Afterword

Abstract

Urban Enlightenment affords a quite different view of the periodical essay than usually appears in studies of eighteenth-century British literature. Some of its assumptions and parameters are familiar enough: I read the periodical essay as an expressly public-making genre; ‘rise and fall’ narratives of the Enlightenment essay serial have been with us since the first modern studies of the genre; and English critics in particular have for two centuries invoked the Addison-to-Irving trajectory in explaining the early Irving’s relation to England’s literary past. Two methodological differences between this study and others, however, compel these familiar aspects to assume guises both strange and new. I consider the first an ‘internal’ approach, which allows Enlightenment critical discourses about the periodical essay to tell their own stories about the genre’s relationship to modernity. The second — studying the writing and reception of these essays in a transatlantic context — makes explicit some original assumptions about the genre’s public-making impulses that conventional studies of the period, rooted in received notions of modern publicity and its ostensibly liberal-individualist consensus, have largely obscured. By recovering these internal and transatlantic conceptions of the periodical essay’s importance to Enlightenment literary and civic culture, I have sought to raise questions about the sufficiency of our conventional literary histories and the broader historiographical narratives that underpin them.