Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note The directions of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies are quite exciting, as the essays in this volume suggest. These pieces, all presented at a regional or national meeting of the American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies, draw on unusual archival materials, discuss a variety of non-"literary" or extra-textual materials, employ new theoretical approaches, or offer innovative discussions of canonical texts. Like our field of study, which embraces multiple disciplines, this volume creates vibrant conversation, a heterogeneous mix of approaches, texts, and languages. The "novel" as a genre remains a dominant focus, and a number of essays in this volume offer new perspectives on the genre or new readings of canonical texts. Neil Saccamano reads dramatizations of sentimental attachments in relation to discussions of political authority in Laclos 's Les Liaisons dangereuses. Barbara Benedict explores the ways early advertising discourse, like early fiction of Eliza Haywood and Daniel Defoe, commodifies desire, and the implications of that parallel on the novel. In her discussion of Burney's Cecilia, Susan Greenfield redefines "madness" as a kind of heroic quixotism, and explores the interesting intersections between madness and imagination. The connection between prison reform efforts and the English Jacobin novel is the focus of Alexander Pitofsky's essay. Though Casanova's Histoire de ma vie is not a novel, that autobiography is often compared to one; within the text, suggests Ted Emery, Casanova critiques the novel's construction of feminine subjectivity. Laurence Mall distinguishes the tragic exoticism of the Abbé Prévost's Histoire de M. Cleveland'from the ancillary exoticism of the baroque novel that preceded it and the aesthetically charged exoticism of the Romantics that followed. These pieces share a concern with situating fictional discourses into a wider cultural field. A number of essays use unusual or little-known sources or materials. Melissa Downes discusses The Jamaica Lady, a novel published long ago in William McBurney 's Four Before Richardson (1963) but infrequently discussed since. She reveals how deeply imbricated the conversation about the West Indies—both in terms of finance and race—is with the anxieties emerging from the South Sea Bubble. April Shelford similarly focuses on the Caribbean as the context for her discussion of an unidentified eighteenth- xii / Editor's Note century British sailor's previously uncovered journal and the journals of Edward Thompson. Laura Schattschneider examines the narratives implicitly created by "tokens"—or "infant's petitions"— left with foundlings at the foundling hospital, and their intersections with contemporaneous novels. These three essays demonstrate how archival work and unusual sources invigorate our discipline. The volume also includes essays that explore notions of "author"-ity. Geoffrey Turnovsky suggests how the dystopic representation of commercial publishing and so-called "marginal" writers redefine both the literary marketplace and the construction of authorship in eighteenth-century France. Discussing the poetry of Stephen Duck, James Mulholland examines the use of singing, as differentiated from other types of orality, and its relation to class, gender, and poetic authority in the pastoral. Caroline Weber explores the representations of statuary in eighteenth-century French painting and literature, and focuses on their implications for subjectivity, sociability, and gender. Samuel Johnson's commitment in his moral writing to the ancient Stoic and Baconian principle that learning and happiness derive from attempting difficulties and registering mistakes is the subject of Jeffrey Barnouw's essay. George Haggerty reconsiders the correspondence between Horace Walpole and William Cole, usually considered in terms of antiquarianism, in terms of homosocial interaction. Finally, the volume contains a cluster of essays that meditate on "beauty" in the eighteenth century. The first three of these four essays were drawn from the 32nd annual meeting of the Midwestern ASECS which was organized around the theme of beauty. Downing Thomas, program chair, hoped to encourage the discussion of eighteenth-century creations and preoccupations within the aesthetic frameworks of the period, but also in light of recent critical concerns with the category of the aesthetic and the renewed interest in beauty that has emerged at the turn of the millennium. All three essays from the conference frame the recent return of interest in beauty in light of the complex discourses that grappled with the subject throughout the...