First published in 1987, The New Eighteenth Century (now with a new preface by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown) examines eighteenth century English literature's resistance to the application of new theoretical approaches and presents new work by leading scholars which both challenges this resistance and demonstrates the usefulness of feminist, Marxist, new-historicist, and psychoanalytic approaches to the analysis of eighteenth-century texts.

This book reinterprets and resituates canonical works (by such writers as Fielding, Goldsmith, and Sterne) but also explores areas and figures increasingly important to eighteenth-century study. It opens questions about the canon and about the nature of "canonicity" itself as it considers texts by women, working-class literature, guidebooks for bourgeois tourists, and aspects of the cultural and social terrain including problems of race and colonialism, capitalism, and penal institutions.

The New Eighteenth Century not only provides new ways of looking at the literature of the period but serves as a model for future work in eighteenth-century studies.