Historical Subjects: Recent Fiction about the Eighteenth Century

*NB: Appended to this review essay is a more complete list of relevant modern works, which the editor of Eighteenth-Century Life asks readers to help augment. As you read the essay and look through the appendix, readers will probably think of additional modern novels, plays, films, and imaginatively reconstructed histories set in the long eighteenth century. Please send titles to the editor (rpmacc@facstaff.wm.edu), as the journal plans to update the list once a year from here on. That arbiter has set 1960 as the arbitrary terminus a quo.

Since the early 1980s, a growing number of novelists in Britain, Europe, and their former colonies have written works set in, or in some way dealing with, the long eighteenth century. That these works constitute a genuine literary subgenre is beyond dispute, but what cultural work this subgenre might be doing is only beginning to be understood. While it would be relatively easy to argue that these novels participate in a distinctly postmodern and/or postcolonial interpretation of history, such readings would only scratch the surface of their accomplishment. Any really forceful reading of them must come to terms with why the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular should be attracting attention.

What is the draw? Two things stand out for me, both of which have been noted by other critics, in other contexts. First, in the late twentieth century we have become obsessed with the question of what it means to be human, cyberspace making us all wonder whether we are not pure mind as opposed to body, and cyborgs making us wonder just the opposite. ¹ With these questions in mind, it makes sense to look back to the origins of that dualism—to look back, in other words, to Descartes’ articulation of the idea that human beings were defined by their minds in opposition to their animal/mechanical bodies, and to the reception of his ideas over the next century or so. Second, the European empires that were taking shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have only recently been dismantled. That contemporary writers should be looking back to colonial origins—and, as Clement Hawes has argued of Midnight’s Children, undoing the self-justifying narratives of imperialism ² —is eminently comprehensible. Finally, thinking about these two points in relation to each other, a third emerges, one which suggests that the construction of the Cartesian subject as a distinctively human mind attached...