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Viewed as a crucible of modernity, the eighteenth century has become a special focus of Modern Language Quarterly, a journal that has led the revival of literary history as a subject for empirical study and theoretical reflection. The essays in this volume, which cover a broad cross-section of eighteenth-century literary history, represent the best studies of this period recently published in MLQ.From the beginning of the century to its end, and across national borders, contributors explore the intersection of literary studies with history, philosophy, psychology, and the visual arts. They discuss a creative range of topics, including feminism, nationalism, domestic ideology, the classical novel-drama-lyric poetry triad, and both aesthetic and philosophical writings. This span of subjects and approaches extends the focus of Eighteenth-Century Literary History beyond its period to project a spirit of inquiry onto literary history in general.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Provocations / Marshall Brown
A Novel Nation; or, How to Rethink Modern England as an Emergent Culture / Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse
Nobody's Story: Gender, Property, and the Rise of the Novel / Catherine Gallagher
Reading Shakespeare's Novels: Literary History and Cultural Politics in the Lennox-Johnson Debate / Jonathan Brody Kramnick
Godwin and the Republican Romance / Jon Klancher
Feminine Identity Formation in
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre / Jill Anne Kowalik
Mary Robinson and the Myth of Sappho / Jerome McGann
Reading the Moment and the Moment of Reading in Graffigny's
Lettres d'une peruvienne / Thomas M. Kavanagh
De-familiarizing the Family; or, Writing Family History from Literary Sources / Ruth Perry
The Anxiety of Change: Reconfiguring Family Relations in Beaumarchais's Trilogy / Christie McDonald
The Eighteenth-Century Beauty Contest / Michael B. Prince
Descartes's Cogito, Kant's Sublime, and Rembrandt's Philosophers: Cultural Transmission as Occasion for Freedom / Sanford Budick
Contributors
Index
About the author
Marshall Brown, ed.
