are gaining prominence as a response to the crisis in the humanities as universities come up with innovative ways to collaborate. Many of these initiatives, however, are associated with institutions that have substantial resources the rest of us may lack. Schools like Stanford University, Rice University, the University of California-Davis, the University of Florida, or Arizona State University boast humanities institutes or centers for the humanities that run a range of innovative programming supporting faculty research, collaboration between students and faculty, speaker series, and other community outreach programs. Just down the road from my home institution, Pomona College is kicking off a Humanities Studio this fall, with support from a Mellon Grant, that will also focus on student-faculty research, speakers, and programming.3 But splashy events like this aren't possible at my cash-strapped university. In the absence of deep pockets, what can we accomplish? The University of Redlands, where I have taught for eighteen years, is a small, private comprehensive university, with approximately 2,250 students in the College of Arts and Sciences. We are tuition-dependent, with a very small endowment. In 2008–2009, I was chair of the English Department. Prompted by the recession budget crisis and anxieties about coming cuts, I began what I called simply a "Humanities Chat," inviting my colleagues who studied or taught the humanities to gather.4 It was clear after the first meeting that the feeling that we were in this together improved morale. At subsequent meetings, I pushed for pragmatic steps like coordinating our department teaching schedules so that we no longer offered eighteenth-century philosophy at the same time as eighteenth-century literature. To promote our fields, we needed to make it easier for students to delve into them, after all. Thanks to colleagues who took on leadership roles, that conversation has grown into the Humanities Advisory Council. Council members are elected at the departmental level by English, History, Art History, Philosophy, Modern Languages, Religious Studies, and interdisciplinary programs with humanities cores. We then elect a chair, who attends monthly chairs' and [End Page 378] directors' meetings with the Dean, reviews teaching schedules to look for energizing connections and avoid conflicts, and helps...

Reviewed by: Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture ed. by Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall Caroline Gonda Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall, eds., Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). Pp. 219. £60.00. “Remember: As far as anyone knows we’re a nice normal family.” Doubtless hilarious to some, the bumper stickers and wall plaques on eBay are not so funny to the queer children excluded, silenced, or sacrificed in order to preserve the so-called normal family’s image of itself. It’s in the nature of ideology that those processes of exclusion, silencing, and sacrifice are so often themselves invisible or denied. The appearance of obviousness, naturalness, this-is-just-how-things-are, is what gives particular forms of being their power to control—or, at their most extreme, to destroy—the lives of others. In a world where, as the Scottish lesbian novelist Iona Macgregor says, “the dominant class never sees its own boundaries,” the work of a collection such as Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture is an important intervention, making critically visible both “the heteronormative legacy of the eighteenth century as a historical period” and the continuing presence of heteronormativity in eighteenth-century studies. As the editors note, the chapters in this volume “set out to reconfigure our sense of how gender and sexuality have become mapped onto space; how public and private have been carved up, and gendered and sexual bodies socially sanctioned; and how narrative conventions have been put in the service of affirming or subverting cultural orthodoxies about sex, gender, and sexuality. They also spotlight the literary traditions, scholarly criticisms, and pedagogical practices that buttress or subvert heteronormativity both in the past and in the present” (15). Whether or not one subscribes to Karma Lochrie’s argument in Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (2005)—that only the emergence of statistics as a science in the late eighteenth century makes it possible to speak meaningfully about norms and the normal (including in sexuality)—this collection makes the case for the eighteenth century as a crucial period in the formation of heteronormativity. By the end of the century, the editors argue, heteronormativity “congeals into a fully fomented hegemony,” although “alternate sex/gender configurations” continue to materialize (14–15). The chapters here explore heteronormativity across a wide range of areas and subjects: for example, the history of shopping and its impact on the sexual geography of the city (O’Driscoll); changes in French wedding-night customs (Roulston); the use of heteroerotic pornography as an element in male homosocial bonding (Kavanagh); moral panic, sexual assault, and protective masculinity in late eighteenth-century London (Braunschneider); Gothic fiction’s resistance to heteronormative closure (Haggerty); and the racial and sexual politics of colonialism (de Freitas Boe). In addition to Coykendall’s chapter on the critical and historical reception of Gray and Walpole, the two chapters that frame the volume address themselves to eighteenth-century studies, examining the workings of heteronormativity in scholarly research (Lanser) and the pedagogic practices and new readings of texts that result from attending to transgender issues in the classroom (Saxton, Mance, and Edwards). As powerful and pervasive a force as heteronormativity becomes, it is not monolithic, but is enmeshed with other structures of power. Ana de Freitas Boe’s [End Page 427] chapter on John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790) makes this particularly clear: “Stedman’s depiction of the erotic life of the colony forces us to reconsider how concerns about race and miscegenation shaped emergent heteronormative conceptions of sexuality in the eighteenth century. The monogamous couple—and monogamy as a concept—looks different from the vantage point of the colonial periphery” (165). Questions of class as well as of race are important in this volume, as seen particularly in Sally O’Driscoll’s chapter “Conjugal Capitalism,” which focuses on the figure of the domestic woman as “mulier mercans,” defined no longer by her sexual desires but by the fetishistic transfer of those desires onto material goods and purchasable commodities. The city in which she wanders is transformed, gentrified by the...

