Elongating the Already “Long” Eighteenth Century

I entered the M.A. program at Wayne State intent on studying British literature of the Romantic period and continued into the Ph.D. program immersed instead in the period leading into it: the Long Eighteenth Century, a field that is admittedly almost comically broad and overreaching in its use of the word “long” to stretch forward into Romanticism and backward into premodernism. This overreaching, claiming new territory via nomenclature is, perhaps, appropriate. During the eighteenth century, expansion (intrusion?) occurred on multiple fronts: the British Empire infiltrated colonized lands; the previously primarily financial institution of marriage expanded into the companionate ideal we know it as today; nonfiction expanded into the realm of fiction, when the novel arose in its modern form combining tactics of nonfiction journalism (realism) with the ancient, narrative form of the romance (so well articulated in Lennard J. Davis’s seminal book Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel). Specializing in the Long Eighteenth Century, then, allows me to think and write about the conditions that allowed for the cultural expansion that unleashed the ego-centric, toddler-esque behavioral tendencies (i.e., defining one’s self as separate from others, defining the world in terms of what’s “mine!”) that we are living with, and perhaps growing out of, to this day. It provides a historical framework and interesting critical lenses through which to think and write about humanity’s development at a tipping point. 

Enlightenment-spawned delineations such as that between fiction and nonfiction (in the form of novel, widely acknowledged as having emerged in its modern form during the eighteenth century), between marrying for money and marrying for love (or at least companionship, encapsulated in the companionate marriage market), between men and women (and the behaviors, reading, and writing habits deemed appropriate for each), and between animals and supposedly non-animals (humans), to name a few, are examples of the interesting binaries ripe for deconstruction in this field. The feminist critical lenses with which I tend to work are especially prominent, and fun to apply, in eighteenth-century studies. 

Paradoxically, it is perhaps literary scholars’ love of deconstructing binaries and its associated discomfort with delineating between anything (that would be an act of violence), let alone a historical time period to tell us something about humanity by breaking it down, that leads to this field’s colonization, or encroachment on/into other fields. Professor Scrivener’s article “Inside and Outside Romanticism” also thinks about the eighteenth-century field itself in terms of its colonizing: “‘Romantic-era literature’ usually designates the writing in the fifty years from 1780 to 1830, but there is also the long eighteenth century that subsumes Romanticism within non-Romantic literary-historical narratives, and some periodizations lay claim to a Romantic century, 1750 to 1850, colonizing [my emphasis] both the age of Johnson and the early Victorian period” (151). While the time period rationale is questionable, the desire to connect disparate time periods is a collaborative spirit that infuses the field. 

In her 2018 state of the field, Cynthia Wall points to scholars’ “great deal of interest in collaboration and community” while simultaneously comparing scholars’ “failure to collaborate” to “the unhappiness of Fanny [Burney] at the Court of the mad king” (733). In drawing attention to Frances Burney’s diaries, an edited collection of which was published in 2017, Wall connects a (nonfictional) experience dramatized by a famous (fiction) author of the time period with the people who study it. Wall unites fiction and nonfiction, feminist and novel studies, the eighteenth-century and the present, conveniently bringing together seemingly disparate ideas into the recent state of the field, all of which I am intereseted in. 

Works Cited 

Scrivener, Michael. “Inside and Outside Romanticism.” Criticism, vol. 46, no. 1, 2004, pp. 151-165. 

Wall, Cynthia. “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 58, no. 3, 2018, pp. 731-803.