Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note What does the future of eighteenth-century studies look like? If the recent turning of our own century suggests the question, then the essays below provide an eloquent answer. They promise an ongoing research agenda broad enough to encompass large and important questions, sustained enough to reach well-informed and well-argued conclusions, and nuanced enough to engage competing political values. With the present volume the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies again offers essays selected from among the scholarly papers presented at the annual meetings of the society and its affiliates. Once again the contents form a cornucopia of research representing a wide array of period interests. The topics range from a gendered survey of the iconography of the most celebrated actress of the British stage during the last quarter of the century; to an argument that fiction enjoyed a marked heroic aspect (even as it more famously subjected other genres to novelization); to a methodological debate about the continuing relevance of a history-of-ideas approach to intellectual texts. Following recent practice the volume also features several essays with a common theme. It was society president Carol Blum who inaugurated the custom more than a decade ago with a cluster of essays on the literary uses of bees. Four articles in the history of science address the intersection of writing and healing. They take us from salons in southern France that served physicians as professional vehicles for what Pierre Bourdieu calls distinction , as well as for airing medical issues, to the spectacular London anatomy school that found expression in the drama of Joanna Baillie; and from the shifting patterns of rhetoric in British doctor-patient correspondence across the century, to an investigation of the indignities suffered by poor pregnant women at the hands of a developing obstetric medicine. Several other contributions meet in the exploration of cultural metaphor . One surveys the historical extension of what it meant, figuratively speaking, to claim to restore culture to the status quo ante during the Restoration and its aftermath. For generations of poets and playwrights, it is argued, the trope of restoration became a complex formation symbolic of the return of order and plenty, until the metaphor was at last turned upside down in The Dunciad as the restoration of chaos. Another essay in the Xl xii / Editor's Note poetics of historical consciousness unpacks through close reading the ways in which William Blake configured the trope of the body politic as a critical site of artistic and civic regeneration. And in a third consideration of cultural metaphor, an early modern discourse prizing observation as labor is understood to have far-reaching consequence in contemporary critical practice. As usual, French studies are well represented here. With the novel geography of his Lettre à d'Alembert the lumière J.-J. Rousseau is seen to break with encyclopédistes to map a new isolation for the individual, while the mysterious Chevalier de Cerfvol, a sometime disciple of Rousseau, is revealed as the author of conjugal conduct book affirming male prerogatives in marriage. The scholarly imagination at its best is evident in an anatomy of the reception in abridged form of the novels of Samuel Richardson; in a painstaking analysis of Samuel Johnson's use of exemplary biography in the Rambler papers; and in a carefully reasoned inquiry into the parentage of one of Daniel Defoe's most elusive characters, Roxana's Susan. In a closing contribution, two distinguished colleagues take up a neglected classic, Ernst Cassirer's Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, tacitly challenging scholarship to continue to synthesize the great intellectual aims of the Enlightenment project despite our postmodern mistrust of master narratives. The millenial moment would seem to be a good time to pause and reflect on the achievements of the past before pressing on with the tasks of the future. The editor would like to thank his predecessor Julie Candler Hayes for her generous goodwill. Gratitude is also due to graduate students Audrey Conway and Timothy Gauthier for their assistance in proofreading and publicizing the volume, and especially to Susan Steigerwald for her extraordinary diligence and organization at every stage of production. May this volume honor her memory...