...next would me with a book on prostitution. Time would march on and soon I would be reading another study, of patronage, maybe, or painting, or the Corsican nationalist Pascal Paoli (the inspiration behind one of James Boswell's earliest, hero-worshipping pilgrimages, recorded in a travelogue republished this year). Like my predecessors, I have concluded that such variousness itself expresses the unruliness, inventiveness, globetrotting, zeal for accumulation, and zeal for talk that distinguish the society and culture that we signed up to study. Possibly in contradistinction to my predecessors, I have also found reasons to wonder whether the diversified, globalized, and broadened "long eighteenth century" at issue in recent scholarship is, in its multifariousness, putting pressure on the temporal framework we had been deploying to label and study it and make it "a field." In new ways some scholars are led by their inquiries to strain against, or snub, the periodization schemes that others have used without fuss. They are led to postulate alternative periods, subsumed within alternative histories.

Last year in this space Cynthia Wall remarked on how her reading marathon had ultimately ratified a comment Northrop Frye made about the eighteenth century's decorous "sense of what it means to be a century": with the Glorious Revolution happening in 1688 and the storming of the Bastille coming round punctually in 1789, our period, Frye intimated, can feel more solid and less of a fabrication than others. (1) Wall also acknowledged, however, that Steven N. Zwicker had wondered at the outset of his 2004 SEL review whether "Restoration and eighteenth century" actually was a meaningful unit--"is this a period at all?" (2) Three years ago, Zwicker did not, it would appear, find any authors under review sharing his concern.

But this year arguments about periodization contribute to the provocation delivered by some of the best books on my roster. So does the skepticism they direct at the linear, one-stage-after-another model that equates history with progress and modernization. And the rationales they offer for unsettling established structures for dividing time do not coincide altogether with those that led Zwicker to ponder a boundary adjustment and propose a "short" eighteenth century. (Zwicker wanted to make way both for a longer seventeenth century and a more robustly demarcated Romantic period, but recent scholarship's embrace of a neo-Fryean "Age of Sensibility" actually renders Romanticism's boundaries blurrier rather than firmer. One sees, too, in a couple of this year's books comparable signs that the date 1789's status as the watershed moment is no longer deemed beyond dispute.) At issue for several writers under review here, those drawing on postcolonial theory especially, is a desire to go beyond a history imagined from the point of a view of a single nation and a consciousness that history looks very different--plural, nonsynchronous, uneven--once one adopts alternate frames (imperial, say, or maritime). "British literature of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties": Robert Markley gets The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 underway with a chapter so titled, cleverly capturing the parochialism of English departments' accustomed ways of telling historical time. The counterpart title, likewise conjuring up a time out of joint, is Ian Baucom's "Liverpool: Capital of the Twentieth Century," title for the opening chapter of his Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, reprise of Walter Benjamin's "Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century," and expression of a periodization scheme in which the twentieth century, our "long contemporaneity," both begins in eighteenth-century Liverpool capital houses and insurance brokerages and precedes the nineteenth century. Reading historically, restoring texts to their contextual environment, becomes something more robust than the default mode for literary studies when animated by this kind of curiosity--also discernible in studies this year by Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Daniel O'Quinn, and others--about what, when, and where past history was.

I was intrigued this year by scholars' willingness to think of the eighteenth century as present in the present, as by the way they model an understanding of time as more than a regular succession of dates--an understanding of hauntings, echo effects, and uncanny anticipations as likewise being the stuff of historical time. This was fun and edifying. (3) Of course, such redescriptions of historical time, which substitute a kind of plural, nonsynchronous multihistoricality for good old universal history, make a comprehensive description of what we are currently conversing about that much more daunting a task.

Certainly, it remains the case that most of the literary studies I read conform methodologically with the protocols, familiar since new historicisms were new, of the "discourses of" study or the "literature-and" study: i.e., discourses of madness; eighteenth-century literature and Atlantic slavery, etc. My chosen mode of sifting the abundance for better or worse reaffirms the predominance of this model; in the eight sections that follow, this essay categorizes books principally by theme, folding in editions with monographs wherever possible. It is noteworthy that I felt justified in including a section covering literature and religion, registering the surprisingly high profile that topic enjoyed this year, and again registering the buzz around periodization I evoke above. Our narrating of our modernity often depends on the idea that there is first an age of faith, then our secular age, and that there is no overlap between them--but just that idea is probed in studies I describe hereafter.

What my thematic survey of the year's work cannot reflect, unfortunately, is that the best of this year's scholarship in literary studies, far from dissolving literature into (cultural) history, exhibits a close-grained attention to form. Wall teaches us to discern the nuance in an eighteenth-century description; Eve Tavor Bannet, to read the silences in eighteenth-century letters; Lori Branch and Lorna Clymer, in diverse ways, to connect repetition in poetry with ritual in religion: these are only three of several proofs that literary studies is still able to do things cultural history cannot do and that it does them. In an equally encouraging way, the best of the historians whose works appeared on my roster--Deborah Valenze's name comes to mind--depict acts of the literary imagination as modes of making history in their own right.

