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30 - More is different: literary change in the mid and late eighteenth century

from PART VI - CONCLUSION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Clifford Siskin
Edited by
John Richetti
John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

Because something is happening here

But you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr Jones?

Bob Dylan

Something happened

Between 1700 and 1800 the body of writing we now call ‘Literature’ changed. Whatever the exact placement of the bookends or the particular labels, all of our literary histories of the eighteenth century tell tales of difference. Even proponents of the ‘long’ eighteenth century extend the time frame not because they presume continuity but because they want the discontinuities within their area of expertise. While there is considerable disagreement about the date and nature of those changes, our anthologies enshrine the overall effect: what began as Neoclassical or Augustan ended as Romantic. We know something happened during the eighteenth century but we are not quite sure what it was.

The task is complicated from the start – that is, from our failure to agree on when the ‘eighteenth century’ starts. Although some of our anthologies and literary histories observe the double zeroes, most bundle it into a larger package that starts decades earlier than 1700. Paired with the Restoration, as in this volume, the eighteenth century becomes part of a period (1660–1780) that is fully one-third in the seventeenth century. Blackwell raises that percentage to 40 by pushing the start date back to an even earlier political event; their 1996 anthology runs from the English Civil War (1640) to the French Revolution (1789). ‘Both events’, notes the editor, ‘influenced literature.’

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 795 - 823
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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