The switch in terminology from Renaissance to was plainly a deliberate intervention in the moment of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, which dates from the mid-1980s, and was designed to undermine periodization as well as the hitherto exclusive focus on elite culture and high cultural texts. (Though see Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England 19-44 for evidence that early modern is of Victorian coinage, and 45-70 for evidence that the phrase had wide currency among economic historians in the first half of the twentieth century.) Furthermore, renaissance, like Restoration or BC/AD, is hardly a neutral term, but presumes some progressive, whiggish awakening from a stupor. You are already taking sides using such terminology, and it is fair to say that still scholars who prefer renaissance tend to be more conservative and those who prefer early modern tend to be more progressive.Institutionally, some of the readers of this journal will remember that when we began organizing the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, this meeting was designed to attract work beyond Europe and North America, and as such renaissance is hopelessly Eurocentric and has little meaning or no meaning for Asia or Africa, no reference outside of a European context. GEMCS was intended from the beginning to be more inclusive chronologically and a conceptual alternative to the American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies.Conceptually, allows, enables, and encourages a continuity, rather than the absolute breaks that course catalogs, college curriculums, and the Modern Language Association job list categories still impose. These are categories that, despite endless critique, by simple inertia and institutional investment as yet determine training, hiring, and, through the curriculum, teaching. Nonetheless, the switch to clearly encourages a longer view, a greater arch (though not quite like Annales longue duree), whether one stresses continuity or rupture. Versions of the longer arch are nicely exemplified in Raymond Williams's work, Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). Early also has the advantage of obviating such clumsy terms as the long eighteenth though it invites such equally clumsy substitutes as late modern (a description that, in fact, I prefer to eighteenth century). Wherever one's work is situated in the eighteenth century, as a cultural and historical formation, it has more in common with an agricultural old society (as Harold Perkins has it), a face-to-face society (as Peter Laslett has it), than it does to an urbanized, industrialized, and capitalized nineteenth century. Michael McKeon's Secret History of Domesticity offers a particular rich recent example of such fruits, as a prehistory of domesticity and the novel, reaching further back than any study has before. As such, it is unlike all the histories of the novel spawned by Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel that are predicated on novelty and an absolute break between seventeenth-century romance and eighteenth-century novel. For those of us (here read leftist) still given to the larger view, for whom Williams's dialectic of residual, dominant, and emergent still offers the most flexible, capacious, and efficacious model for understanding cultural change, the larger arch is a precondition of any adequate narrative of change. …
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Sep 5, 2020
Paulo Fernando Marschner + 1
Open Access