Art historians and cultural historians have noted what appears to be a puzzle in eighteenth-century history, a puzzle which emerges from an apparent conflict of the following trend: as English country houses became more and more classical, the gardens around them became less so. That is, as architecture progressively conformed to the principles of universal order and mathematical geometry embodied in the Palladian ideal, gardens seemed to repudiate those same principles, embracing irregularity and particularity. Another apparently contradictory trend is noteworthy: as country houses became smaller through the eighteenth century, the gardens around them became larger. By the later eighteenth century people of means seem to have preferred smallish houses in acres of parkland, rather than enormous houses in small, formal gardens.There are two possible ways of approaching this problem. The first is simply to ignore the contradiction and accept the houses and gardens as products of separate traditions. Most art historians have done this, fitting the houses and gardens respectively into the classical and romantic traditions. The houses are said to be classical in style because they were intended to appeal to the reasoning faculties of the Enlightenment mind, while the gardens are called romantic because they were designed to appeal principally to the subjective and non-rational faculties, the senses and the emotions. The puzzle of classical houses in romantic gardens simply does not arise when an author such as Hussey, for example, examines the history of gardens, or when Summerson writes about the classical country house.

Review: <i>Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks</i>

Friendship between the sexes, in eighteenth-century England, was a site of great controversy: it could be mocked as a chimera, feared as a mask for seduction or a leveller of gender distinctions, or welcomed as a sign of newly enlightened sociability. Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Charlotte Lennox all explored the tantalizing possibilities of such friendship in their daily lives as well as in their fiction. Their relationships have tended to be stereotyped as a symbiosis of benevolent male genius and grateful female talent. But as friends, siblings and colleagues who worked together closely, these writers broke new ground. In the middle of the century, a unique spirit of cooperation veiled, without erasing, the old tensions between the sexes, which continued to be played out discreetly in these writers' dedications, prefaces, reviews and, above all, letters. Mid--eighteenth-century experiments with the theme of friendship between the sexes in fiction have been generally ignored or misread as euphemistic versions of courtship or parenthood. But novels by the four authors in this study benefit greatly from being read against the grain, with the spotlight turned from their main plots of courtship to their more ambiguous sub-plots. Male-female friendship is not proposed here as a watertight category but rather as a fascinating area of overlap and contest between ideologies of relationship. Chapter 1 sketches the broad spectrum of male-female friendship possibilities in eighteenth-century literature. The next three chapters focus on three significant sample patterns: Sarah and Henry Fielding's sibling bond, Samuel Richardson's cultivation of a wide circle of literary 'daughters', and the mentor-protegee relationship in the life and works of Charlotte Lennox. The aim of this thesis is to reconsider these writers' lives and reputations while demonstrating the peculiar interest of male-female friendship as a lens through which to view eighteenth-century literature and literary history.

