Reading 1759 Literary Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

ading 1759 investigates the literary culture of a remarkable year in British and French history, writing, and ideas. Familiar to many as the British 'year of victories' during the Seven Years' War, 1759 was also an important year in the histories of fiction, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Reading 1759 is the first book to examine together the range of works written and published during this crucial year. Offering broad coverage of the year's work in writing, the 11 essays gathered here examine key works by Johnson, Voltaire, Sterne, Adam Smith, Edward Young, Sarah Fielding, and Christopher Smart, along with such group projects as the Encyclopédie and the literary review journals of the mid-eighteenth century. The volume is organized around a cluster of key topics that reflect the concerns of most importance to writers themselves during the year. In many ways, this was a year of the new and the modern, with writers addressing current issues of empire and ethical conduct, forging new forms of creative expression, and grappling with the nature of originality itself. Among other issues, texts written and published in 1759 confronted the history of Western colonialism, the problem of prostitution in a civilized society, and the limitations of linguistic expression. Philosophical problems were also addressed, not least the thorny question of causation; while, in France, the Encyclopédie the central Enlightenment project ran up this year against the forces of state censorship. Taking into its purview all of these texts and broader developments, Reading 1759 puts the literary culture of this singular, and singularly important, year back on the scholarly map. In the process, the volume also provides a self-reflective contribution to the growing body of 'annualized' studies that focus on the literary output of specific years.