Introduction: New Approaches to the Eighteenth Century

Yet the freely-roaming, youthful curiosity about everything and nothing in our archive has also helped to prolong the life of the empirical detail-not only as an untheorized, but now also as an unhistoricized legitimizing ground of inquiry. [...]even young scholars at this year's ASECS could be seen to present the whimsical and the odd as the inherently interesting. In response to the problems created by ecocriticism's elevation of realism into a representational gold standard, for example, Hitt questions the generic divisions between poetry and fiction, divisions that were fortified by arguments on the rise of realism in the eighteenth-century novel. Because it is so rigorously engaged with the limiting function of boundaries and because it sees eighteenth-century writing as promoting far more complex relationships, Hitt's essay on ecocriticism offers a broad meditation on the ethical, political, and pedagogic imperatives of criticism and our relationship to the past. Hamm explores the history of the Tonson franchise in order to locate the 1709 The Works of Mr. William Shakespear [sic] amidst the publication of identically formatted works of 15 other authors. Because Shakespeare exists as one of a flight of British writers worthy of such a series, Hamm concludes, these Tonson editions "mark an important point in the development of the English literary canon, the idea of which is manifested in the specific material qualities of this series of publications, in these books as concrete objects." 5 The chief concerns the SHARP website identifies are very precisely those of eighteenth-century scholars who focus on publishing history: "the social, cultural, and economic history of authorship; the history of the book trade, copyright, censorship, and underground publishing; the publishing histories of particular literary works, authors, editors, imprints, and literary agents; the spread of literacy and book distribution; canon formation and the politics of literary criticism; libraries, reading habits, and reader response."