Enlightenment critics from Dryden through Johnson and Wordsworth conceived the modern view that art and especially literature entails a double reflection: a reflection of the world, and a reflection on the process by which that reflection is accomplished. Instead “neoclassicism” and “Augustanism” have been falsely construed as involving a one-dimensional imitation of classical texts and an unselfconscious representation of the world. In fact these Enlightenment movements adopted an oblique perspective that registers the distance between past tradition and its present reenactment, between representation and presence. Two modern movements, Romanticism and modernism, have appropriated as their own these innovations, which derive from Enlightenment thought. Both of these movements ground their error in a misreading of “imitation” as understood by Aristotle and his Enlightenment proponents. Rightly understood, neoclassical imitation, constitutively aware of the difference between what it knows and how it knows it, is an experimental inquiry that generates a range of prefixes—“counter-,” “mock-,” “anti-,” “neo-”—that mark formal degrees of its epistemological detachment. Romantic ideology has denied the role of the imagination in Enlightenment imitation, imposing on the eighteenth century a dichotomous periodization: duplication versus imagination, the mirror versus the lamp. Structuralist ideology has dichotomized narration and description, form and content, structure and history. Poststructuralist ideology has propounded for the novel a contradictory “novel tradition”—realism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism—whose stages both constitute a sequence and collapse it, each stage claiming the innovation of the stage that precedes it. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

This book "historicizes" the British Enlightenment, 1650-1800, as the beginning of the modern world by reconstructing what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that have come to define the character of daily existence.

The Enlightenment has been blamed for some of the most deadly developments of modern life: racism and white supremacy, imperialist oppression, capitalist exploitation, neoliberal economics, scientific positivism, totalitarian rule. These developments are thought to have grown from principles that are rooted in the soil of the Enlightenment: abstraction, reduction, objectification, quantification, division, universalization. Michael McKeon’s new book corrects this defective view by historicizing the Enlightenment--by showing that the Enlightenment has been abstracted from its history. From its past: critics have ignored that Enlightenment thought is a reaction against deadly traditions that precede it. From its present: the Enlightenment extended its reactive analysis of the past to its own present through self-analysis and self-criticism. From its future: much of what’s been blamed amounts to the failure of its posterity to sustain Enlightenment principles. To historicize the Enlightenment requires that we conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace—society, privacy, the public, the market, experiment, secularity, representative democracy, human rights, social class, sex and gender, fiction, the aesthetic attitude. McKeon’s book argues the continuity of Enlightenment thought, its consistency and integrity across this broad range of conceptual domains. It also shows how the Enlightenment has shaped our views of both tradition and modernity, and the revisionary work that needs to be done in order to understand our place in the future. In the process, Historicizing the Enlightenment exemplifies a distinctive historiography and historical method. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Black Victorians/Black Victoriana is a welcome attempt to correct the historical record. Although scholarship has given us a clear view of nineteenth-century imperialism, colonialism, and later immigration from the colonies, there has for far too long been a gap in our understanding of the lives of blacks in Victorian England. Without that understanding, it remains impossible to assess adequately the state of the black population in Britain today. Using a transatlantic lens, the contributors to this book restore black Victorians to the British national picture. They look not just at the ways blacks were represented in popular culture but also at their lives as they experienced them--as workers, travelers, lecturers, performers, and professionals. Dozens of period photographs bring these stories alive and literally give a face to the individual stories the book tells. The essays taken as a whole also highlight prevailing Victorian attitudes toward race by focusing on the ways in which empire building spawned a "subculture of blackness" consisting of caricature, exhibition, representation, and scientific racism absorbed by society at large. This misrepresentation made it difficult to be both black and British while at the same time it helped to construct British identity as a whole. Covering many topics that detail the life of blacks during this period, Black Victorians/Black Victoriana will be a landmark contribution to the emergent field of black history in England.

