Preface

PrefaceutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The fourth annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Stud ieswas held at McMaster University, Hamilton, Canad a,from May 7th to 9th, 1973. David Williams, Chairman of the Program Committee, and his colleagues arranged for the presentation there of more than sixty papers on a very wid e range of topics. With one exception,* the essays in this collection were chosen from those read at the meeting, the field s they represent includ ing history of law, social history, philosophy, musicology, and art history, as well as English, French, German, and Spanish literary criticism, literary history, or history of id eas. In collecting the essays for this volume, the Pub licationsCommittee of the Society has mad e no effort to present a special theme or sub ject examined from the vantage point of d iverse specialists. Programs of past meetings of the Society have includ eda single symposium, whose sub jectprovid edb otha theme for the meeting itself, and not quite incid entally,a title for the volume of the Proceed ings that b ecame at least a partial record of the occasion. But the program offered at McMaster University, much larger than those held earlier, d id not give its chief attention to one theme. It comprised ,instead of one symposium, several plenary sessions, at each of which a b road sub jectwas d iscussed ;in ad d ition,it includ ed numerous section meetings, held more or less simultaneously, on a great variety of topics. The Pub licationsCommittee has sought to represent this catholicity in the present volume, which though a limited record of the annual meeting, is a record nevertheless. The question what use there can b e in inter-d isciplinarystud iesof the sort ♦ Homer O. Brown, “The Displaced Self in the Novels of Defoe,” first appeared in ELH, 38 (1971); it was chosen by the Society for its annual award as the best scholarly article of the year in eighteenth-century studies. ix x I PrefaceutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA represented b y the Society’s annual volume has many answers, no doubt. It is always valuable, of course, to gather information, to know more after reading a book or an article than one knew before. And it is useful, too, to have a sense for work in fields related to one’s own. But such reasons for promulgating books like this one seem insufficient. At least it hardly seems rebuttable that fortuitous exceptions apart, every reader of essays outside his speciality will be in no position to do more than acquire an obvious level of information from them. However clear and persuasive the arguments, their implications for the specialist are likely to be beyond the non-specialist, a conclusion that supports a widely held view that inter-disciplinary studies are for the most part only superficially valuable. Such studies may not themselves be superficial, of course; still, only a small part of what they say is likely to be available to the general reader, as I have already suggested. But there seems to be a third way in which these essays may work on the mind. I take the clue from the stated or implied aims of several of the following papers themselves. These do not primarily stimulate the subtle modification of opinions already held by the reader—a response of the sympathetic specialist, presumably. Nor do they offer, primarily, a new body of information—information available to the specialist and the non-specialist alike. Instead, they aim at the conversion of the reader’s way of seeing things. The essays by Henry E. Allison, Homer 0. Brown, Ralph Cohen, Walter Grossmann, Kathryn Hunter, Martin Kallich, Eve Katz, and Carey McIntosh are among those that in one way or another urge the reader to a new perspective. They do not move him to see an old thing modified, so much as they expect him to view it as radically different from what it has generally been thought to be—which is to say they try to repudiate and replace an established and respected way of seeing. Obviously almost any essay is likely, in some degree, to do all three things—provide information, modify existing...