Rachael Scarborough King is Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, USA; she studies the literature and media of the long eighteenth century, with particular interests in newspapers, periodicals, and letters. She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures. She completed her Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York University, and her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Seth Rudy is Associate Professor and Charles M. Glover Chair of English at Rhodes College, USA, where he studies the history of ideas and encyclopedic knowledge projects of the eighteenth century. He is the author of Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He completed his Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York University, and his BFA in Film Production at the Tisch School of the Arts.
This book is organized around a central pun like all great works of scholarship. It queries the ends of knowledge, but here the end might mean telos, completion or cessation. The editors have assembled a genuinely productive and heterogeneous collection, but they wisely acknowledge that their volume is open-ended, unfinished and generative in the spirit of the Enlightenment encyclopedia project which provides its inspiration and warrant. - Al Coppola, Associate Professor of English, John Jay College, CUNY, USA