A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature

General editor: Peter Brown, University of Kent at Canterbury

Old English Literature Robert Fulk (pub. Sept 2002)

Middle English Literature Andrew Galloway

English Renaissance Literature Donna Hamilton

Seventeenth-Century Literature Thomas N. Corns

Eighteenth-Century Literature John Richetti (proposed here)

Romanticism Gary Kelly

Victorian Literature James Eli Adams

Modernism Molly Hite

Twentieth-century British fiction

Irish Literature Terence Brown

Postcolonial Literature Shirley Chew

The old notion of the literature of the eighteenth century in Britain as serenely neo-classical and ‘Augustan’, dominated by a few major writers such as Pope, Swift, and Johnson, has been rejected or substantially refined by criticism and scholarship of the last thirty years, at least. Scholars now stress, correctly in my view, the changing diversity of imaginative writing throughout the century and call attention to the profoundly transitional nature of literary production that may be said to begin in 1688 with the political ferment surrounding the forced abdication of James II. Following the lead of historians, literary historians have also lately emphasized the effects on consciousness of the so-called “financial revolution,” as Britain began the shift to a modern socio-economic order in which money and credit replaced land as the basis of wealth and power. This transition works both ways, let it be noted, since there is much that survives from older social, religious, and ideological forms of consciousness, and the literary history of the period is not simply a matter of a clear prelude to an enlightened modernity. Given the relatively free and open press and thriving market for printed material in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, the traditional literary history of those years has been revised to take into account a new and raucous publishing scene in which authors and ideas compete for attention and in which the high cultural neo-classical ideal of literature supported by patronage and addressing an elite audience exists cheek-by-jowl with popular and demotic writing in the marketplace directed at a socially diverse audience for political and commercial gain. And of course critics have long been aware of the productive opposition between the Scriblerian circle of Swift, Pope, and others and many of the workers – “Dunces” in Pope’s phrase – in that marketplace, whose dominating figure is Defoe. In addition, recent years have seen the recovery of an enormous body of neglected writing, prose and verse, by women and also by non-elite class (even at times working class) writers (some of whom were women), and my history will seek to include a good deal of their work.

So the century begins with tension and conflict, with opposing notions of literary value and purpose in the air and up for grabs, and through the mid and late century one can say that there are unsettled, evolving notions of what counts as literature and what literary expression should look like. Preferences shift, audiences change, and writing looks very different at the end of the eighteenth century than it did at the end of the seventeenth century. My history of eighteenth-century British literature would seek to mark those differences and to trace those tensions as they appear in particular works from both high and low (or lower) culture and to describe how literary forms or genres in those years are dynamic or if you like opportunistic as they adapt themselves to shifts in audience expectations and ideological needs. Even in the high literary culture of the early eighteenth century, satire and polemic, parody and pastiche, are dominant trends, and that dominance signals the energizing nature of this opposition for literary production. And as the century progresses, such shifts become even more pronounced, visible in phenomena such as the popularity of those long narrative fictions we now call novels, with their self-promotion as something new, in the shifts in traditional forms such as the georgic poem and the topographical or loco-descriptive poem and the emergence of new versions of old forms such as biography and auto-biography, and in the articulation of new theories of originality, and revised notions of the psychological effects and ontological import of writing for its readers. Bakhtin’s idea that all genres become in due course “novelized” might well inform a good deal of my treatment of generic transformations through the century.

My history would avoid purely author-centered chapters (although certain major canonical authors (indicated in the working titles of chapters below) are bound to loom large and to earn a prominent place. In a one-volume history of the period, one has to sacrifice coverage to discussion of major developments and transformations in the theory and practice of imaginative writing. As Dr. Johnson once remarked, all knowledge is comparative. So the individual chapters would focus on these generic shifts and transformations, presenting individual works and authors often enough in contrasting pairs. For one obvious example, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels might well form a part of a chapter that would trace opposing notions of narrative purpose and meaning and perhaps lead to a section discussing the relative decline of satire and the emergence of the novelistic and ultimately the sentimental and the gothic modes in narrative. So, too, Fielding and Richardson and their contrasting approaches to the novel would form a good part of the novel chapter, and Johnson’s literary criticism might well be considered along side the revisionist notions of other critics and theoreticians such as Edward Young, Kames, and the Wartons. Another chapter might pair Pope and Swift as representing opposing ideas of the nature and function of poetry, with each of them exemplifying a distinct performative approach to verse and contrasting poetic identities and ambitions.

In all this I will be following the salutary emphases of recent criticism and scholarship, but I will also hope to add to these largely cultural and ideological approaches now dominant close attention where ever possible to the aesthetic, exploring when I can the superior complexity and symmetry, for example, of Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” to Defoe’s “The True Born Englishman,” or of Richardson’s Clarissa to Haywood’s Love in Excess. I would hope to bring out the special qualities of eighteenth-century writing at its most powerful and still meaningful, even while explaining its insertion in the particular cultural and ideological circumstances of the time and narrating the history of those changing circumstances through the eighteenth century. I envision a succession of relatively compact chapters (35-40 pages) that are focused on a genre or a group of authors who exemplify important developments in the literary history of the times.