The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English

by Sarah Eron (Editor), Nicole N. Aljoe (Editor), Suvir Kaul (Editor)

Overview

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life.

Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032221106
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/25/2024
Series:	Routledge Literature Companions
Pages:	598
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sarah Eron is a Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, where she specializes in the literature, philosophy, and culture of the long eighteenth century (1660–1830). Her work entertains cross-disciplinary questions that motivate the broader fields of cognitive literary studies, disability studies, and the history of science. She is the author of Mind over Matter: Memory Fiction from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen (2021) and Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment (2014). Her articles have appeared in Studies in Romanticism; Studies in the Novel; Eighteenth-Century Novel; Eighteenth-Century Studies; Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture; Victorian Poetry; and Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly.

Nicole N. Aljoe is a Professor of English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the Co-Director of The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Mapping Black London, and the Director of the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac. Her research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literatures. The author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709–1836 (2012) and co-editor of Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (2014) as well as A Literary History of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream (2018), she has written essays that have appeared in African American Review, American Literary History, Anthurium, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Early American Literature, and Women’s Studies.

Suvir Kaul is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics (2015); Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2009); Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (2000); and Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (1992). He has edited The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (2001) and co-edited Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005). He teaches eighteenth-century British literature and culture; South Asian writing in English; and critical theory, including postcolonial studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Sarah Eron, Nicole N. Aljoe, and Suvir Kaul

 

Part I

 

Empire

 

1. Empire, Racial Capitalism, and British Culture

Suvir Kaul

 

2. Asian Empires before British Hegemony

Ashley L. Cohen

 

3. The Problem of Indigeneity

Alex Wagstaffe and Eugenia Zuroski

/ Part II

 

Caribbean and Transatlantic Studies

 

4. Early Caribbean Anglophone Literature

Cassander L. Smith

 

5. Piracy in the Caribbean

Manushag N. Powell

 

6. Slave Voices and the Archives of the Caribbean

Nicole N. Aljoe

/ Part III

 

Nation

 

7. The Cultural Making of “Great Britain”

Leith Davis

 

8. Scotland in an Anglo-centric Nation

Janet Sorensen

 

9. Irish and Anglo-Irish Writing

James Ward

 

Part IV

 

Class Relations and Political Economy

 

10. The Masterless

Charlotte Sussman

 

11. Land, Labor, Literature

John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan

 

Part V

 

The State Church and its Challengers

 

12. Dissenting Religions

Misty G. Anderson

 

13. Secularization

Corrinne Harol

 

14. Religious Toleration

David Alvarez

/ Part VI

 

Legal and Human Rights 

 

15. Literature and the Law

Melissa J. Ganz 

 

16. Theories of Consent

Kathleen Lubey

 

Part VII

 

Writing Race and Racial Identities

 

17. Writing “Race” in the Anglophone Atlantic

Ryan Hanley

 

18. The Jewish Presence in Literature and Culture

Laura J. Rosenthal

 

19. Early Black Writers: Belinda Sutton’s Childhoods

Brigitte Fielder

/ Part VIII

 

Gender, Queer and Trans Studies

 

20. Queering and Transing the Eighteenth Century

Thomas A. King

 

21. Sapphic Relations

Ula Lukszo Klein

 

22. The Challenge of Trans Theory

Declan Kavanagh

 

Part IX

 

Women’s Writing

 

23. Writing Women in the Age of Phillis: Gender and its Discontents

Susan S. Lanser

           

24. Feminisms: Intersectionality in Domestic Fiction

Victoria Barnett-Woods and Karen Lipsedge

/ Part X

 

Disability Studies

 

25. Defining Disability

D. Christopher Gabbard

 

26. Disability and Sexuality

Jason S. Farr

 

27. Rereading Disability with Race

Emily B. Stanback

 

Part XI

Spectacle and Performance

 

28. The Cultures of Performance

Daniel O’Quinn

 

29. Public Spectacle

Jean I. Marsden

 

30. Theories and Practices of Performance

Emily Hodgson Anderson

 

Part XII

 

Literature, Philosophy, Theory

 

31. Literature and Philosophy

Sean Silver

 

32. Affect Theory

Sarah Tindal Kareem

 

33. Materialism and Theories of Matter

Jess Keiser

 

Part XIII

 

Science and Culture

 

34. Eighteenth-Century Science and Culture

Tita Chico

 

35. Natural Science

Danielle Spratt

 

36. Mind, Brain, and the Rise of Cognitive Literary Studies

Sarah Eron

 

Part XIV

 

Eco-critical and Post-Humanist Studies

 

37. Posthuman Ecologies

Lucinda Cole

 

38. Humans, Machines, Automatons

Joseph Drury