The New Eighteenth Century

Theory, Politics, English Literature

Felicity Nussbaum, Laura Brown

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040353721
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Dedication
• Original Copyright Page
• New Preface
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 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
• Notes
• Index
• Contributors