Teaching The Eighteenth Century Now

In this timely collection, teacher-scholars of “the long eighteenth century,” a Eurocentric time frame from about 1680 to 1832, consider what teaching means in this historical moment: one of attacks on education, a global contagion, and a reckoning with centuries of trauma experienced by Black, Indigenous, and immigrant peoples. Taking up this challenge, each essay highlights the intellectual labor of the classroom, linking textual and cultural materials that fascinate us as researchers with pedagogical approaches that engage contemporary students. Some essays offer practical models for teaching through editing, sensory experience, dialogue, or collaborative projects. Others reframe familiar texts and topics through contemporary approaches, such as the health humanities, disability studies, and decolonial teaching. Throughout, authors reflect on what it is that we do when we teach—how our pedagogies can be more meaningful, more impactful, and more relevant. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Inspired by the conversations of like-minded professors interested in promoting eighteenth-century literature through informed, innovative teaching, this collection began as a series of presentations at the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference. Covering a range of texts and strategies—from a genre-based approach to early novels, to an argument for student-teacher collaboration engaging Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Floating Life—the collection aims to participate in larger conversations about the “best practices” of teaching eighteenth-century texts in the undergraduate classroom. With an eye toward energizing further pedagogical dialogue about this important period, the authors share a wealth of experience and practical advice about the joys and pitfalls of teaching Western and non-Western texts to students relatively unfamiliar with early-modern literature.

The central axiom of Teaching the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century is that the classroom functions as a site for research and collaboration: not only as a space that reflects the research of individual teacher-scholars, but as a generative site to put ideas, theories, and methodologies into play. Whereas transatlanticism has transformed research practices over the last decade, the present collection is concerned with exploring what this transformation looks like in the classroom, and how the classroom continues to shape research practices in the field. Contributors address issues such as how the traffic in ideas, people, and commodities between Europe, Africa, and the New World are considered in classroom settings; how inter- and intra-departmental collaborations reshape our approaches to teaching the eighteenth century; how and why Transatlantic Studies can function as an introduction to college study; and how it can help more advanced students to revise their notions of nation, place, and identity. By now, there are a number of anthologies available to help instructors determine what transatlantic material to teach, but none that engage why and how to teach it, or what teaching it can do for us, our students, and our profession. Rather than simply providing reading lists or a collection of anecdotes about lesson plans, Teaching the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century emphasizes theorizing critical engagements with, interdisciplinary focus on, and the transformative potential of Transatlantic Studies. The primary market for Teaching the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century is university, college, and community college professors, researchers, and students, with three specific subgroups: 1. Teachers new to Transatlantic Studies Teachers coming to Transatlantic Studies for the first time will find both suggestions for materials or topical units to be integrated into existing courses (e.g., a unit on transatlantic exchange that could figure in an eighteenth-century literature survey course) and ideas for developing new courses altogether. 2. Teachers already teaching and/or researching in the field of Transatlantic Studies Such scholars will find material to broaden their approach to familiar courses and subjects: inter- or cross-disciplinary focus, new texts, successful clusterings of texts or themes or approaches, and ideas for team-teaching or linking courses with other faculty. 3. Teachers involved in Transatlantic Studies programs, especially those that focus on contemporary/Post WWII context (e.g., at the University of Dundee, the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and the University of Birmingham) Teaching the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century will provide historical context for current geopolitical studies: perspective on the dynamics and historical and political forces occurring in the eighteenth century and contributing to 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century politics, nations, and paradigms.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France has been celebrated as the period of conversation. Salons flourished and became an important social force. Women and men worked together, in dialogue with their contemporaries, other texts, and their culture to create novels, political satire, drama, poetry, fairy tales, travel narratives, and philosophy. Yet the inclusion of women's contributions, only recently recovered, changes the way we conceive of the period that constitutes one of the building blocks of French national identity and Western civilization, and teachers are often unsure how and where to incorporate the texts into their courses. Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers attempts to reconstruct these conversations by integrating women's work into classrooms across the curriculum. The works of French women writers are crucial to courses on the early modern period and enliven many others—whether on literature, history, women's history, the history of science, philosophy, women's and gender studies, or European civilization. The essays included in part 1 provide necessary background and help instructors identify places in their courses that could be enriched by taking women's participation into account. Contributors in part 2 focus on some of the central writers and genres of the period, including Lafayette, Charrière, and Graffigny, the epistolary novel, convent writing, and memoirs. The essays in part 3 offer concrete descriptions of courses that place women's texts in dialogue with those of their male colleagues or with historical issues.

Philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain was diverse, vibrant, and sophisticated. This was the age of Hume and Berkeley and Reid, of Hutcheson and Kames and Smith, of Ferguson and Burke and Wollstonecraft. Important and influential works were published in every area of philosophy, from the theory of vision to theories of political resistance, from the philosophy of language to accounts of ways of governing the passions. The philosophers of eighteenth-century Britain were enormously influential, in France, in Italy, in Germany, and in America. Their ideas and arguments remain a powerful presence in philosophy three centuries later. This Oxford Handbook is the first book ever to provide comprehensive coverage of the full range of philosophical writing in Britain in the eighteenth century. It provides accounts of the writings of all the major figures, but also puts those figures in the context provided by a host of writers less well known today. The book has five principal sections: 'Logic and Metaphysics', 'The Passions', 'Morals', 'Criticism', and 'Politics'. Each section comprises four chapters, providing detailed coverage of all of the important aspects of its subject matter. There is also an introductory section, with chapters on the general character of philosophizing in eighteenth-century Britain, and a concluding section on the important question of the relation at this time between philosophy and religion. The authors of the chapters are experts in their fields. They include philosophers, historians, political theorists, and literary critics, and they teach in colleges and universities in Britain, in Europe, and in North America.