REMEMBERING EMPIRE

Several books this year query where that history behind eighteenth-century British literature took place, doing so in ways that occasionally lead them, as noted above, to query when it did. This happens as they highlight the dislocations that constitute an imperial economy: the long-distance exchange of commodities; the journeys of explorers, merchants, transported convicts, indentured servants, and slaves.

Intent on conceiving of a philosophy of history and historical hauntings adequate to those dislocations, Baucom in Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History brilliantly renews, and relocates to the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic, methods Walter Benjamin designed to investigate the mysteries of nineteenth-century capital. Baucom's central artifact, read as searchingly as Benjamin read the dusty debris of Parisian arcades, is a marine insurance contract. Through that contract, the Zong incident of 1781 (occurring when the Liverpudlian captain of the slave ship the Zong ordered 130 of his African captives to be dumped overboard) was rewritten in the court of law: a case of mass murder became legible only as a story of lost cargo and claims for compensation. That contract is an artifact of a credit finance system that had transformed the irregularity and unpredictability of slavers' voyages into the even and regular network of capital circulation and a key that, in Baucom's hands, unlocks the eighteenth century's central epistemological story: the transformation of old concepts of the knowable, credible, valuable, and real and the accompanying invention of new, actuarial concepts of the typical (of typical risk, typical life expectation, typical value of a given commodity, which subordinate). The genius of insurance, Baucom observes in this mordant supplement to J. G. A. Pocock's work on credit and historical time, is that it renders valuable something that comes into being not just when things are made or exchanged but also when they cease to exist (as the Zong's owners insisted).

In the first half of Specters of the Atlantic, Baucom comments both on the training in fictionality that novel reading provided as the Atlantic world adjusted to this new world of suppositional entities and of credit and credibility and on the privileging of the typical and the average in the historicist methods that we inherit from the eighteenth century. The second half of the book adds a concern with ethical witnessing to the meditations on modern capital and time consciousness that occupy Baucom in his first five chapters. Here--in abolitionist writing, Romantic poetry, Walter Scott's historical fiction, and J. M. W. Turner's painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying--Baucom chronicles a counterdiscourse of modernity. This is a "melancholy realism" (p. 221) that refuses the logics of the exchangeable and the typical that animate eighteenth-century fiction and eighteenth-century speculation alike and that insists, instead, on the irreplaceable singularity of lost objects. Baucom himself does not hesitate to write, in the tradition of the writers he examines, as a man of feeling: poised between what (in his excellent reading of the theory of morals in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments) he calls "disinterested propriety" and "aggrieved sentiment" (p. 247), he mainly opts for the rhetorical possibilities of the latter. For me, the passion of this proposal that the Atlantic slave trade made modernity, that it constituted as central a "historical event" as the French Revolution, made reading the book an event in itself.

Engaging the turbulent interval between the American and French Revolutions, Daniel O'Quinn's Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 demonstrates that to an extraordinary degree, the English during this interval put India and points east on stage--in plays about nabobs, suttee, Captain Cook, and balloons touching down in seraglios. Armed with a masterful knowledge of the legitimate and illegitimate theaters and the environing print culture of newspaper reviews, lampoons, and cartoons, O'Quinn reconstructs the theaters' ethnography of the imperial margins. He also locates in the performance of character enacted on stage and in the house of the London theaters an autoethnographic discourse on virtue and manners. To track how the stage provided the metropolitan public with a forum for self-evaluation and self-regulation is, O'Quinn proposes, to track the birth pangs of the new forms of subjectification--put more simply, the imagining of middle-class identity--that arose in response to the imperial crises of the late eighteenth century: the loss of America, the sudden expansion of the East India Company's powers to plunder, and the challenge that the hybrid status of the Company, which was at once a commercial and a governmental entity, posed to traditional understandings of state sovereignty.

O'Quinn begins with the 1770s, a time of worry about imperial decline and the contribution that the impaired manliness of the fashionable gentleman might make to that decadence. He ends his story around 1800 when the autoethnographical experiments in self-stylization and styles of othering that he finds in earlier sentimental comedies and pantomimes give way to "forms of spectacle that enact cultural and racial supremacy" (p. 9): as attempts to bring the long war with the sultans of Mysore into performance, such spectacles, part 3 of the book demonstrates, unify their audience as they interpellate them as white and English, identities that the audience members possess in new ways as race becomes "something essential rather than local and contingent" (p. 9). In between, in part 2, O'Quinn reconstructs women playwrights' "ethical spectatorship of governance" (p. 117)--that of Elizabeth Inchbald in particular, who astonishingly wrote twenty plays involving Indian subjects--and turns as well to the oratorical performances defining the trial of Warren Hastings.