Reviewed by: The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century by Liz Bellamy Laura J. Rosenthal Liz Bellamy, The Language of Fruit: Literature and Horticulture in the Long Eighteenth Century. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 248 pp. In The Language of Fruit, Liz Bellamy explores intriguing tensions between the allegorical uses of fruit in literature, of which there are many, and the practice of horticulture. While she surveys a range of fruits with attention to their economic status, their use in recipes, their cultivation, and their social meanings, she focuses on three: the apple, the orange, and the pineapple. Bellamy positions this project at the intersection of historicism and ecocriticism. She approaches literature as an influence as well as a representation. She insists that the traditional, symbolic meanings of fruit not only change over time in response to the material availability of fruit but that these literary meanings have shaped horticulture itself. Thus the book explores literary texts, horticultural writing, and historical practices of cultivation. Bellamy opens by addressing the gendering of fruit, starting with both the Judeo-Christian story of the fall by way of a piece of fruit and the Roman tale of Proserperine, who brings the desolation of winter by eating a pomegranate seed. In Ovid, "she is simultaneously identified with fruit that is consumed and with her own consumption of fruit" (33). Ovid's Metamorphoses has other scenarios in which female vulnerability is expressed through fruit, including the Pomona, the goddess of orchards, seduced by Vertumnus, the god of seasons. Bellamy threads the gendering of fruit throughout the project, demonstrating its significance as well as its instability. While apples represent female frailty, they also symbolize the purity and even masculinity of a native English fruit in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Authors of agricultural pamphlets, Bellamy notes, encouraged the planting of fruit trees as a patriotic duty. The iconographic resonances of particular fruits were embedded in their language even as they responded to changes in fruit production technology. This encouragement to grow fruit was in part an expression of xenophobia, warning the public against imported luxury goods and embracing native fruits as natural, wholesome, and healthy. Horticultural literature draws on a range of literary sources to characterize the virtue of certain fruits, connecting agriculture to both literary and spiritual tropes. [End Page 109] This period also saw the emergence of the leisure gardener, who becomes an object of attention in this study. Central to leisure gardening was the hot bed, a frame containing manure that gave out a steady heat in the process of decomposition. (Bellamy later returns to the "hot bed" as a metaphor, as we will see.) The hot bed allowed the elite leisure gardener to cultivate more delicate fruits, such as cherries, strawberries, and later oranges. The first orangeries sprang up in the late seventeenth century, but the fruits themselves were more often imported from Spain or Portugal than grown in England, making the journey intact thanks to their protective rind. While the apple was hailed as healthy native fruit and the orange became a special, usually imported treat, the pineapple remained an embodiment of exotic curiosity throughout the eighteenth century. This tropical fruit blended colonial exoticism with a royal flavor associated with its rarity. The pineapple was further linked to the king because of the way its leaves resemble a crown. This opening investigation of both myth and horticultural practice offers new insight into literary texts. In a chapter on the use of fruit in seventeenth-century poetry, Bellamy complicates recent ecocritical claims by showing that mythic associations with various fruits persist through transformations in horticultural technique. The apple is, of course, foremost in this discussion, as both a native fruit appropriate, according to the poetry, for all classes of eaters, but also particularly fraught with symbolic meaning. In the Restoration, Bellamy argues, the apple is exchanged for the orange. Oranges became the snack of choice in the Restoration theaters, and the license to sell them was quite lucrative. Oranges were relatively expensive luxury commodities, associated with their origins in Spain and Portugal. Portugal was an ally and the home of the queen, Catherine of Braganza, but both...

