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SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 42.3 (2002) 619-664



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Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

Barbara M. Benedict


The separation between the public and private spheres in the long eighteenth century is dead. This is a truth universally acknowledged in Restoration and eighteenth-century studies this year. It colors examinations of genre, gender, history, and textual production and reception, and accounts for the number of books that make abstruse information, paratextual material, quirky pockets of sociability and personal and professional practices, and accounts of travel key in eighteenth-century culture. This broadened eighteenth century so strains attempts to construct a grand narrative that it takes fifty-five essays in David Womersley's A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake to map it. Scholars are now finding thrilling centers in what were once the margins of a period bounding with curiosity, experimentation, and anxiety.

This collapse of privacy and publicity also makes the later eighteenth century, when class, gender, and public culture became matters of general anxiety, newly significant. Two areas particularly galvanize critics: John Wilkes and the question of liberty, and Romanticism and the question of revolution. Many studies overtly or implicitly examine the discourse about and [End Page 619] exercise of English freedom as a social and a literary practice, and trace how it complicates the late-century drive toward political reform. The fusion of public and private also explains the fresh prominence of the memoir and the autobiography as genres that articulate an uneasy selfhood, particularly of eighteenth-century women. Fresh editions of Helen Maria Williams's Letters Written in France, in the Summer 1790, To a Friend in England; Containing Various Anecdotes Relative to the French Revolution, edited by Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser, Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, edited by Claire Grogan, and William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," edited by Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker make the genres of memory significant cultural documents. Once the idea of a separate sphere for women's writing disappears, the genres produced by and about women become part of the marketplace of print. The identity expressed by all genres becomes a fabric threaded with postures and gestures derived from and designed for a mixed-gender and public world.

Identity, indeed, is a unifying theme in studies this year. One result of this reconception of culture is the new prominence given to plays as expressions of identity far closer to novels than previously believed. Both genres dramatize an emerging early modern self pulled by conflicting forces, self-conscious, and shakily straddling choreographed public and private behavior. The ambiguity of this land-water self on stage and page prompts a fresh spurt of scholarship this year that finds criminality and masking paradigmatic of the subject in Restoration and eighteenth-century fiction and culture. Two women particularly embody this dynamic: Aphra Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft. Ambiguous, fluid figures who turned their daring and derogated sexuality into literature, who made the female body the site of ideological conflict, and who used confession as feminist polemic, these writers link the Restoration with the Romantic era as peaks of gender reformation holding together the frothy blend of the political and the personal arenas that is now the long eighteenth century.

Women's Writing, Gender, and the Genres of Memory in the Marketplace

Current feminist scholarship is reinterpreting the way women participated and wrote in early modern culture. Much recent feminist work focuses on new genres that reexamine not only the separation of spheres, but their very existence. Most notable are [End Page 620] the memoir, the autobiography, and similarly ambiguous treatments of fictionalized "fact" that precede or parallel the novel. These forms show that the representation of women crystallizes several problems of historical and literary analysis: the extent of writers' and women's agency; what agency means; the processes of cultural production; the processes of cultural reception; and the composition and behavior of society.

The intersection of public and private spheres entailed...

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