Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An MLQ Reader (review)

Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An MLQ Reader. Edited by Marshall Brown. Durham NC: Duke UP, 1999. vi + 279 pp. $17.95.

In what does the "literature" that enables "literary history" consist? Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An MLQ Reader, edited by Marshall Brown, promises a theoretically subtle and timely account of the kind of history that can have meaning as "literary history" today. In common with an earlier volume, The Uses of Literary History, also edited by Marshall Brown, the eleven essays collected here were originally published as articles in MLQ--most not later than 1994--in the first rather than the second half, that is, of the nineteen nineties. The collection evokes for this reason, and with commendable coherence and consistency of voice, the consciousness of a critical-historical moment of its own. This is suggested by the slight "period" quality of some of the critical prose, in a world where works are "textualizing practices," attitudes are "constructed" and discourses "differential." There is a tendency to verbal play and reversals in some of the titles of essays, and a deconstructionist pitch in some of the essayists' methods. All the essays are by eminent, and sometimes exceptionally eminent, figures within the North American academy across a broad subject range, from professors of Comparative Literature, English, French, and German, to Romance Languages and Literatures. The learned eclecticism of the volume can be gathered by noting what the contributors are also working upon: gambling in early modern Europe; pathological grief and secularization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; a history of the family in relation to the novel. Several of the essays provide commentary that moves outwards from, and then returns to, a single, central text or literary work. At least five of the essays are concerned with the novel or the status of the novel in some way. At least seven out of the eleven touch on, or treat in some more direct regard, the perennial issue of gender. Two are specifically concerned with texts of eighteenth-century French literature and one with literature in German. Two contain, and discuss, images and pictures. Some of the essays, attractively in my view, retain signs of their origins as delivered addresses or talks to an audience of professional conference delegates.

All the essays are contemporary exemplars of literary-historical scholarship in practice. In this the volume as a whole can be seen not just as a collection of the "best" individual pieces previously printed in MLQ but as a distinctive contribution to the theory of literary history with particular reference to the eighteenth century. (Albeit that the volume tends to concentrate on the later part of the eighteenth century rather than the age of Swift, Addison, or Pope). The need for the collection is engagingly established in the "Introduction" by Marshall Brown. Here Brown observes that "as texts of literary history, books are not reducible to their content or their ideological statements" (2). The mission of MLQ with respect to literary history, as re-inforced by this "Reader," is thus to reverse the "reduction of the cultural to the social, and within the social to the realm of practice" in "what today is often, perversely, termed cultural studies" (3). To quote the editor's central encapsulating claim: "The essays in this book reinstate the imagination without which culture is, finally, just nature" (4). Judged by this commitment to the literary constituents of culture, then, this book should be regarded as a potentially important attempt to re-define the threshold of literary-historical study. Certainly the anthology seeks a point of balance between "literature" and "history." The contributors are dedicated to finding the thin line where the "literary" does not supervene to divide its study from the principles of historical writing, and the historical does not distort the study of literature to the point where defining qualities of literature are lost. From the work of R.S. Crane in the 1950s, through the pages of the...