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Early American Studies

  • Latest issues:
    1. Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2012 - Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal: Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2012
    2. Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2011 - Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal: Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2011
    3. Volume 9, Number 2, Spring 2011 - Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal: Volume 9, Number 2, Spring 2011
    4. Volume 9, Number 1, Winter 2011 - Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal: Volume 9, Number 1, Winter 2011
  • Latest articles:
    1. From the Editor -

      By Elaine Forman Crane

      Language and its relationship to political culture unexpectedly dominate this issue of Early American Studies. Taken together, the five articles that focus on the persuasive power of speech and writing demonstrate how words effect and affect social change. In his article on James Fenimore Cooper’s maritime novels, Bryan Sinche shows how an artfully constructed turn of phrase could mold shipboard hierarchies at sea, while Michael Besso’s revisionist essay reveals how Hooker’s sermon advanced God’s will (rather than popular sovereignty) on land. Whose words resonate most powerfully? Despite the Puritan insistence on the force of divine intervention, Robb Haberman maintains that print culture in the form of magazines ... Read More
    2. Stillbirth and Sensibility The Case of Abigail and John Adams -

      By G. J. Barker-Benfield

      Abigail Adams had a stillbirth in July 1777, when she was thirty-three. As far as we know, it was the last of her pregnancies. She had married John Adams in 1764, and they lived chiefly in Braintree, a small town outside Boston, as John established himself as a successful lawyer. Abigail gave birth to five children in their first eight years of marriage. Toward the end of that period, John began to emerge as a leader of the American Revolution. After being away from Abigail in Philadelphia for months at a time on Revolutionary business, he sailed for Europe in 1778, and was there for ten years, returning for three months in 1779. Abigail joined him there in 1784, taking their nineteen-year-old daughter, Abigail ... Read More
    3. Margaret Bayard Smith’s 1809 Journey to Monticello and Montpelier The Politics of Performance in the Early Republic -

      By Catherine Allgor

      On July 29, 1809, Margaret Bayard Smith and her husband, Samuel Harrison Smith, left their Washington City home for a visit to the Virginia countryside. The Smiths set off by carriage, leaving two daughters, seven-year-old Julia and five-year-old Susan, at home, so as, as Margaret would explain to Dolley Madison, not to tax the hospitality of their hosts. They were planning to visit Thomas Jefferson at Monticello in Charlottesville, and James and Dolley Madison at Montpelier in Orange. That year Jefferson had left the presidency and retired from politics, passing the executive office on to his friend and colleague James Madison. Though no doubt the desire to see their friends and their homes motivated the Smiths ... Read More
    4. American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism -

      By Maura Jane Farrelly

      Scholars who focus on American Catholic history have not fully examined the relationship between slavery and Catholic identity in the United States. That the Church not only tolerated, but actually supported the institution of slavery has been acknowledged by nearly everyone studying and writing about colonial and early American Catholicism. The Church’s active opposition to the forces of abolitionism has also been explored—the common conclusion being that this opposition was fueled as much (if not more) by the anti-Catholic leanings of abolitionist firebrands like William Lloyd Garrison and Lyman Beecher as it was by the Church’s theological commitment to the enslavement of an entire race of people.1 That slavery ... Read More
    5. To Beget a Tame Breed of People Sex, Marriage, Adultery, and Indigenous North American Women -

      By Felicity Donohoe

      On returning from an expedition in the Southeast of America, the French traveler and Creek warrior, Louis Le Clerc Milfort, witnessed an “extraordinary and shocking ceremony.” Passing through a Choctaw village, he was invited to watch an Indian woman endure a punishment for adultery at the behest of her husband that involved sexual intercourse with several men in succession. A “disgusted” Milfort refused an offer to take part in the event. Describing the proceedings, he said: “The husband assembles, without letting her know beforehand, his friends, a few relatives of the woman, and as many young men as he can find. When they are all gathered together, they detail one among them to ascertain if the woman is at ... Read More
    6. “Those Sounds That Had Obtained a Command” Voice, Power, and Submission in Cooper’s Sea Fiction -

      By Bryan Sinche

      In his quasi-nonfiction book The Traveling Bachelor; or, Notions of the Americans (1828), James Fenimore Cooper takes on the identity of a European bachelor and writes letters to friends on the Continent in which he describes the habits of the American people and the institutions of the United States. In one such letter, to the imaginary Baron Von Kemperfelt, Cooper’s bachelor recalls the early days of Unites States and trumpets the burgeoning naval force of the young country. He leagues himself with those prescient men who “admitted that nature and reason both pointed to the ocean as the place where the rights of the nation were to be maintained.”1 The bachelor goes on to insist that the U.S. government assigned ... Read More
    7. Provincial Nationalism Civic Rivalry in Postrevolutionary American Magazines -

      By Robb K. Haberman

      In January 1790 “Maria Morelove” wrote to the editors of the New-York Magazine congratulating them on the forthcoming appearance of the debut issue. As a native New Yorker, she was embarrassed that both Philadelphia and Boston boasted a pair of monthly magazines, while her own “respectable and populous city” could not sustain even one. New York’s privileged status as “the residence of our political fathers—the emporium of the United States—and the resort of foreigners of distinction,” she continued, made it all the more imperative that this publishing venture should prosper.1 Thomas and James Swords, the brothers who edited, printed, and published the New-York Magazine, shared their reader’s conviction. Like ... Read More
    8. Thomas Hooker and His May 1638 Sermon -

      By Michael Besso

      On May 31, 1638, in the settlement of Hartford along the Connecticut River, Thomas Hooker preached what has been accounted as among the most important sermons in colonial New England. The only record of it that we have today exists in the form of an auditor’s shorthand outline.1 Three features of this sermon have contributed to the attention given it by historians. First, its source: Hooker, a prominent Puritan pastor in both old and New England, was undoubtedly Connecticut’s leading public figure in the first decade of the colony’s existence. Second, its subject: the sermon referred to matters regarding civil government; more specifically, it apparently advocated popular sovereignty and popular control of ... Read More