Was the Eighteenth Century Long Only in England? Joan DeJean When I was a graduate student looking for a dissertation topic, in the early 1970s, the eighteenth-century French novel was just barely on the map. I had the feeling, however, that a great deal of that largely virgin territory was about to become terra very much cognita. I remember my advisor, Georges May, saying things like: "I don't think you should work on Marivaux"—or Diderot, or Prévost (the figures I was considering most seriously)—"because a French thesis is soon to be published on him." In those days, a forthcoming thèse d'état was thought to be the kiss of death for an American doctoral candidate trying to decide where to begin a career: the sum of knowledge each of them contained was so vast, or such was the then accepted wisdom, that a French thesis on Marivaux would have completely overshadowed a comparatively far more modest American effort. And so it was that, in my quest for an eighteenth-century novelist on whom no French thesis was about to appear, I came to settle on Paul Scarron: if the eighteenth-century novel was still underexplored, its seventeenth-century counterpart was almost completely off the charts. Now, I was of course aware that Scarron's Roman comique, published in 1651 and 1657, was clearly a part of seventeenth-century literature. Since, however, I thought of Scarron's novel (and still do) as so much closer to the eighteenth century than the seventeenth in both form and character, it never for a moment occurred to me that writing on it would automatically cut me off, as far as the job market was concerned, from the eighteenth-century EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, volume 13, numéros 2-3, janvier-avril 2001 156 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION prose fiction that I had planned to have as the focus of my intellectual life: I was quite frankly stunned to find that universities that advertised for specialists in eighteenth-century literature did not even want to see my dossier. Thirty years later, I am still not convinced that doing a dissertation on Scarron should have made it initially impossible for me to be hired to teach the eighteenth century. The minute I heard of the concept of "the long eighteenth century," I realized that I was not alone in my belief that some parts ofthe eighteenth century's territory were stranded, as it were, in earlier or later time zones. The only problem has been that the idea that the eighteenth century could be allowed to overflow its traditional boundaries has not been quick to catch on as far as French eighteenth-century studies are concerned. We all know that periodization is a notoriously slippery business, and the notion of a "long" eighteenth century is no exception to this rule. Thus, it should come as no surprise that, in English studies and in history, the fields in which the concept originated and in which it has already gained wide critical currency, there appears to be no universally accepted idea ofexactly how long the newly long eighteenth century is supposed to be. Although most say that it begins in 1660, some situate the starting point closer to 1680. The long century's end is similarly contested: my sense is that 1789 is now the most generally accepted date, though 1798 (the date of the publication of Lyrical Ballads) is often proposed and, of late (particularly among historians and particularly in England), the long eighteenth century is sometimes thought to have ended only in 1832 (because of the First Reform Bill, which signalled the death of the ancien régime in Britain).1 Now it is obvious that many of the markers used to denote the chronological limits ofa given academic field ofinquiry are not equally useful to the members of the various disciplines that share this field. Thus, for obvious 1 I will not thank those who were kind enough to serve as informants on this question on the grounds that they might prefer to remain anonymous; simply raising the issue of a change in periodization can provoke surprisingly hostile reactions. Formal considerations...

Reviewed by: Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman Peter Cosgrove (bio) Lorna Clymer and Robert Mayer, eds. Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. 268 pp. US$53.50. ISBN 978-0-87413-939-6. Everett Zimmerman was exceptionally gifted not only as a master of critical studies in the field of history and fiction in the eighteenth century, but also as a teacher. In this attractive and well-stocked volume in his honour, a number of his NEH students as well as friends and colleagues from the University of Santa Barbara have contributed a wide-ranging group of essays revolving around his lifelong subject-one of the persistent discursive obsessions of our time-the links between history and fiction. But this apparently timeless-one might say ahistorical-opposition can mean many things. To the dismay of practicing historians, literary critics understand the narrative structure of history-writing to indicate that imagination rather than citation is the dominant methodology of their field. For the common reader, it means character drama in a more or less authentic historical past. Alternatively, fictions from that very past may be read as signifying the social or political history of their times. And there are those fictions more typical of the eighteenth century than the present that use the term "history" in [End Page 311] their titles-Fielding's Tom Jones, or the History of a Foundling, and the History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mme De Beleau, Defoe's Roxana-which, though the intention has been the subject of many a critical dispute, seem in general to indicate the truthfulness of the account, whether facetiously or in straight-faced disingenuousness. The various essays in this elegantly produced volume tend to resonate with each other, to clarify or to raise new and fruitful areas of discussion. In addition to dividing the collection into two parts, Boundaries and Forms, the editors have performed a very neat process of parallelism and juxtaposition. The book begins and ends with a consideration of Defoe, the first by Maximillian Novak and the last by David Marshall, which focuses on Coetzee's inspired intertextual spin-off, Foe. Novak's essay does a service by circumscribing the Utopian ideals that have sometimes been applied to the plot of labour by an ingenious European in an untilled New World. By distinguishing between Mediterranean and Atlantic voyages of