Traditional eighteenth-century paradigms of reason, truth, and nature underlie modern concepts of self, gender, sex, etc. that are challenged today in the name of a more liberated and pluralistic problematics. This book is the first of two volumes of essays that identify this postmodern challenge. It examines the historiography of postmodern phenomena in relation to the eighteenth-century texts that they ventriloquize. More essays on the topic are contained in Making History (Bucknell Review, Vol. 42, No. 1).