 

Early American Literature

  • Latest issues:
    1. Volume 46, Number 3, 2011 - Early American Literature: Volume 46, Number 3, 2011
    2. Volume 46, Number 2, 2011 - Early American Literature: Volume 46, Number 2, 2011
    3. Volume 46, Number 1, 2011 - Early American Literature: Volume 46, Number 1, 2011
    4. Volume 45, Number 3, 2010 - Early American Literature: Volume 45, Number 3, 2010
  • Latest articles:
    1. Trade, Time, and the Calculus of Risk in Early Pacific Travel Writing -

      By Michelle Burnham

      In the 2005 Common-place issue on early America and the Pacific, historians Edward Gray and Alan Taylor observe that the Atlantic studies paradigm, which moves “beyond nations and states as the defining subjects of historical understanding, turning instead to large scale processes” is also particularly “useful for understanding Pacific history” since “disease, migration, trade, and war effected [sic] the Pacific in much the way they effected [sic] the Atlantic.” A similar transfer of the Atlantic world model to the Pacific informs David Igler’s insistence that, like the Atlantic, the Pacific world was “international before it became national.”1 Igler notes that most scholarship on the Pacific has instead relied ... Read More
    2. Representative Nobodies The Politics of Benjamin Franklin’s Satiric Personae, 1722–1757 -

      By Todd N. Thompson

      In his 1736 preface to Poor Richard’s Almanac, Benjamin Franklin jocularly responds to rumors about Poor Richard Saunders’s identity, and in doing so plays upon notions of public appearance unique to print media. Remarking on accusations that Saunders does not exist, Franklin, through Saunders, complains, “This is not civil Treatment, to endeavour to deprive me of my very Being, and reduce me to a Non-entity in the Opinion of the publick.” Using humorously specious logic, Saunders begs the question, “. . . if there were no such Man as I am, how is it possible I should appear publickly to hundreds of People, as I have done for several Years past, in print?” (Papers 2: 136).1 This is but one of several jokes that ... Read More
    3. “All Parts of the Union I Considered My Home” The Federal Imagination of The Algerine Captive -

      By Keri Holt

      My ardent wish is that my fellow citizens may profit by my misfortunes. If they peruse these pages with attention they will perceive the necessity of uniting our federal strength to enforce a due respect among other nations. Let us, one and all, endeavor to sustain the general government. . . . Our first object is union among ourselves. For to no nation besides the United States can that antient saying be more emphatically applied: BY UNITING WE STAND, BY DIVIDING WE FALL. Toward the middle of Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, an unusual exchange takes place. Having been captured and bound into slavery in Algiers, Updike Underhill—the novel’s wayward Yankee protagonist—agrees to meet with a “Mahometan ... Read More
    4. Romantic Transports Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism in Transatlantic Context -

      By Rachel Carnell, Alison Tracy Hale

      At the conclusion of Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), her hapless heroine, Dorcasina Sheldon, finally awakens from “the romantic spell, by which she had been so many years bound” that has animated the plot and entangled her in a lifetime of ever-more humiliating scenarios (317). She confesses her chagrin to her maid: “my own conduct will not bear reflecting upon; I cannot look back without blushing for my follies” (322). Dorcasina’s confession anticipates that of a far more famous British heroine, Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett, who, after reading Fitzwilliam Darcy’s letter explaining the deception George Wickham has imposed, rebukes herself: “How despicably have I acted!” She continues, “I, who have ... Read More
    5. Coquetry and Correspondence in Revolutionary-Era Connecticut Reading Elizabeth Whitman’s Letters -

      By Bryan Waterman

      In the Baldwin Family Papers at the Huntington Library, fifteen brief letters remain from one side of a correspondence between two Revolutionary-era American poets: Elizabeth Whitman and Joel Barlow. Both writers, Connecticut natives, were in their mid- to late twenties. She was born in 1752, the daughter of Elnathan Whitman, minister of Hartford’s Second Church until his death in 1777, and Abigail Stanley, daughter of a wealthy and influential Connecticut family. Elnathan Whitman was a Yale graduate; his father, Samuel Whitman, had been a trustee of the college, and his maternal grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, was also the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards. Joel Barlow was born in 1754, the youngest son of a ... Read More
    6. The Letters of Elizabeth Whitman to Joel and Ruth Barlow, 1779–1783 -

      By Bryan Waterman

      Fifteen letters from Elizabeth Whitman to Joel and Ruth Baldwin Barlow survive in the Baldwin Family Papers at the Henry E. Huntington Library. The Baldwin collection, made up largely of Barlow letters and the correspondence of Joel’s sister-in-law, Clara Baldwin Bomford, came to the Huntington in 1956, having been stored for generations in a portable writing desk Joel Barlow had taken with him to Europe during his diplomatic missions in the early nineteenth century. In 1936, three letters from Mary Wollstonecraft and one from Helen Maria Williams, all to Joel Barlow’s wife, Ruth, were removed from this collection without the owner’s knowledge, donated to the library at UC-Berkeley, and published by a Berkeley ... Read More
    7. Critical Keywords in Early American StudiesKeyword: CatastropheKeyword: NationKeyword: FormalismKeyword: RelevanceKeyword: ColonialismKeyword: Archive -

      By Emily García, Duncan Faherty

      This compilation has its genesis in the American Studies Association’s 2010 conference theme, “Crisis, Chains, and Change: American Studies for the Twenty-first Century.” The theme inspired us to examine some of the critical keywords that will inform early Americanist scholarship in the near and distant futures. Since the publication ofRaymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), scholars have adapted his approach to define and delimit fields of investigation through metacritical analysis. The collection Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2007), edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, reinvigorated American studies (broadly construed) with just such an intervention. The ... Read More
    8. Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities -

      By Santa Arias

      In an introduction and seventeen critical essays, Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities provides examples of the emergence, perception, and articulation of Creole identity and consciousness across the Americas. The historical and cultural engagement with the construction of Creole subjectivity is taken up in this book in a manner that distinguishes itself by its comparative approach to literary articulations of Creole subjectivity and agency across several time periods. The result is a thorough examination of Creole discourse on cultural and social difference from an array of colonial and postindependence authors representing different ideological contexts and cultural spaces such as ... Read More
    9. Editor’s Note - With this new issue of Early American Literature there is more to celebrate. Alas, there is also more to mourn. Lisa B. Voigt, a member of the journal’s editorial board, recently won the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures for Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/U of North Carolina P, 2009). Congratulations, Lisa! As 46.3 was going to press, the unwelcome news arrived of the death of Jeffrey Richards, a longtime ... Read More

 

The Eighteenth Century

  • Latest issues:
    1. Voume 52, Numbers 3-4, Fall/Winter 2011 - The Eighteenth Century: Voume 52, Numbers 3-4, Fall/Winter 2011
    2. Volume 52, Numbers 2, Spring 2011 - The Eighteenth Century: Volume 52, Numbers 2, Spring 2011
    3. Volume 52, Number 1, Spring 2011 - The Eighteenth Century: Volume 52, Number 1, Spring 2011
    4. Volume 51, Number 4, Winter 2010 - The Eighteenth Century: Volume 51, Number 4, Winter 2010
  • Latest articles:
    1. Introduction: The Drift of Fiction -

      By Julie Park

      What is left for us to say about the novel? Its moment in eighteenth-century studies seems to have come and gone with the wave of books published in the 1980s and 1990s that sought to revise Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957).1 In 2000, David Blewett edited a special issue for Eighteenth-Century Fiction, "Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel," which brought together the most venerable names in the field to think about the unusually enduring influence of Watt's book while affirming, defending, or attacking its central claims, one more time.2 It appeared to put to rest the last questions anyone might have about the novel and its rise in the eighteenth century.Onwards—so it seems. Almost ten years after Blewett's ... Read More
    2. Female Quixotism and the Novel: Character and Plausibility, Honesty and Fidelity -

      By April Alliston

      This essay begins by returning to the oft-observed association between the novel and the feminine in the long eighteenth century. What are the implications of the European cultural associations between conventions of genre and gender in the period? I would like to approach the question afresh by observing that the concept of verisimilitude (probability, plausibility), which began to be cited in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries as the feature that distinguished the novel from the other primary narrative genres of romance and history, was borrowed from neoclassical dramatic theory.1 The decorum of dramatic verisimilitude, I will suggest further, was specially implicated in the decorum of female ... Read More
    3. 'Lay Aside My Character': The Personate Novel and Beyond -

      By Jonathan Lamb

      A group's knowledge or belief cannot be ultimate or irreducible—it must ultimately be individuals who are in such states, and, to speak of the knowledge of a group, or of society's representation of reality, must involve some kind of fiction.In The Economy of Character Deidre Lynch cites Samuel Person, an eighteenth-century imitator of Theophrastus who blended (perhaps ambitious to unite his name with his theme) the meanings of "character" and "person." According to Person, character expresses both typical and individual qualities and is stamped not only with the "signatura rerum but also personarum."1 As far as Lynch is concerned, Person makes a blunder that has been duplicated in all treatments of the novel that ... Read More
    4. Giving Power to the Medium: Recovering the 1750s -

      By Christina Lupton

      In recent years a consensus has arisen amongst scholars of the eighteenth century that fiction published in the 1750s—that is, after the first successes of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, and before the heyday of Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, or Jane Austen—should be considered anew. Propelled by a general sense that the novels of this time were quirky and self-reflexive in ways that the celebration of realist fiction has eclipsed, critics have turned with some enthusiasm to texts like the anonymous Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl (1750), Francis Coventry's Pompey the Little: or, the Life and Adventures of a Lapdog (1751), and John Kidgell's The Card (1755). These are novels ... Read More
    5. The Air of Tom Jones; or, What Rose from the Novel -

      By Jayne Elizabeth Lewis

      "There was an Air of Grandeur in it, that struck you with Awe.""There is a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit, that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson."Even a lover of Tom Jones's indoorsy rival, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), will know what Samuel Taylor Coleridge meant when he spoke of the "cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit, that prevails everywhere" in Henry Fielding's novel.1 Or is it strictly possible to know such a thing? Just where is the "everywhere" that the romantic poet invoked? For that matter, where is the "there"? One imagines that "there" might lie round about the same place as the semi-deictic "there" with which Fielding ... Read More
    6. Realism and the Unreal in The Female American -

      By Mary Helen McMurran

      Published anonymously in 1767, The Female American, or the Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield received only two brief notices in the press and was never published again in England. Although it was republished in America circa 1800 and again in 1814, these editions also went mostly unnoticed. Thanks largely to Michelle Burnham's edition of the novel with its ample introduction, notes, and selection of contexts and sources, the current generation of scholars and students has rescued this unpopular work in a popular genre (the novel) and popular subgenre (the Robinsoniad).1 It has since become that rare literary rediscovery which seems to speak more to its twenty-first century readers than to its eighteenth-century ... Read More
    7. Reading Mistakes in Heliodorus -

