The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of ＂civilizational＂ differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life.

Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.

Sarah Eron is a Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, where she specializes in the literature, philosophy, and culture of the long eighteenth century (1660-1830). Her work entertains cross-disciplinary questions that motivate the broader fields of cognitive literary studies, disability studies, and the history of science. She is the author of Mind over Matter: Memory Fiction from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen (2021) and Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment (2014). Her articles have appeared in Studies in Romanticism; Studies in the Novel; Eighteenth-Century Novel; Eighteenth-Century Studies; Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture; Victorian Poetry; and Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly.

Nicole N. Aljoe is a Professor of English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. She is the Co-Director of The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Mapping Black London, and the Director of the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac. Her research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literatures. The author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1836 (2012) and co-editor of Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (2014) as well as A Literary History of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream (2018), she has written essays that have appeared in African American Review, American Literary History, Anthurium, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Early American Literature, and Women’s Studies.

Suvir Kaul is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics (2015); Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2009); Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (2000); and Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (1992). He has edited The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (2001) and co-edited Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005). He teaches eighteenth-century British literature and culture; South Asian writing in English; and critical theory, including postcolonial studies.