Bucknell University Press, 1996–2016: Two Decades of Eighteenth-Century Scholarship

Entrée

In 1968, Bucknell University Press was founded to purvey academic studies in the humanities, the social and the hard sciences. It was part of an ambitious consortium, the Associated University Presses (itself established two years earlier), which included the Delaware, Fairleigh Dickinson, Lehigh, and Susquehanna Presses. (In 2010, Rowman and Littlefield replaced the AUP as the parent distribution company.) Greg Clingham, the fourth director of the press, took over in 1996, a post he retains to this day—making him the longest-tenured head in Bucknell's history. He has expanded coverage to include such areas as German literature and culture, Latin American literature and theory, Irish writers, Russian and comparative humanities, as well as Africana studies. However, for many readers of Eighteenth-Century Life, the most significant consequence of his stewardship must lie in his promotion of and tenacious support for scholarship devoted to the long eighteenth century. A cursory glance at recent listings by its principal peers, Oxford, Cambridge, Delaware, and (the now, sadly, defunct) AMS Press, reveals that Bucknell is currently the preeminent publisher in this field. It has become, and deservedly so, the press of choice for numerous top scholars in the field, as well as an avenue for emerging scholars to find their voice and audience. In the following pages, I will survey some of the more significant and representative books devoted to the long eighteenth century that Bucknell published over the past two decades, categorizing and assessing them, and finally, tentatively note some trends and themes emerging from this collocation.

My survey follows a thematic organization, locating and examining major authors and genres, intellectual history, gender and cultural studies, and so forth. This arrangement has the virtue of lending some structure to the vast number of titles at hand (see the bibliography for a comprehensive catalogue—by my count, 169). But the categories are at times loose and baggy, such that decisions on where to put what may possibly seem arbitrary. For example, Bonnie Prince Charlie could have easily been placed in the category of cultural studies rather than in the pictorial arts grouping to which it was ultimately consigned. This fluid categorizing could be extended to any number of other examples found below, which speaks as much to the interdisciplinary nature of the various studies as to the permeability of the categories themselves. The organizational logic ultimately emerging, however, does bring a sense of order to a large, complex, and varied set of volumes and, I hope, promotes clarity and coherence.

Milton and Blake

We begin with a pair of authors that bookend the long eighteenth century, John Milton and William Blake. These two are more typically peeled off into the Renaissance and Romantic periods, respectively, for good reasons. But Milton was a contemporary of Dryden's, just as Blake was of Cowper's. Bringing them into this essay's ambit, therefore, is historically justified, and it offers some intriguing insights into the authors more traditionally welcomed into the long eighteenth century. If the tortuous, baroque prose of the Ready and Easy Way contrasts markedly against the lucid, clean-limbed syntax of the Two Treatises of Government, if the complex and rolling enjambment marking book 9 of Paradise Lost departs sharply from the tight heroic couplets enfolding Shaftesbury's seduction of Monmouth in Absalom and Achitophel, there are close consonances and contiguities as well. The prose and poetry of the more representative writers Restoration England display a muscular intelligence and sinewy verbal energy shared by Milton. At the other end of the chronology, the deceptive simplicity of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience bears comparison with, to name but two examples, the folk ballads published by Bishop Percy in 1760s and with Christopher Smart's verses for children, while the evocative mysticism of Blake's prophetic books finds its elder cousin in the raptures of Smart's Jubilate Agno.

Earl Miner's Paradise Lost, 1668–1968 is perhaps the most important book published on Milton in the past few decades. This folio-size volume assembles an encyclopedically dense collection of...