      By Scott Black

      There were three English translations of Heliodorus's late classical Greek novel An Ethiopian Story (Aithiopika) in the long eighteenth century: 1686, 1717, and 1789.1 The anonymous 1717 translator calls the Ethiopian Story the "Mother Romance of the World," and throughout the eighteenth century the work was considered a foundational model of prose fiction.2 Echoing a standard claim, a critical cliché throughout early modern Europe, Richard Blackmore writes in 1716 that Heliodorus "became the Model on which the numerous Authors of Romances in following Times form'd themselves, as the Poets imitated that of Homer."3 The terms "romance" and "novel" were unstable and interchangeable throughout the period, so in 1751 ... Read More
    8. The Secret History of the Rise of the Novel: The Novel and the Middle Class in English Studies -

      By George Boulukos

      As the field of English studies emerged and developed from the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, it began to make claims for the middle-class origins of the novel. Indeed, since the great expansion of University education in Anglophone culture at the close of the nineteenth century, University-based English studies has articulated its self-imagining through arguments about the novel.1 Much of this essay looks closely at the ways that nineteenth-century commentators before the emergence of English studies understood the sociological and educational status and effects of the novel, demonstrating that they saw it as a form of entertainment that offered an informal social education, but an education ... Read More
    9. Vicars and Squires: Religion and the Rise of the English Marriage Plot -

      By Lisa O'Connell

      Reading Sir Charles Grandison soon after its publication in 1753, Mary Wortley Montagu famously remarked, "Richardson is so eager for the multiplication of [marriages] I suppose he is some parish curate, whose chief profit depends on weddings and christenings."1 Her mock complaint—steeped in a routinely Whiggish anti-clericalism—points toward a fresh line of inquiry for novel studies, namely that mid-eighteenth-century English novels that placed marriage at their center did so with ecclesiastical ends in view. Most historicist work on the rise of the novel has understood its setting in sociological terms, through concepts like the growth of the middle class or of liberal individualism, or as an aspect of ... Read More
    10. Captain Singleton: An Epic of Mitsein? -

      By Jody Greene

      It is only small and thinly peopled places that can be subjugated and held down in words, such as desert islands and lonely houses.Il n'y a pas de monde, il n'y a que des îles.In a recent Critical Inquiry article entitled "Derrida Enisled," J. Hillis Miller reviews the career of the recently deceased French thinker and concludes that Jacques Derrida is nothing less than the Robinson Crusoe of the Continental philosophical tradition.1 Throughout his writings, and in particular in his as yet unpublished 2002-03 seminars on "The Beast and the Sovereign," which deal extensively with Daniel Defoe's first fiction, Derrida not only reflects for himself on the impossibility of Mitsein—"being-with"—but also consigns the ... Read More

 

Eighteenth-Century Studies

  • Latest issues:
    1. Volume 45, Number 2, Winter 2012 - Eighteenth-Century Studies: Volume 45, Number 2, Winter 2012
    2. Volume 45, Number 1, Fall 2011 - Eighteenth-Century Studies: Volume 45, Number 1, Fall 2011
    3. Volume 44, Number 4, Summer 2011 - Eighteenth-Century Studies: Volume 44, Number 4, Summer 2011
    4. Volume 44, Number 3, Spring 2011 - Eighteenth-Century Studies: Volume 44, Number 3, Spring 2011
  • Latest articles:
    1. Popular Culture and Sporting Life in the Rural Margins of Late Eighteenth-Century England: The World of Robert Anderson, ''The Cumberland Bard'' -

      By Mike Huggins

      Our knowledge of late eighteenth-century popular cultural life outside London, the major urban areas, and southern England is still relatively limited, especially in relation to leisure and recreation.1 This study sets out therefore to explore questions of late eighteenth-century popular culture, customary sports, class, and cultural identity through an alternative and very different focus—rural regional material, drawing largely on the published works of the neglected working-class dialect poet Robert Anderson, who lived and worked in Cumberland, the northern rural geopolitical borderland of England. The lack of academic interest in English popular culture and sporting life in the late eighteenth century ... Read More
    2. Unbending the Mind: or, Commercialized Leisure and the Rhetoric of Eighteenth-Century Diversion -

      By Darryl P. Domingo

      The Melange of so many different Subjects, and such a Variety of Thoughts upon them (which, if I am not deceiv’d, give an agreeable Goût to the whole) may not satisfie you so well as a Composition perfect in its kind on one intire Subject; but possibly it may divert and amuse you better, for here is no thread of Story, nor connexion of one Part with another, to keep the Mind intent, and constrain you to any length of Reading. The Slackening and Unbending our Minds on some Occasions, makes them exert themselves with greater Vigour and Alacrity, when they return to their proper and natural State. This essay is a study of amusement which makes an amusement out of study. Endeavoring to delight and ... Read More
    3. A ''Don Juanized'' Macbeth on Austria's Enlightened Stage: Its Genesis, Its Critical Fortunes -

      By Edmund J. Goehring

      When Søren Kierkegaard’s doppelgänger in Either/Or (1843) pairs a canonical poet, a painter, and a composer with a congenial topic—“Homer with the Trojan War, Raphael with Catholicism, Mozart with Don Juan”1—he does so in part to validate Don Juan lore as a subject worthy of sustained critical investigation. Although going mainly to Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), Kierkegaard’s praise of that particular work would buoy up the collective repertory: his exegesis on earlier versions like Molière’s Le festin de Pierre (1665) and, before that, Tirso’s El burlador de Sevilla (1630) joined the popular tale to aesthetic and ethical questions reaching back into Antiquity. Kierkegaard saw the dramatization of Don Juan’s life ... Read More
    4. See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Spectation and the Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere -

      By Manushag N. Powell

      Such texts as The Spectator (1711–14), the often imitated but never surpassed daily periodical by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, made enormous strides in facilitating readers’ willingness to accept authors as worthy professionals.1 Modern Western subjects, dependent as we are becoming on our textual self-representations, might think of ourselves as the children of Mr. Spectator and his belief that both individuals and humanity as a whole could be made knowable through text. Generally speaking, the centrality of the middle-class authorial “I” to eighteenth-century print culture is remarkable. This device is well known to readers who first encounter the eighteenth century through Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, or ... Read More
    5. The ''Reluctant'' Politician: Thomas Jefferson's Debt to Epicurus -

      By M. Andrew Holowchak

      If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling & indeed ridiculous to suppose that a man had less right in himself than one of his neighbors or indeed all of them put together. Thomas Jefferson’s philosophical and political thinking owes a great debt—one which he often acknowledged—to ancient Greek and Roman thinking. Foremost among those ancient thinkers was the Greek Epicurus (341–271 BCE), whose philosophy Jefferson called “the most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients, as frugal of vicious indulgence, and fruitful of virtue as the hyperbolical extravagances of his rival sects.”1 He refers to Epicurus as “our ... Read More
    6. Early America in Transatlantic Context(s) -

      By Mark K. Fulk

      The four books reviewed here offer a rich and varied history of the factors that shaped the founding of the United States. From the issues surrounding religious liberty and the ways in which the American past impacts upon the political present, to the lives and writings of model individuals, each volume offers a unique perspective on the American experiment and its deep roots in English and European thought. The First Prejudice offers an invaluable exploration of the complicated development of religious tolerance in Early American culture. Beneke and Grenda draw extensively from America’s relation to its English and European roots, avoiding simplistic formulations in favor of a multifaceted analysis of ... Read More
    7. The Risks of Reward in Early America -

      By James P. Cousins

      Perceptions of danger, or risk—whether potential or realized, apparent or apparitional—manifest social rationalities. Eighteenth-century expressions of risk—in literature, diplomatic exchanges, court records, imperial decrees, periodicals, maps, and other cultural ephemera—provide important clues to the complex, often mystifying, actions and reactions of European colonists. Two recent works of literary and geopolitical history present textual and nontextual illustrations of risk in attempts to underscore localized social processes and comprehensive imperial policies. Though methodologically dissimilar, Paul Mapp’s and Joseph Fichtelberg’s studies are united in their appreciation of risk as a psychosocial and ... Read More
    8. Sterne and the Culture of Commemoration -

      By Jesse Molesworth

      Endings always proved messy for Laurence Sterne, in both his art and his life. Consider that his own body seems to have enjoyed its own grotesque afterlife, when his corpse was discovered, soon after its interment on 22 March 1768, on the dissection table of a neighboring anatomy school—the apparent victim of bodysnatching. An ending represents little more than a new beginning, and one is tempted to say that Sterne followed so many of his characters in resisting a final conclusion: like Tristram Shandy, attempting to outrun the specter of Death; or Yorick, who remains a vibrant presence throughout Sterne’s writing despite numerous reminders of his death; or even Tristram’s brother Bobby, whose death cannot be ... Read More
    9. Lives and Letters -

      By Nicole Pohl

      . . . a Letter may be written upon any thing or Nothing, just as that any thing or Nothing happens to Occur. . . . A Letter is Written, as a Conversation is maintained, or a Journey perform’d, not by preconcerted, or premeditated Means, by a New Contrivance, or an Invention never heard of before, but merely by maintaining a Progress, and resolving as a Postillion does, having once Set out, never to Stop ‘till we reach the appointed end.1 Such critics as William Merrill Decker, Charles A. Porter, Keith Stewart, Susan Fitzmaurice, Janet Altman, and Jacques Derrida long have struggled with the definition and concept of the “letter” and epistolarity. For them, the complexity arises in a historical context ... Read More
    10. The Virtues of Kantian Ethics -

      By Nicholas F. Stang

      While many philosophers still know Kant’s ethics primarily from Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and perhaps the Critique of Practical Reason, recent scholarship has shown that to truly understand his moral philosophy we must widen our perspective to include the full range of his ethical writings, including the Metaphysics of Morals, the Religionschrift, his lectures on ethics, and various essays on politics and history (e.g., “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History”). A new monograph by Anne Margaret Baxley and a new collection of essays edited by Lara Denis show, in different ways, the philosophical value of expanding and enriching our understanding of Kant as a moral philosopher. In ... Read More

 

Eighteenth-Century Life

  • Latest issues:
    1. Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2012 - Eighteenth-Century Life: Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2012
    2. Volume 35, Number 3, Fall 2011 - Eighteenth-Century Life: Volume 35, Number 3, Fall 2011
    3. Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2011 - Eighteenth-Century Life: Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2011
    4. Volume 35, Number 1, Winter 2011 - Eighteenth-Century Life: Volume 35, Number 1, Winter 2011
  • Latest articles:
    1. Shakespeare, The Castle of Otranto, and the Problem of the Corpse on the Eighteenth-Century Stage -

      This essay considers the limited presence of the dead body in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. The near absence of gory death from the novella is striking, given both its intensive borrowing from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its status as the founding work of the Gothic tradition. The essay argues that Walpole’s selective use of Shakespearean materials is symptomatic of an eighteenth-century ambivalence towards the use of death as spectacle, an ambivalence that manifests itself in the critical dispute over the stage corpse. The analysis of this dispute reveals two contradictory impulses at work: on the one hand, there is a desire to push such images out of sight in hopes of advancing a more refined sensibility; on the other hand, especially in the latter half of the century, there is a gradual emergence of a patriotic wish to embrace the spectacle of death as part of a native literary tradition, with which Shakespeare’s name is rapidly becoming synonymous. The final section of the essay considers The Castle of Otranto’s reworking of Shakespeare’s macabre materials as a complex and ambiguous reflection of these contradictory urges.

