"This collection of twelve previously unpublished essays explores the conflicts sparked by the extraordinary range of new ideas and material possibilities in the eighteenth-century British Empire, reading the Enlightenment less as a set of axioms than as a variety of cultural and ideological formations.

The essays demonstrate how profoundly eighteenth-century formulations of gender, race, class, and sexuality have, through their challenges to a less empirical, rational, and universalizing past, set the terms for debates in the centuries that followed. They explore a wide range of texts, from Georgic poetry to crime stories, from illness narratives to travel journals, from theatrical performances to medical discourse, and from political treatises to the novel."--BOOK JACKET.