Volume 41 Number 2

Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eighteenth Century

Greg Clingham (Ed.)

1998
196 pages
$40.00
ISBN 0838753833
Bucknell Review

Questioning History examines the historiography of postmodern phenomena (the metafictions of Jeanette Winterson, Patrick Suskind, Susan Sontag, Allen Kurzweil, Wole Soyinka, and others, as well as the representation of modern film and photography, architecture, and race) in relation to the eighteenth-century texts that they ventriloquize, including those of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, John Bunyan, John Dryden, John Gay, William Hogarth, Horace Walpole, Denis Diderot, Pierre de Laclos, and Johann Herder. "History" occupies a central yet ambiguous position in both eighteenth-century studies and postmodernism. The impact of recent theory on eighteenth-century studies has expanded the concept of history, focusing attention on marginal and alternative discourses, genres, and subjectivities. Simultaneously, the traditional eighteenth-century paradigms of reason, truth, and nature have been identified as underlying the modern concepts of self, gender, sex, nation, race, representation, truth, and history that postmodern and postcolonial critiques challenge in the name of a more liberated and pluralistic problematics. Questioning History (together with its forthcoming companion volume, Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-Century Culture) is a collection of essays that identifies this postmodern challenge, but questions its version of eighteenth-century historiography by demonstrating that historiography is to be complicit with and implicit in the postmodern project itself. By identifying a dialogic rather than a monologic relation between postmodern and Enlightenment discourses, this work offers a theoretically and historically nuanced account of eighteenth-century liminality, and makes a timely and original contribution to the study of the eighteenth century and its appropriation by postmodernism.

Contributors: Julie C. Hayes, Allen Michie, Greg Clingham, Lee Morrissey, Philip E. Baruth, Nancy M. West, Clement Hawes, William C. Mottolese, and Bob Chase.

About the editor:

Greg Clingham is emeritus professor of English at Bucknell University, a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and the author or editor of ten books, including Johnson, Writing, and Memory. From 1996 to 2018, he was director of the Bucknell University Press.