Introduction: New Approaches to the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This essay examines two of the more innovative fictions of Sarah Fielding and her collaborator Jane Collier as experiments in a neoclassical mode. Fielding's (and Collier's) The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754) dismisses several philosophical schools and mimics the structure of a Greek tragedy as it displays the essential selfishness of romantic love and the fatuous yearnings of audiences who read for it, and Collier's An Essay on The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) imitates the structure and rhetorical strategy of Ovid's Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) as it dissects just how tormenting love, and other kinds of dependency, can be. What these books have in common is their critique of the concept of romance: they want to demystify it as dangerous for women. They do that, in part, more by provoking than by invoking the authority of the classical tradition—using it to diagnose some problems of modern life.

The main current of eighteenth-century studies still runs deep with empirical details. As we go to press, the 2004 meeting of ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) has just concluded. The meeting had something for everyone, from panels devoted to teaching poetry in the undergraduate classroom to roundtable discussions about the future of sexuality studies. Yet amidst all the variety and methodological self-consciousness that one can find these days, an impressively large number of papers justified their claims for a hearing by emphasizing the curious and the particular. Discovering new facts, recovering and editing neglected or obscure texts and authors, or lingering over the odd and the rare still constitute central demonstrations of scholarly legitimacy in eighteenth-century studies. Such respect for the empirical is laudable, even exemplary. It reflects how much the eighteenth-century archive is still under construction, how much work there still is to be done even in making available influential works. Who would have twenty years ago thought that there is a large body of working class poetry in the eighteenth century? And who would have expected that there is more than enough material to fill a three-volume edition, just published by Pickering and Chatto under the general editorship of John Goodrich?¹ At the same time, however, our reliance on and ease with empirical detail too often isolates such details from wider intellectual currents and theoretical problems. This continued reliance on the empirical motivates our special focus section. "New approaches" are particularly important for eighteenth-century studies because they make us rethink the details and help to show how they relate to broader intellectual currents.

The need to awaken eighteenth-century literary studies from its cozy relationship with history and empiricism is a familiar story. It was, after all, as early as 1987 that Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum diagnosed in The New Eighteenth Century a distinct resistance to theoretical discourse in a field that had always highly valued the concreteness of biography, history, and bibliography. At the same time, Brown and Nussbaum noted important efforts in the direction of more contextualized and politicized approaches, and these efforts multiplied after the publication of their volume with the spread of the new historicism. In our view, the new historicism has been in equal parts good and bad for the eighteenth century. It revitalized eighteenth-century studies because its program contained an inviting pedagogical imperative. By removing the boundaries between different kinds of texts—legal, popular, political, didactic, and literary—the new historicism leveled disciplinary hierarchies and sent countless graduate students into a suddenly demystified, open archive in which everything could be related to everything else. History learned the joys of the surprising conjunction and literature the anxious pleasures of expanding boundaries. Advice manuals on marriage and political treatises, accounting books and travel journals became quickly, alongside recognized and not-so recognized literary texts, legitimate objects of literary interpretation. This wasn't the victory of Fredric Jameson's famous dictum "always historicize!" but rather the victory of "don't hesitate, always relate!" The complaint that such seemingly arbitrary leveling of discursive differences was not historical enough and rather more...