1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English
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.
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
Biography
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.
