In and After the Beginning

Kevin L. Cope's In and After the Beginning contends the centrality of beginnings to notions of narrative, philosophy, and history that were newly emerging in the eighteenth century, calling into question the usual critical habit of focusing on endings - following the chronological progress of a plot to its climactic conclusion. Challenging traditional approaches that ""shoot past early-eigtheenth-century ephemera in order to get quickly to climactic celebrities like Jane Austen or Samuel Taylor Coleridge,"" Cope argues that the idea of beginnings, and the convergence of disparate narrative and historical parts into new starting points, are not background tendencies: they are central concerns that underwrite all new genre and social institutions of the era. Students and scholars of the long eighteenth century will appreciate Cope's fundamental depiction of literary and social progress as complex phenomena borne of vast arrays of events, rather than of linear steps, will address any reader interested in narratology, historicity, and even postmodernity.