Was the Eighteenth Century Long Only in England?

Abstract

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...