    2. Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra: Adelaide O'Keeffe, the Jewish Conversion Novel, and the Limits of Rational Education -

      Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra (1814) is a historical novel by the Irish author Adelaide O’Keeffe that features religious conversions from paganism to Judaism, and from Judaism to Christianity. O’Keeffe stages these conversions within the context of late Enlightenment debates about the ability of rational educational approaches to inculcate religious belief. I compare Zenobia to Edgeworth’s Harrington, Rousseau’s Émile, Mme de Genlis’ Adéle et Thèodore, and Hamilton’s Agrippina. Zenobia applies two popular modes of fictional representation of education to the teaching of religion. The first of these modes is that of the philosophical experiment, most often presented as a utopian pedagogical fantasy in which a child and educator live apart from society and in which various educational approaches and techniques can be applied to the child without outside interference. We find examples of this approach in Rousseau’s Émile (1762) and Mme de Genlis’ Adéle et Thèodore (1782). The second mode is that of practical, applied pedagogy in which teachers contend with outside influences and a child’s already-established habits and prior associations. O’Keeffe’s particular contribution to pedagogical literature is her use of both modes to represent religious training.

    3. Selling Celebrity: Actors' Portraits in Bell's Shakespeare and Bell's British Theatre -

      In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, John Bell commissioned hundreds of actor portraits in dramatic roles, which were published as book illustrations in the series Bell’s Shakespeare and Bell’s British Theatre. These portraits contributed significantly to the emergent culture of theatrical celebrity. While paintings and engraved prints of actors mostly peddled a mode of celebrity that was sustained by audience applause within the theater walls, Bell’s illustrations created a parallel visibility for the performers outside the theater, which was only tenuously and unevenly associated with their stage celebrity. The performers’ images circulating through Bell’s books realigned the contours of the late eighteenth-century market for theatrical celebrity.

    4. Richetti's Narratives
    5. The Shape of Things to Come
    6. Recovered Lives
    7. Bodies Abounding
    8. Masques and Bergamasques: Dancing with Voltaire
    9. Watched Women
    10. Popular Revolution or Foreign Invasion?
    11. The Centrality of Peripheries: The Orinoco Ilustrado and Imperial-Enlightened Knowledge
    12. Romanticism and Genre, Theory and Practice
    13. Outliving Three Centuries? A View of Johnson Studies at the Tercentenary of His Birth
    14. Subjectivity in the Romantic-Era Novel

 

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

  • Latest issues:
    1. Volume 24, Number 2, Winter 2011-12 - Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Volume 24, Number 2, Winter 2011-12
    2. Volume 24, Number 1, Fall 2011 - Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Volume 24, Number 1, Fall 2011
    3. Volume 23, Number 4, Summer 2011 - Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Volume 23, Number 4, Summer 2011
    4. Volume 23, Number 3, Spring 2011 - Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Volume 23, Number 3, Spring 2011
  • Latest articles:
    1. Formalism and Eighteenth-Century English Fiction -

      By John Richetti

      When the editors of Eighteenth-Century Fiction asked me if I would like to edit a special number of the journal, I readily agreed but then wondered what might be a timely topic. What had the study of the eighteenth-century English novel lacked of late? What would justify and unify a special number? In recent years, I had become uneasy about what I perceived as the drift in some of eighteenth-century studies towards an extreme version of cultural studies that struck me as indifferent or even hostile to what I think of as the main tasks of literary study. The tendency of this brand of cultural studies seemed to mandate treating literary texts as simply part of the larger ideological and cultural field. Perhaps ... Read More
    2. Counting, Resonance, and Form, A Speculative Manifesto (with Notes) -

      By David A. Brewer

      The chief virtue of the recent quantitative turn in literary studies championed by Franco Moretti, Clifford Siskin, William St Clair, and others has been to remind us of just how broad and varied the literary field of the past actually was, and what a small fraction of it receives scholarly attention of any sort. At the same time, this exciting new (to us) vista has been accompanied by a sobering reminder that our customary modes of investigation are simply not up to the task of really grasping this broadened field and its forms: put simply, we have neither world enough nor time to read all that we would need to read—nor would “reading everything” necessarily lead us to any view that was greater than the sum of ... Read More
    3. Anna Barbauld on Fictional Form in The British Novelists (1810) -

      By Anne Toner

      Anna Letitia Barbauld’s fifty-volume collection, The British Novelists, published in 1810, has been recognized as formative in establishing the novelistic canon. It also contains innovative piece of writing on novelistic form, as Barbauld argued in her collection for the merit and respectability of the novel by attending to its value in aesthetic terms. When advertised in the Athenaeum in 1807, The British Novelists was presented explicitly as a guide to the choosing of novels, instead of the evaluative void of the library catalogue.1 Barbauld provided an early nineteenth-century retrospect of, mainly, the eighteenth-century novel, with an eye alert to what she calls the “ordonnance” of a novelist’s plan, its ... Read More
    4. Secondary Qualities and Masculine Form in Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison -

      By Helen Thompson

      Samuel Richardson distils the plot of his second novel Clarissa (1747–48) into Clarissa’s warning: “my story, to all who shall know it, will afford these instructions: that the eye is a traitor, and ought ever to be mistrusted: that form is deceitful.”1 This constitutes a distinctly impersonal gloss of Clarissa’s trials at the hands of the rake Lovelace: it is neither she nor he, but her “eye” and his “form” that propel Clarissa’s fatal decision to put herself in Lovelace’s power. When she uses the word “form” to evoke what, at the start of Clarissa, turns her eye “traitor,” Clarissa does not refer to Lovelace’s effusively personalized duplicity; she instead blames the capacity of his visible attractions to elicit ... Read More
    5. “Seeing something that was doing in the World”: The Form of History in Colonel Jack -