discovery, "ruminations on alternate forms of government" (28), and survivalist narratives, in which the castaway creates "a projection of contemporary Britain on an imaginary Caribbean island," Novak creates a genre for Robinson Crusoe-none other than a fiction in which the protagonist's actions create "problems and consequences" (32) more appropriate for novels than for Utopias. Marshall's concluding piece takes the question of genre to another level when he anatomizes the themes of writing instruction in Foe. The mysterious narrator, Susan-a projection possibly of Roxana (whose name this was)-tries to usurp Defoe's authorial role by occupying his house and teaching Friday to write. She fails; however, by some delicate skipping between clefs, with the aid of a reference to Rousseau's critique in Émile of women writing and thence to Marsyas the flayed flutist, Marshall takes "the novel to warn us of the dangers of demanding proof of the interior of the other" (246). Other essays approach this question of the interiority of historical writing that Henry James famously declared impossible to achieve. Ted Ruml and Robert Mayer direct their attention to two Scotsmen, Gilbert Burnet and Walter Scott, in order to show that the genre of history is stretched out upon frameworks that ultimately ambiguate the reader's perceptions. For Mayer, meditating on the paratexts, in Genette's formula, of Scott's Magnum Opus edition of his novels, the plethora of fictional commentators, footnotes, and prefaces that Scott appends confuses rather than illuminates the genre-something, Mayer observes, that seemed to puzzle Scott himself. Is he writing history/romance, history/novel; does he intend to offer "idle pleasure...

Unexpected Bodies in Eighteenth-Century German Culture Patricia Anne Simpson and Birgit Tautz Since the 1990s, interdisciplinary scholarship has been reframing a discourse about "extraordinary" bodies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson) and the cultural construction of these as "unexpected" from a range of perspectives, including queer studies, intersectional feminism, posthumanism, disability studies, ecocriticism, and critical race theory. Garland-Thomson's path-breaking work decisively shifted a medicalized discourse to another register. Her intervention has reverberated across academic disciplines and activist platforms alike. The body—erroneously presumed to be human—continues to organize inquiry into the limits of the human. Although scholarship about the body frequently reflects presentist perspectives, eighteenth-century aesthetics, with anthropocentric roots in Enlightenment thought and totalizing tendencies derived from assumptions about the body as a self-identical, logical "whole" likewise offer extensive material for the analysis of bodies beyond the human. In a previous "Forum on (New) Directions" (2021), two contributions, in particular, highlight the innovation related to "unexpected" bodies in our field. Stephanie M. Hilger's"Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century" calls attention to the health humanities, which "allow for a fresh perspective"; she elaborates: "Eighteenth-century thinkers wrestled with the separation of the humanities/mind from the sciences/body, yet they rarely questioned the supremacy of the mind."1 Eleoma Bodammer's "Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies" seeks to extend the model of critical disability studies to our field, encouraging a discussion that "could take a variety of directions that might help to explain responses to disability in aesthetic theories, debates on humanity, and the history of emotions."2 This, the final forum section of our editorship, builds beyond the horizons of the medical humanities and critical disability studies by foregrounding the cultural construction of the "body" and all its articulations in the eighteenth century. The contributions impressively show that, although anthropomorphic beliefs about the wholeness of the body frequently seek to ground and legitimize themselves in the eighteenth century, the actual historical landscape was much more porous, multifaceted, and in flux, indeed decentering anthropocentric mindsets, creative dispositions, and perspectives on eighteenth-century literature, culture, and the body. [End Page 137] The contributions to this forum bring the "unexpected" bodies into focus: they are extraordinary, anomalous, amorphous. Inspired by two panels sponsored by the LLC Forum Executive Committee on Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century German Literature, the contributors contemplate a range of human and nonhuman bodies marked by gender, ability, race, anomaly, and associations in the material and ecological environment. Bodies of water, plant life, bewitched bodies, and aesthetic, "uncontainable" bodies—all invite an innovative reimagining of German-speaking European literature and culture in multiple representations of nonnormative, nonconforming bodies. Patricia Anne Simpson University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bowdoin College Birgit Tautz University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bowdoin College NOTES 1. Stephanie M. Hilger," Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century," Goethe Yearbook 28 (2021): 301–06, here 304. 2. Eleoma Bodammer, "Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies," Goethe Yearbook 28 (2021): 307–313, here 310. Supplemental Bibliography Allingham, Liesl. "Gender and Narrative Crisis in Christoph Martin Wieland's 'Novella without a Title.'" The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation 56, no. 4 (2015): 427–44. Google Scholar Calzoni, Raul and Greta Perletti. Monstrous Anatomies: Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2015. Google Scholar Dale, Amelia. The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2019. Google Scholar Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Google Scholar Deutsch, Helen and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. Defects: Engendering the Modern Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Google Scholar Engelstein, Stefani. Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. Albany: SUNY P, 2009. Google Scholar Farr, Jason S. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2019. Google Scholar Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Google Scholar ———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Google Scholar ———, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles...