O'Quinn's focus on Britain's Asiatic rather than Atlantic empire is refreshing, as is his decision to spotlight the 1770s and 1780s and so counter Romanticists' tendency to make the decade that follows the taking of the Bastille the watershed moment for change. (O'Quinn speculates, in fact, that the familiar periodization is symptomatic of Romanticists' own Romanticism--that the 1790s stabilize a prior and much more threatening, because less recognizable, instability.) Throughout he models a new, productive way of reading theater, taking his cue from the audiences, who, he states, were "extremely curious about their reactions to performances, not because they were obsessed with the aesthetic merit of a particular play, but because plays at this historical moment were negotiating and presenting the transformations in British society on a nightly basis" (p. 11).

Markley's The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 might be read as a prequel to Staging Governance. The would-be imperialists who set out for China, say, from Stuart England--great-grandfathers of O'Quinn's nabobs--could not help but notice, however, the economic and military inferiority of the kingdom they called home. Home was the margins of a globe dominated by the empires of the Far East. Over the last decade revisionist economic historians have been analyzing that economic dominance (which continued well into the eighteenth century) and drawing the obvious inference: in world history Western hegemony has been the exception rather than the rule. Markley is perhaps the only scholar working in English studies who knows this scholarship, and with intriguing results he makes it his launching point for a defamiliarizing account of the English writing of empire and Englishness. He reconstructs a history of encounters in which, more often than not, Englishmen's efforts to trade in the East as equal partners ended in failure or, quite literally, in kowtowing. As Markley points out acerbically, such a history did not lend itself to straightforward parables of European triumphalism.

In this context European empire was the stuff of fantasy (only). The best parts of The Far East and the English Imagination scrutinize the operations of such fantasy and, in particular, the vision of miraculously inexhaustible wealth that the spice trade, with its exaggerated mark-ups, taught Europeans to associate with Indonesia, China, and Japan. The curse of scarcity, Christianity taught, was the consequence of original sin, but these places looked as if they had evaded that curse. Thus in a chapter treating Paradise Lost Markley reconstructs Milton's nervous interest in China and the challenge that the Middle Kingdom's stability, wealth, and imperturbable sinocentrism posed to his providential reading of human history. John Dryden's Amboyna, Daniel Defoe's Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and A New Voyage around the World, and book 3 of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels focus other chapters, which collectively challenge the binary schemes, setting European self against non-European "Other," of postcolonial theory. On the contrary, trade with the East, Markley demonstrates, was described during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in triangulated terms. What he finds in materials stretching from Queen Elizabeth's letter to the monarch of Sumatra to Gulliver's voyage to Japan are efforts to exclude the "third man," the hated rival from Holland, Spain, or Portugal, who competes with the English for access to Eastern abundance (p. 39).

Noting how Amboyna represents the English as the virtuous martyrs in such trade wars, Markley challenges us to write this sense of victimhood back into our discussions of the cultural meanings of global commerce. Treating a later moment in the history of European expansionism, my next two books, Lynn Festa's Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France and Brycchan Carey's British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807, are concerned, on the contrary, with how a cult of sentiment sponsored Europeans' teary contemplation of the spectacle of other people's victimhood. They also engage how this cult, less reliably, sponsored activism meant to end that suffering. Carey's pedantic book mainly retreads familiar ground, devoting the bulk of its pages to how later eighteenth-century poetry and fiction bring together slavery and sentiment and doing so without really enriching our sense of either. Much stronger is his well-researched discussion, in the book's second half, of sentimental abolitionism in lesser-known materials: sermons, parliamentary speeches, the forensic rhetoric of the courtroom. Festa covers the same historical terrain, all the while, however, posing big, bracing questions about how French and English writers understood personhood and the relations between persons and property. Pursued through readings of moral philosophy, fiction (Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and assorted it-narratives), slave narratives (whose uncanny kinship to it-narratives she traces), and the Abbe Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes, Festa's argument is, in stark terms, this: to understand why sentimentalism became the literary idiom with which to denounce and mandate European colonial activities, why sentimental novels, and not epics, were empire's literary mode, we need to restore the agonistic elements to exchanges of fellow feeling. Sympathy was valued not only for how it moved between individuals, but also for how it operated "as a form of social and cultural differentiation" (p. 3). The cohesive fiction that we can feel what another feels operates to bring together the empathetic spectators of the object of suffering (the whipped slave, the dispossessed Indian), and yet it also maintains the distance separating those spectators from the spectacle prompting their tears. As it constructs the cultural divides across which one set of people feels for (vs. with) another, sentimental discourse thus marks the limits of humanity, a project with high stakes during an age of accelerated intercultural contact. Festa's supple prose serves her well in untangling the ethical complexities of this material: she is capable both of the judicious concession--sentimentalism is not ignorant of its...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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