The New Eighteenth Century
Theory, Politics, English Literature
1st Edition
Published on 1. May 2025
Book
Hardback
330 pages
978-1-041-01515-4 (ISBN)
Description
First published in 1987, The New Eighteenth Century (now with a new preface by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown) examines eighteenth century English literature's resistance to the application of new theoretical approaches and presents new work by leading scholars which both challenges this resistance and demonstrates the usefulness of feminist, Marxist, new-historicist, and psychoanalytic approaches to the analysis of eighteenth-century texts.
This book reinterprets and resituates canonical works (by such writers as Fielding, Goldsmith, and Sterne) but also explores areas and figures increasingly important to eighteenth-century study. It opens questions about the canon and about the nature of "canonicity" itself as it considers texts by women, working-class literature, guidebooks for bourgeois tourists, and aspects of the cultural and social terrain including problems of race and colonialism, capitalism, and penal institutions.
The New Eighteenth Century not only provides new ways of looking at the literature of the period but serves as a model for future work in eighteenth-century studies.
This book reinterprets and resituates canonical works (by such writers as Fielding, Goldsmith, and Sterne) but also explores areas and figures increasingly important to eighteenth-century study. It opens questions about the canon and about the nature of "canonicity" itself as it considers texts by women, working-class literature, guidebooks for bourgeois tourists, and aspects of the cultural and social terrain including problems of race and colonialism, capitalism, and penal institutions.
The New Eighteenth Century not only provides new ways of looking at the literature of the period but serves as a model for future work in eighteenth-century studies.
Reviews / Votes
Review of the first publication:'The New Eighteenth Century is an undeniably important book...I shall assign it to my students in eighteenth-century courses and seminars. If I could, I would assign it to all of my colleagues in the field.'
- Jerry C. Beasley, University of Delaware
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Postgraduate
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
Weight
780 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-041-01515-4 (9781041015154)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
approx. 07/2026
1st Edition
Routledge
€41.00
Not yet published
E-Book
05/2025
Routledge
€73.99
Available for download
E-Book
05/2025
Routledge
€73.99
Available for download
Persons
Felicity A. Nussbaum, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, has published Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre and The Arabian Nights in Historical Context with Saree Makdisi, among other books. A former president of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, she has held NEH, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships. She is currently writing plays on Hester Thrale Piozzi and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
Laura Brown is the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell. She has served as President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. And she is the author of seven books-engaging variously with drama and performance, women and imperialist ideology, sewers and oceans, lapdogs and monkeys, and now earthquakes, storms, and what she is calling the eco-other in eighteenth-century literature. The latter is the topic of her most recent book, The Counterhuman Imaginary: Earthquakes, Lapdogs, and Traveling Coinage in Eighteenth-Century Literature, published in 2023.
Laura Brown is the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell. She has served as President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. And she is the author of seven books-engaging variously with drama and performance, women and imperialist ideology, sewers and oceans, lapdogs and monkeys, and now earthquakes, storms, and what she is calling the eco-other in eighteenth-century literature. The latter is the topic of her most recent book, The Counterhuman Imaginary: Earthquakes, Lapdogs, and Traveling Coinage in Eighteenth-Century Literature, published in 2023.
Content
Revising Critical Practices: An Introductory Essay 1. Historicizing Absalom and Achitophel 2. The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves 3. "When Men Women Turn": Gender Reversals in Fielding's Plays 4. Representing an Under Class: Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett 5. The Resignation of Mary Collier: Some Problems in Feminist Literary History 6. On the Use of Contradiction: Economics and Morality in the Eighteenth-Century Long Poem 7. Heteroclites: The Gender of Character in the Scandalous Memoirs 8. Prison Reform and The Sentence of Narration in The Vicar of Wakefield 9. Johnson and the Role of Authority 10. Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and The Theatrics of Virtue 11. The Spectralization of The Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho 12. The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public Consumption of Private Property