Editor's Note (2001)

Editor's Note The intellectual landscape of eighteenth-century culture has never appeared more varied or inviting in its physical aspect than it does today. Hence the geography of the Enlightenment provides a point of departure for several of the essays gathered in this volume. Their interest in physical geography reflects not so much the expected influence of military, national , and political centers, as the unexpected significance that living in a land apart may confer on writing. Set in a variety of local habitations, and moving with a purposeful discursiveness across the grounds of argument, they explore the way a sense of place affects literary creation as well as interpretation. One distinguished contributor even goes so far as to argue that it was the expansive geography of American space, as opposed to the more centralized spaces of Europe, which helped to shape one of the earliest and most important documents of American democracy. Why geographical space should have arrived at the forefront of study is a question well worth asking, certainly, even if any answer must remain speculative. The postcolonial decentering of early modern studies has taken a toll on outdated accounts of heroic nationalism, for one thing. It is partly because we recognize the nationalist politics of an earlier globalizing history that we seek to practice the interpretive geopolitics of planetary caretakers instead. For another, there is greater awareness of the possibility of researching topics that once may well have gone without an audience. The wide distribution of scholarship among several national, regional, and single-figure societies, many of them sponsoring journals, publication series, or newsletters , has created a community of interest in fields formerly considered arcane or rarefied, local geography among them. A yet more practical explanation for the ever-widening scope of interest is the relative ease of entering into electronic communication with that distant fellow scholar whose paper you heard at a conference or whose footnote suddenly cast new light on your work. The four essays we begin with range in their geography from Scandinavia to Dutch Suriname, from the European periphery to the South American frontier. An initial study explores the narrative intersection of geological space and the newly discovered deep prehistoric time of scientific inquiry. IX Ï‡ / Editor's Note Above ground the earth revealed a weathered masculinity, it seemed, while mysteriously creative forces deemed feminine lay hidden underground. Just as the earth was gendered above and below, time's vector could likewise be configured as either female cycle or male arrow. Once plotted along these gendered axes of space and time, several narratives from the age of Goethe are understood to reflect the expanding chronotope of Enlightenment science in novel and exciting ways. Two of the essays that follow extend the envelope of generic description in order to make a postcolonial critical lexicon more accommodating of narrative variety. One of them argues cogently that an unknown drama written in Dutch Suriname by one Pieter Van Dyk has as much right to be called a captivity narrative as do the better known, histories of Mary Rowlandson or Olive Oatman. In the other what it means to write a conquest narrative is ingeniously enlarged on behalf of Mary Wollstonecraft to include the romantic conquest of a lover as well as the imperial conquest of a territory, and then to signify the comparative management of the first by the second, and at last to embrace the overcoming of any personal rhetoric of conquest and discovery altogether. Finally, a learned reading of the 1800 Irish Act of Union takes up a lesser known novel by Maria Edgeworth to demonstrate how thoroughly her writing reveals a responsive yet evenhanded politics of suffering nationhood. Although included in this volume simply on the basis of their excellence , several other essays share related concerns. In the first a prime document of the United States is analyzed for the sake of redrawing the international political horizon against which it first appeared. John Adams staunchly defended his preference for a bicameral legislature against Turgot on the basis of the sheer vastness of American space as well as on the greater equity of bicameral as opposed to unicameral representation, it is argued. In another essay...