Preface Préface

In the last thirty years, scholarly attention has focused in particular on two complementary aspects of the European Enlightenment: the birth of consumer society and the development of the autonomous modern self. Social historians have argued that the eighteenth century witnessed a revolution in habits of consumption, as new middle-class material desires and patterns of acquisition emerged, and with them, new atomized identities and political agendas. This theme in social history has proved just as resilient in the literary history of the eighteenth century, which has seen an explosion of research on the impact of the financial revolution and the ascent of fashion and consumerism on literature and the arts. All this wealth of “new economic criticism” has established the promise, indeed the necessity, of conceiving of Enlightenment European culture as negotiating enormous socio-economic upheaval. But this work, by focusing on the new flows of cash and commodities in the market, has produced a rather partial view; indeed, by making shopping the defining activity of eighteenth-century life, this scholarly praxis effects its own kind of commodity fetishism, speaking as much to the desires and pleasures of our present neoliberal moment as to the preoccupations of those confronting early capitalism. Our conference, The Immaterial Eighteenth Century, sought to redress this imbalance, complementing our understanding of the period’s new credit economy and consumerism with insight into the character and importance of the immaterial. In our call for papers we asked for a return to the eighteenth century to seek out what has been neglected: what can we learn by reexamining this formative moment for values and habits that have been occluded? Looking beyond “thing theory” and “interiority,” enquiries that have dominated the field for the last decade, what approaches can raise the ethical and political stakes in the study of eighteenth-century literature and culture? Scholars from the three learned societies participating in the conference—The Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Aphra Behn Society—took up this challenge, proposing papers with new perspectives on ideals of community, the realm of the mind, the divine and the supernatural, affective communication, and cosmopolitanism. The conference’s three plenary speakers all opened different avenues on immaterial exchanges: Laura Brown (Cornell University) spoke on how affection across species boundaries emerges in this period, Martine Brownley (Emory University) illuminated the afterlives of Queen Mary II, and philosopher Daniel Dumouchel (Université de Montréal) explored the moral and emotional valences of the eighteenth-century aesthetic imagination. We were fortunate, too, to have the generous participation of the McMaster Museum of Art, which mounted for the conference its most ambitious exhibition to date: Rising to the Occasion: The Idea of the Human in the Long Eighteenth Century. Drawing on McMaster’s rich collections of period paintings and prints (Romney, Taillason, Hiroshige, Hogarth) and borrowing important works from across North America (Kauffman, Copley, Houdon, Verelst), the MMA curators designed an exhibition that explored eighteenth-century ideas of the human and their contemporary resonances—a centerpiece of the exhibit was an installation by Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore responding to the British imperial legacy for ideas of the feminine in Canada. McMaster Research Collections librarians hosted a display of books relating to the conference themes and held tours of our collections of eighteenth-century books and periodicals—the best in Canada. Finally, McMaster’s Physics and Astronomy Department prepared a one-hour show at the McMaster Planetarium on Newtonianism in eighteenth-century astronomy. Lorsqu’on considère l’ensemble de la recherche effectuée sur les Lumières européennes au cours des trente dernières années, on s’aperçoit que deux aspects complémentaires ont particulièrement retenu l’attention : la naissance de la société …