In a letter written in the late 1730s, the poet Thomas Gray gives a ‘true & faithful Narrative’ of how his ‘very tranquil’ studies are ‘suddenly alarmd with a great hubbub of Tongues’. The voices do not come from the street as one might think. Instead they are produced by his books. Madame de Sévigné, the seventeenthcentury letter writer, complains that Aristotle is squeezing her sixth volume to death but Aristotle insists that he has ‘as much right to be here as you’. De Sévigné's cousin, the Comte de Bussy, refuses to help because he himself is being killed by Strabo, the ancient geographer. Finding himself beside Euclid, Nicholas Boileau wonders why ‘any Man of Sense will have a Mathematician in his Study’. Agreeing, Jonathan Swift suggests that ‘Metaphysicians and Natural Philosophers’ should be the next to go. Meanwhile John Locke speculates that ‘our owner must have very confused ideas, to jumble us so strangely together’ (CTG i 93–4).

As well as revealing the heterogeneous knowledge that would later inform Gray's poetry, the letter prompts questions about the relationship between culture and history. Like all books, this current study emerges from its own ‘hubbub of Tongues’. And like all writers I have had to hush some voices while amplifying others. The literary-historical conventions that I have inherited, however, do not allow me to arrange those voices with complete freedom. If I were to place Swift before Strabo, or Euclid after Locke, I would have to justify my apparent disregard of historical sequence. The second half of this introduction will use Thomas Gray's letter to argue that such linearity can be both limiting and misleading. But before presenting my case for a non-sequential version of literary history, I want to explore the meaning and repercussions of the term ‘pre-romantic’. As well as presenting an alternative approach to the poetry of the midand late-eighteenth-century, this section will argue that the invention of ‘pre-romanticism’ is typical of the processes by which literary criticism diminishes certain forms of writing in order to privilege others. In other words, pre-romanticism is a constructed category, and its construction illuminates the larger workings of literary history.