CHAPTER INTRODUCTION I I f I may start with a paradox: the cru- cial essay in this volume, containing articles I have published over the past ten years about eighteenthcentury English literature and culture, is not to be found in the table of contents It isn't to be found there, I'm chagrined to say, because I didn't write it I refer to Sigmund Freud's magnificent, troubling, and inspired essay of 1919, "The 'Uncanny.' " It's not here and yet—like an optical illusion, or one of those strange retinal "ghosts" that seem to float up in space after one stares too long at a word or line of type—Freud's essay haunts this volume, its magus-pages everywhere interleaving with my own For after ten years, I discover, it is precisely Freud's unsettling, unflinching meditation on the problem of enlightenment—so profound in its implications—that most deeply shapes my own thinking about the eighteenth century and links the various essays in this book, one to one another How so? one may ask The essays here were not written in concert, nor did I have "The 'Uncanny'" in mind (though I had certainly read it) when I began working on them over a decade ago It is true, I find now, that I cite Freud's essay—fleetingly—in my title-piece, "The Female Thermometer" from 1986, and in an essay on Ann Radcliffe's Gothic fiction from 1989 But anyone searching for something more substantial—some extended reading or contestation—