New Eighteenth Centuries Lawrence Lipking Sooner or later, we scholars and critics are dated. An essay called "A History of the Future" might try to predict what will happen in eighteenth-century studies, but soon enough becomes a souvenir of the moment when it was written (or perhaps a moment before).1 A book called The New Eighteenth Century eventually fits on a shelf with other relics of newness, like the old New Criticism. If we are lucky, some remnants survive; a few New Critics are breathing still. But making their innovations seem fresh again depends on recreating the contexts that once gave them life. At one time, we have to remember, the past was new. When The New Eighteenth Century was new, in 1987, I was taken aback by what its introductory essay said about my history of the future. For one thing, "The" was substituted for the "A" in my title. To write the history of the future, as if a crystal ball could be definitive, would be preposterous. Moreover, the error reproduced the most objectionable word in the editors' own title: The. New eighteenth centuries had always been plentiful, beginning in the eighteenth century itself, but a book that purported to contain the new eighteenth century (in its 1987 version) was bound to overlook a great many other versions.2 And the editors compounded that error when they claimed that I seemed "caught" between my "passion for the new" and "fear of it."3 Some new things deserve our passion, some do not. My essay does not recognize the categorical new, which squeezes the heads of a hydra into one "it"; nor did I ever join the party of the New Historicism. Perhaps a herald of the new needs always to rewrite the past. That was certainly true of my own history of the future. It responded to a particular situation. In 1972 the English Institute had launched a series on New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature, which began with four talks. The results distressed Paul de Man, who chaired the Institute in 1973. The approaches had struck him as not very new, and one of them, Donald Greene's "The Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature: Past, Present, and Future," bristled with what would later be [End Page 327] called the resistance to theory. De Man asked me to organize another session and open my own talk to new approaches. The assignment appealed to me, not only because the time was ripe for a sea change in eighteenth-century studies, cued by the founding of ASECS in 1969, but also because I had recently taken over as editor of "The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century" in the popular Norton Anthology of English Literature. At that time the canon seemed stultified—not a single woman author in the whole first volume of the anthology (2,000 pages), no reference to slavery or empire or the class system, no hint of the revolutions brewing both then and now. There was an obvious need for fresh air. In the third edition (1974) I was allowed some timid additions: Anne Finch, a bit of sex from Rochester, Johnson's "Brief to Free a Slave," Smart's "My Cat Jeoffry," Burke on the American Revolution. But clearly the rigid notion of "English Literature" was ready to be rethought. What might it be in the future? Rereading my talk now, more than four decades later, I find it dated in many ways. Its pronouns, for instance, assume that authors and scholars are men (save for one reference to "men and women"). It tends to focus on what was then the received canon of English literature (later editions of the Norton Anthology would venture far outside). It limits its excursions into theory, except for Foucault (more than one person has told me that my talk was the first time they heard about him). But most of all, it subscribes to a humanistic vision of progress, not only in scholarship but also in the stories that scholars tell about the eighteenth century itself, whose radical changes in society and art are credited with provoking ideas that still inspire hope for a better world. By 1987...