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This collection opens a panorama of essays celebrating diverse ways to participate in the British-and international-Enlightenment. Investigating major authors, unusual persons, commentators on other nations, scholars, and even early environmentalists, this volume explores the many amenable places where the confident culture of this period emerged.

Exploratory and energetically analytical, 1650-1850 ranges over the expanse of long eighteenth-century culture. Welcoming research on all nations and language traditions, this annual escorts its readers into a truly global Enlightenment. Volume 29 includes essays on familiar topics such as Samuel Johnson and women's education while it also showcases Sir Joseph Banks's globetrotting and provides a vivaciously interdisciplinary special feature on the cultural implications of water. Capping it all off is a diverse bevy of robust, full-length book reviews.

The essays in The Secret Life of Things approach it-narratives, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike, from various theoretical and historical vantage points. While sketching the cultural biography of a neglected literary form, these wide-ranging essays both enrich and complicate the history of prose fiction in the second half of the eighteenth century.