ABSTRACT
The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life.
Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|41 pages
Empire
part II|40 pages
Caribbean and Transatlantic Studies
part III|40 pages
Nation
part IV|28 pages
Class Relations and Political Economy
part V|43 pages
The State Church and Its Challengers
part VI|28 pages
Legal and Human Rights
part VII|41 pages
Writing Race and Racial Identities
part VIII|43 pages
Gender, Queer and Trans Studies
part IX|27 pages
Women's Writing
part X|43 pages
Disability Studies
part XI|42 pages
Spectacle and Performance
part XII|40 pages
Literature, Philosophy, Theory
part XIII|41 pages
Science and Culture
part XIV|30 pages
Eco-critical and Post-Humanist Studies