ABSTRACT
For many years, ‘the eighteenth century’ meant political corruption, Augustan satire and the rise of the novel—or, in the words of Sylvia Plath, ‘all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason’. 1 Academic accounts of the period were restricted to discrete narratives with little interplay between the disciplines. Preoccupations such as the growth of the middle classes recurred in a variety of contexts, but there was rarely any sense that historians could learn from philosophers, or art historians from geographers. Fortunately this is no longer the case. Post-structuralist formations have encouraged a more sophisticated and interdisciplinary approach to period study and as a result we have a range of ‘new’ eighteenth centuries; not all of these are structured around ‘theory’ but few are wholly untouched by it. 2 Therefore, although some doyens of the period demonstrate a touchingly uncritical belief in a monolithic ‘enlightenment’, not many contemporary commentators are likely to represent satire or the novel as self-sufficient genres that can be detached from culture (in its widest sense) or from theories of readership and textual production.
