Preface As editor of this collection of essays, I was charged to select those papers most representative of the heterogeneous nature of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies from amongst all those presented in this country and Canada at regional and national meetings of the Society during the academic year 1973—1974. If my reader will pause a moment, and read quickly through the table of contents, he or she will discover that, in fact, heterogeneity predominates. During my editorial tenure, I have learned (one of many lessons) that it is our Society’s very diversity which sustains it, and this diversity has accounted for the organiza tion’s encouraging success during the six or so years of its exis tence. As our President, Georges May, reveals to us in his apocry phal chapter of Candide (see the Presidential Address), isolated specialization is a form of “idiocy”—a danger which many of the great Enlighteners perceived, but one which is very difficult to obviate. The encyclopedic tendency of the Enlightenment was a response to such intellectual rigidification, and so was, concludes May, the decision to form academies. This tendency has continued into the twentieth century with the establishment of such societies as our own. We shall always be cursed with the spectre of Pangloss, but his form of “idiocy” can be attenuated within the context of an academy of learned and diverse critics and scholars. The variety and richness of this collection of essays hamper any attempt to impose, in a preface, even the most superficial order. xi xii / Preface Yet, every such collection, not unified by a central theme or method, must have a preface. The reader must be prepared for what he or she will find in the volume. Such is bibliographical etiquette; every student of the eighteenth century knows that prefaces were essential to the presentation of almost any book. Sometimes, authors apologized for prefaces, parodied prefaces, or dispensed with prefaces—but they always did so in prefaces! The preface was the first important contact between reader and writer, and the writers of the Enlightenment were learning that their readers not only bought and read, they helped create, and the preface pointed the way. So, having presented you with both sides of the argument, I shall try to do what probably cannot be done (structure this volume) and what must be done (prepare you for what follows). Those who study the Enlightenment in Europe and America soon learn that there were no other periods in the history of Western culture which were more fascinated with all aspects of human communication, including the organization and presenta tion of knowledge, the creation of new ways to propagate the “truth,” the mechanics of social interaction. The modern tech niques of propaganda and other, less obvious forms of data trans mission were developed during the eighteenth century. It can be called the first “book-centered” age of knowledge, that is, the period where the Book begins to fulfill all its potential functions, and where the scribal tradition irrevocably succeeds the oral as the primary means of transmitting and preserving cultural codes. The study of communication is the study of relationships. Artistic communication presupposes interaction between the artist and his spectator, his reader, his “consumer.” Communication also presupposes interaction between leader and follower, governor and governed, controller and controlled. All relationships which to gether form the contextual matrix known as “culture” or “society” are forms of communication. The eighteenth century was a period of new adventures in the verbal and non-verbal processes of communication, and, simultaneously, of a great mass of commen tary on these processes. It is not a coincidence, for example, that Preface I xiii first-person narration was the dominant narrative mode of the period. Both in the memoir-novel and the pre-eminent epistolary novel, writers sought to establish intimate contact, at first decep tive and later conspiratorial, with their readers. (In fact, it is this progression from duplicity to cooperation which marks the devel opment of most prose fiction of the era.) What better way was there to convince a skeptical public to accept the frightening though obsessive urge toward self-discovery through self-examina...
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Nov 16, 2010
Evan Imber‐Black 
Open Access
