Introduction

What conditions are necessary in order for a new frontier to emerge from within the dominant culture? How does the dominant culture come to terms with the sharp divisions within it? What is the relation between an enlightened vision of the world and the mental construction of the other? What might occur when two distinct cultures meet for the first time? In this book review forum, four scholars from different disciplines critique a number of recent publications that explore various frontiers of culture.

How did the culture of women travelers writing in England construct an aesthetics of emancipation? Syndy Conger aligns herself with Elizabeth Bohl’s examination of the intersection of the female voice with traditional aesthetic discourse and the construction of a different cultural entity that began to emerge out of the dominant culture. What was the relation between the abolition and the emancipation of the slaves in the eighteenth century? Vincent Carretta ponders several new and difficult questions while critically assessing Joan Baum’s book on the canonical men of English Romantic poetry and Doris Kadish’s and Françoise Massardier-Kenney’s edition of essays on the theory and practice of translation as cultural mediation. Why were enlightened philosophes forced to embrace the other which, in their own minds, constituted Eastern European culture? Paschalis Kitromilides examines several contributions that disclose a side of the historical Enlightenment that has yet to be wholly integrated into Western contemporary scholarship. What types of activities took place at the frontier created by the first American overseas military encounter, with the Muslims of coastal Africa? Richard Eaton’s review of Robert Allison’s study is a kind of two-edged sword that reaffirms connections between that first frontier of the past and contemporary political practices such as the demonization of the enemy. In sum, recent studies of the eighteenth century place renewed emphasis on critical self-understanding and critique the imaginative construction of reality while exploring the frontiers of culture and politics.