British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique

CLEMENT HAWES is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, USA.

• 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 by, Enlightenment discourse, suggesting that 'the oppositional themes of our own moment replay a great many eighteenth-century debates.' By doing so, it makes a good case for the postcolonial re-readings of the era and its art." - 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era