Book excerpt: 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.