The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique [Hardcover]

The British Eighteenth Century and the Postcolonial Moment challenges reigning clich??s about 'modernity'. It intervenes in debates within current literary theory by means of a close engagement with texts from the British eighteenth-century, viewing the latter as a resource for the contemporary postcolonial future. Indeed, rather than 'applying' postcolonial theory to eighteenth-century texts, the book instead refines postcolonial theory by using such eighteenth-century authors as Swift, Gay, Johnson, Sterne, and Equiano. The book will interest eighteenth-century scholars, historians of the Enlightenment, scholars of postcolonial fiction, and literary historians following in the wake of Michel Foucault and Edward Said.Preface: From Crux to Critique PART I: CANNIBALIZING HISTORY: THE PROBLEM OF METALEPSIS The Global Making of the British Eighteenth Century When Fingal Lived and Ossian Sang: Eighteenth-Century Origins PART II: GLOBAL PALIMPSESTS: POSTCOLONIAL AFFILIATIONS Leading History by the Nose: Reading Origins in Laurence Sterne and Salman Rushdie Imperial Blues: Reading Nation and Empire in John Gay and Wole Soyinka Rutherford's Travels: The Palimpsest of Culture in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage PART III: IMMANENT CRITIQUE: THE BRITISH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AS RESOURCE Swift's Immanent Critique of Colonial Modernity Johnson's Immanent Critique of Imperial Nationalism Epilogue: Toward a Critical Reappropriation of Modernity

Hawes' study on the eighteenth century as a seed-bed of modernity is a well-researched, erudite study which is of value not only to those who are students of the eighteenth century, but also those who have long been immersed in the study of that time will find an interesting new twist on some of the established texts which might make them think anew about a time they thought they knew so well. - ECCB Hawes's book, however, is a valuable assesment of how the topoi of race, ethnicity, class, and nationality were internal, not created lÓ'