Historicizing Blake puts Blake back into the cultural context of his times. These new essays by both established and younger scholars re-address Blake's contemporary milieu after the neglect of ten years of post-structuralist, reader-orientated, methodology. By employing notions of history wider than the purely 'literary', and featuring an important new essay by the period's foremost subcultural historian, Iain McCalman, Historicizing Blake represents a significant contribution towards the re-historicizing of Romanticism.

This volume brings together Nicholas Wolterstorff's essays on epistemology written between 1983 and 2008.

Adam Smith’s contribution to economics is well-recognised but in recent years scholars have been exploring anew the multidisciplinary nature of his works. The Adam Smith Review is a refereed annual review that provides a unique forum for interdisciplinary debate on all aspects of Adam Smith’s works, his place in history, and the significance of his writings to the modern world. It is aimed at facilitating debate between scholars working across the humanities and social sciences, thus emulating the reach of the Enlightenment world which Smith helped to shape. The seventh volume of the series contains contributions from specialists across a range of disciplines, including Christopher Berry, Maureen Harkin, Edith Kuiper, N.B. Leddy, Catriona Seth, Henry C. Clarke, Deidre Dawson, Dionysios Drosos, Ioannis A.Tassopoulos, Jeremy Jennings, Ryan Patrick Hanley, Fotini Vaki, Spiros Tegos, Nicholas J. Theocarakis, Chandran Kukathas, Donald Winch, Fonna Forman, Craig Smith, Nicholas Phillipson, Chad Flanders, Emily Nacol, Andrea Radasanu, Rachel Zuckert, Michael L. Fraser, Ian S. Ross, Daniel B. Klein, Douglas J. Den Uyl, James A. Harris, Geoffrey Kellow, Paul Dumouchel, Jan Horst Keppler, Paul Oslington, Adrian Walsh, Spencer J. Pack, and Dennis C. Rasmussen. Topics examined include: Smith and Women Adam Smith in Greece Nicholas Phillipson's Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life Michael L. Fraser's The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today

Exploring how the discrediting of Boucher and his school intersected with cultural debates about gender and class, this account of Boucher's art should persuade critics and admirers alike to take another, more considered look.

By focusing on colonial histories and legacies, this edited volume breaks new ground in studying modernity in Islamicate contexts. From a range of disciplinary perspectives, the authors probe ‘colonial modernity’ as a condition whose introduction into Islamicate contexts was facilitated historically by European encroachment into South Asia, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. They also analyze the various modes through which, in Europe itself, and in North America by extension, people from Islamicate contexts have been, and continue to be, otherized in the constitution and advancement of the project of modernity. The book further brings to light a multiplicity of social, political, cultural, and aesthetic modes of resistance aimed at subverting and unsettling colonial modernity in both Muslim-majority and diasporic contexts.

The articles collected in this Spring 2009 (VII, 2) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge entitled “Historicizing Anti-Semitism” were part of an international conference entitled, “The Post-September 11 New Ethnic/Racial Configurations in Europe and the United States: The Case of Anti-Semitism,” organized by Lewis Gordon and Ramón Grosfoguel at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) in Paris on June 29–30, 2007. Part of a series inaugurated by a discussion on Islamophobia, they brought a majority Jewish group of scholars together in the hope of bringing to the forum a critical exchange and conversation among the participants. The articles gathered here do not represent a unified voice but those often unheard in discussions of anti-Semitism. The focus on anti-Semitism in this collection raises the question of how ancient and Medieval versions of anti-Jewish practices should be interpreted, especially since even the term “Semite” came about as an effort in eighteenth-century French and German scholarship to organize Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew under a single linguistic nomenclature, which was crystallized in the nineteenth century in the work of the French scholar Ernest Renan. Contributors include: Lewis R. Gordon (also as journal issue guest editor), Ramón Grosfoguel (also as journal issue guest editor), Eric Mielants (also as journal issue guest editor), David Ost, James Cohen, Santiago E. Slabodsky, Rabson Wuriga, Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel, Marc H. Ellis, Etienne Balibar, Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Martine Chard-Hutchinson, Michael Löwy, Jean-Paul Rocchi and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (also as journal editor-in-chief). Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal’s Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR’s homepage.