The Reintroduction of Ethics to Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a 'turn to ethics' in literary criticism in general and in criticism of the literature of the long 18th century in particular. Wayne Booth's The Company We Keep was instrumental in turning our attention to the relationship between books and readers, a relationship that he figured as a 'friendship' with the kinds of ethical demands that attend all friendships. A highly regarded work, Company influenced subsequent studies, such as my Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, but it was not until critics such as Melvyn New and Donald Wehrs began to situate literary analysis in terms drawn from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas that ' ethical criticism' of the field would become an identifiable 'school'of 18th-century studies. Building on, but diverging from, the political emphases of race, class, and gender, ethical critics insist on the 'otherness' of the text and its resistance to our ideologies and assumptions. My Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, for example, reads the works of women writers as statements of ethical agency rather than as evidence of political objectification. Edward Tomarken's Genre and Ethics similarly attends to the voices of literary works in their own contexts, meeting them face-to-face (in Levinasian terms) before asking questions regarding political implications or assumptions. The ` turn to ethics' is not a turn away from politics, however, for the impact of the ethical encounter will have real-world consequences. Therefore, ecocriticism and disability studies are likely to become growth areas in 18th-century ethical readings in the near future as these concerns surfaced in the period itself and are two subjects that dominate our own social, political, and ethical lives as well.