      By Ruth Mack

      After he has made it, after he has risen from a lowly servant on the Virginia plantation, to an overseer, and finally to a plantation owner, Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack does not rest on his laurels. Instead, he enlists his well-educated servant as “Schollar” and “Pedagogue” and begins a comprehensive course of instruction.1 Unfortunately, the religious part of Jack’s learning does not entirely take—“I cannot say,” he relates, “I had any Convictions upon me, sufficient to bring it on ... so it wore off again Gradually, as such things generally do, where the first Impressions are not deep enough.” Another kind of reading and instruction makes a stronger impression: “History.” His teacher, Jack says, “read History to ... Read More
    6. Episodic or Novelistic? Law in the Atlantic and the Form of Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack -

      By Gabriel Cervantes

      Nineteenth- and twentieth-century conceptions of the novel have been retrospectively projected onto earlier, incipient fields of fictional writing.1 In English, this projection has been especially apparent in studies of early eighteenth-century literature where the term “novel” has long been used with little concern over historical accuracy. Using the example of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (first published in 1724), recent studies by Nicholas Seager and Mary Poovey have shown such processes of reinterpretation were already at work by 1740 when the model of domestic fiction absorbed earlier works and the continuum between fact and fiction began to break apart.2 These realizations are crucial, but, as I will argue, they ... Read More
    7. Devotional Reading and Novel Form: The Case of David Simple -

      By Tera Pettella

      Critical histories of the novel make two fundamental assumptions that this article challenges. First, that economic and social changes account for the emergence and development of different kinds of novels, and, second, that the gradual waning of religious involvement over the course of the century contributed to the relative popularity of novels.1 As a result of these assumptions, scholars have not satisfactorily accounted for the influence of devotional reading practices on the development of the novel.2 I focus on the impact not of change but of stability in the development of novel forms, specifically the stability of established religious reading practices. However influential social and economic changes were ... Read More
    8. The Architectural Design of Beckford’s Vathek -

      By Sandro Jung

      Scholars have read William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) in terms of orientalist poetics, the exotic, and the Gothic genre, but they have not primarily focused on the novel’s imaginative reworking of cultural manifestations of form such as architecture and design fashions. Studies of the text’s contexts outnumber by far engagements with the novel’s tropes, structure, and hybridity.1 Yet, as Virgil Nemoianu has observed, “the form of the cultural product is overwhelmingly important in our access to temporality.”2 An assessment of a text’s formal and artistic patterns and constructed spatial forms (as well as their symbolic and morphological significance) not only reveals what constitutes its originality but also sheds ... Read More
    9. “Nothing Really in It”: Gothic Interiors and the Externals of the Courtship Plot in Northanger Abbey -

      By Laura Baudot

      This article identifies a place for formalist readings of eighteenth-century novels by close reading a roll of papers stuffed in a cabinet in Jane Austen’s experimental novel Northanger Abbey. Composed in the late 1790s, Northanger Abbey self-consciously participates in the eighteenth-century novelistic tradition of inquiry into the form of this emerging genre and the nature of its hold over the reader’s imagination.1 In an elaborate game of hide-and-seek with washing bills that spend part of the narrative as a hidden manuscript in a Japan cabinet, Austen hints at the material facts that are fundamental to marriage and reading. These facts are at the surface of both but are driven under cover (under the covers of ... Read More
    10. Remembering Nature: Soliloquy as Aesthetic Form in Mansfield Park -

      By Lorraine Clark

      Mansfield Park is centrally about novelistic form, Jane Austen’s self-consciously constructed example and defence of the eighteenth-century novel of manners as she understands the genre or at least her own practice of it. Her novel is a series of philosophical dialogues at once rhapsodic and sceptical, scenically staged both out in nature and within doors.1 These dialogues include solitary self-reflective musings, reveries, and rhapsodies on nature and human nature; literal dialogues between two people on the same subject; public conversations among several characters; and letters. Austen’s novelistic dialogues also include what Michael Prince terms “heroic drama” and “allegory,” debates and sometimes struggles ... Read More

 

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

  • Latest issues:
    1. Volume 40, 2011 - Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture: Volume 40, 2011
    2. Volume 39, 2010 - Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture: Volume 39, 2010
    3. Volume 38, 2009 - Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture: Volume 38, 2009
    4. Volume 37, 2008 - Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture: Volume 37, 2008
  • Latest articles:
    1. Editor’s Note -

      By Downing A. Thomas

      The essays contained in this volume offer an exciting array of interdisciplinary perspectives on eighteenth-century studies, balancing essays on English and French topics while reaching into German Studies and Musicology with the inclusion of an essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities and an exploration of the musical and cultural impact of an eighteenth-century virtuoso violinist: the “hissing” Pagin. It is particularly gratifying to note that the present volume contains a revised version of the 2009 James L. Clifford lecture, a tour-de-force by Mary Sheriff, “The King, the Trickster and the Gorgon: on the Illusions of Rococo Art.” I want to thank Associate Editor Lisa Cody—now deep into editing volume ... Read More
    2. The King, the Trickster, and the Gorgon: Jean-Marc Nattier and the Illusions of Rococo Art -

      By Mary D. Sheriff

      For decades scholars were certain of it: Venus ruled rococo painting, that frivolous French confection whipped up by Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard. It was the Goncourt Brothers who heralded the reign of this goddess, and their image of eighteenth-century French art long held sway over both those scholars who celebrated rococo painting and those who condemned it’s apparent lack of serious content. Watteau and Fragonard, the Goncourts cast as the great poets of love: Watteau for imagining a “Champs-Elysées of passion,” and Fragonard for drawing inspiration from Ovid’s Art of Love. It was Boucher, however, who personified the taste of eighteenth-century France, which the Goncourts pictured as a true realm of Venus ... Read More
    3. Portrait of a Marriage: John and Amelia Opie and the Sister Arts -

      By Shelley King

      Recent studies of the later eighteenth century, such as Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite’s Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (2002) and Christopher Rovee’s Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism (2006), have emphasized the importance of social interconnections in the period, replacing the long dominant myth of the Romantic artist as solitary genius with a more complex narrative of public and private affiliations. In revising the myth of isolated creativity, such studies locate our understanding of artistic production—both literary and graphic—within the debate concerning public and private spheres of interest that has emerged in criticism ... Read More
    4. The Power of Images in Goethe’s Elective Affinities -

      By Dorothea von Mücke

      Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities narrates how a married, mature couple, Eduard and Charlotte, are involved in a set of projects to reform, renovate, enhance and beautify their country estate and its surroundings. When they are joined on their estate by Eduard’s old friend Hauptmann (captain) and Charlotte’s niece Ottilie, these additions to the household provoke the disruption of the marriage and result in the departure of both Eduard and Hauptmann. In the second part of the novel, the absent men are partially replaced in their functions in the household by a young architect and an assistant teacher from Ottilie’s school. It is throughout this second part that the projects initiated in the first ... Read More
    5. From the Playhouse to the Page: Visual Sources for Watteau’s Theatrical Universe -

      By Josephine Touma

      In 1748 the Comte de Caylus said of Antoine Watteau: “ses compositions n’ont aucun objet. Elles n’expriment le concours d’aucune passion et sont par conséquent, dépourvues d’une des plus piquantes parties de la peinture, je veux dire l’action.”1 Caylus’ pejorative overtones aside, the idea underpinning his summation—that Watteau’s paintings were essentially “subjectless”—continues to resonate. Two and a half centuries later, scholars still consider illegibility as a defining characteristic of Watteau’s paintings, concluding that they evade or even subvert any straightforward reading. Norman Bryson uses the term “semantic vacuum” to describe the dearth of narrative meaning in the pictures.2 The obfuscation or ... Read More
    6. The Hissing of Jean-Pierre Pagin: Diderot’s Violinist Meets the Cabal at the Concert Spirituel -

      By Beverly Wilcox

      When the British music historian Charles Burney passed through Paris on his way to Italy in 1770, he spent a day at the house of a wealthy salonnière, where he met a violinist named Pagin. He later published an account of the meeting which is as enigmatic as it is intriguing: M. Pagin was a pupil of Tartini, and is regarded here as his best scholar; he has a great deal of expression and facility of executing difficulties; but whether he did not exert himself, as the room was not large, or from whatever cause it proceeded, I know not, but his tone was not powerful. Music is now no longer his profession; he has a place under the Comte de Clermont, of about two hundred and fifty pounds sterling a year. He had ... Read More
    7. Diversionary Tactics and Coercive Acts: John Burgoyne’s Fête Champêtre -

      By Daniel O’Quinn

      On Thursday the 9th of June 1774, General John Burgoyne, of Saratoga fame, arranged an elaborate Fête Champêtre at the Oaks, in Surrey, to celebrate the wedding of his nephew Lord Edward Stanley and Lady Elizabeth Hamilton. The guests included the foremost men and women of the kingdom and this seemingly trivial gathering of fashionable society was the subject of extensive reporting in the newspapers. Lengthy descriptions of the event were published under the title of “Oaks Gazette Extraordinary” in the Public Advertiser, The Morning Chronicle, and in The Gentleman’s Magazine. The title is important because the supplemental texts which were added to the papers as “Gazette Extraordinaries” were generally devoted to ... Read More
    8. “Friendship like mine / Throws all Respects behind it”: Male Companionship and the Cult of Frederick, Prince of Wales -

      By Emrys D. Jones

      In a recent article, Hannah Smith and Stephen Taylor have redirected attention to the process by which Frederick, Prince of Wales and John, Lord Hervey broke off what had been a close, intimate friendship in the early 1730s.1 The exact circumstances of this estrangement, the political or personal disagreements behind it, must remain obscure due to a scarcity of extant documentary evidence;2 however, by discussing the friendship and its breakdown in the light of contemporary ideas about court favoritism, masculinity, and political virtue, Smith and Taylor provide a broad contextual framework within which to understand the bitter hostility that arose between the prince and the courtier after their rift.3 Frederick ... Read More
    9. “Putting to Hazard a Certainty”: Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England -

      By Jessica Richard

      In London, on January 6, 1662 (n. s.) Charles II opened the first Epiphany revels of the Restoration celebrating the final night of an especially festive Christmas season “by throwing the Dice himselfe, in the Privy Chamber, where a table was set on purpose, & lost his 100 pounds.”1 The king’s throne was secure, the Cavalier Parliament was seated, and the serious gambling could begin: “the Ladys also plaied very deepe,” diarist John Evelyn recorded, and “I came away when the Duke of Ormond had won about 1000 pounds & left them still at passage, Cards, &c: at other Tables, both there and at the Groome-porters.”2 This gambling scene represents a significant nexus in economic history, where archaic symbolic ... Read More
    10. “Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air”: The World of Eco-Georgic -

      By David Fairer

      Near the beginning of his poem Spring, James Thomson is confronting a crisis of Nature, an earth that is dis-tempered, “off the Poise,” where humanity has lost control and self-control. Individuals are unable to find common ground, and a thrombosis of the social instincts reaches the heart. There seems to be no future in which to invest, no shared commitment or concern, or recognition of a wider good—and the blame falls on “Nature”. It is a worryingly recognisable scenario, where a crisis of nature is really only a symptom of a more fundamental crisis of humanity. The picture is not so much one of chaos and anarchy as of a system working against itself: ungenerous responses and perverted energies form a part, but ... Read More
Created to facilitate collaboration among scholars & students of eighteenth-century studies.