Eighteenth-century Commentators Research Articles

:Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewInfectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism. Robert Mitchell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. x+322.Colin JagerColin JagerRutgers University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLeft-identified intellectuals have enjoyed beating up on liberalism for some time. Liberalism’s omnipresence, not to mention its association with individual liberty, private property, and (especially) a market economy, have made it an irresistible counter in the academic parlor game of demonstrating that those who seem to be our friends are in fact our enemies. In his excellent book, Robert Mitchell writes that, having absorbed the critique of liberalism in graduate school, its primary theorists seemed to him “cramped, provincial, and reactionary” compared to the excitements of continental theory (vii). I imagine this bit of intellectual autobiography will resonate with Mitchell’s readers; it certainly did with me. I too learned in graduate school that novels inculcated liberal norms (individualism, agency, freedom) and that liberalism was pernicious—or, as Mitchell puts it in more measured terms, that literature was “a technology of normativity” (2). Was I supposed to hate novels, then?Infectious Liberty guides its readers beyond this intellectual cul-de-sac. Mitchell writes that when he read Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, and Roberto Esposito’s development of Foucault’s ideas, he came to see the liberal tradition as concerned with groupings, averages, and collective experiments, not simply with individual agency and private property. Liberalism, in short, was a mode of biopolitics: it was a way of seeing the world in terms of populations, regularities, collective bodies, and the overall processes of life and death (illness, production, birth, etc.). Like Foucault and Esposito, Mitchell is not interested in condemning biopolitics or getting rid of it, “whatever that might mean” (x). Rather, he follows Esposito by parsing it: on the one hand, into the death-dealing “thanatopolitics” that emerge in the work of Agamben and others, focused on security and survival; on the other, into an “affirmative biopolitics” focused on openness and transformation. One name for that affirmative biopolitics, Mitchell argues, is Romanticism.Infectious Liberty is divided into six chapters. The first three are organized by way of concepts familiar to literary scholars: genius, difference, character, and free indirect discourse. Chapters 4 through 6 take up more general concepts in critical sociology: flow, experiment, and self-regulation. All the chapters are characterized by an admirably dialectical impulse toward complication and nuance. Mitchell seems interested in clarity rather than academic point scoring, and so I fear my summary below will scarcely do justice to his arguments. This is particularly ironic because Mitchell himself is a marvelous summarizer of complicated material; I particularly admired the economy and clarity of his accounts of John Guillory (41–42), Franco Moretti (68–73), Ulrich Beck (173–78), and Bruno Latour (220–26), which are almost worth the price of admission on their own.The first chapter considers the relationship between genius and population. Some eighteenth-century commentators thought that the matter was arithmetical: a larger population would increase the number of geniuses. Others thought that genius might be related to particular social environments. A more complex possibility was that there were plenty of geniuses around, but that they were in danger of being overlooked or forgotten. Those latter possibilities, of course, are associated with literary texts: Gray’s Elegy, in the first instance, and Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, in the second. In a move that will be characteristic of the book as a whole, Mitchell argues that these literary texts deepen a reader’s ability to grasp the “complex internal dynamics” of populations (47). In this way Romantic literature makes the question of genius a biopolitical one, not in the blunt sense of increase and decrease (a paradigm associated with thanatopolitics) but rather by “approach[ing] populations as entities that have capacities for creating new norms” (49).The idea that literary writing complicates a given discourse in the direction of transformation rather than security carries over into chapter 2, on “imagining the population” (50). Here Mitchel revisits the Godwin-Malthus controversy, observing that despite their real disagreements both men regarded differences within populations as largely irrelevant; they thought in terms of the mass, not the individual. Mitchell contrasts this with Frankenstein, a novel that endeavors to train its readers to see and imagine multiple kinds of populations—including a population of creatures in South America, a possibility famously destroyed by the Malthusian Victor.In chapter 3, Mitchell expands the claim that “population” names not only a homogenized group but a collection of mappable differences. The novelistic development of character systems and of free indirect discourse makes this clear: “characters” include not just humans but nonhuman agents, and free indirect discourse registers not only thoughts in human minds but “nondiscursive forces that bear upon collective biological existence” (79), like the structural logic of assumptions that underlie particular experiences. Free indirect discourse, in other words, is the place where consciousness intersects population dynamics; in Zola’s The Human Beast, for example, a character’s “pathological relationship to women” is linked to “the vast transportation network and administrative bureaucracy created by the train system” (101). Appealing to systems theory and Latour rather than to models of ideology or disciplinarity, Mitchell argues that free indirect discourse maps intersections between “biological forces and social relations at which pressure can be exerted” in a more liberatory direction (101).Chapter 4 investigates how Romantic-era writers thought “globally” (113)—how, that is, they came to understand phenomena like weather or population as intrinsically global. Mitchell turns to texts by Erasmus Darwin and P. B. Shelley that reflect on human transformations of their global environment by means of terraforming and improving the weather. What Shelley and Darwin grasped, he proposes, is the concept of flow: since we are on a globe, any movement in a particular direction will ultimately come back around to its point of origin. This is true for physics, meteorology, and political economy. Mitchell argues that this Romantic tradition has much to offer our age of climate change, for while most theories of the Anthropocene are focused on security and mere survival, the Romantic emphasis on flow is oriented toward joyful repair.Wordsworth and Coleridge famously described the Lyrical Ballads as an experiment, and Burke called the French Revolution a “dangerous experiment.” In chapter 5, Mitchell argues that not only was the Romantic era one of collective experimentation, but the notion of collective experiment was more important to the development of liberalism than individual liberty. The chapter thus proposes a counterhistory of liberal biopolitics itself as a series of variations on the notion of collective experiment, from early eighteenth-century smallpox inoculation through the institutional foci of Burke and Mill to two latter-day developments: the neoliberalism of Hayek and the neo-Romantic “risk society” of Ulrich Beck. Echoing the transformative aspects of Romantic experimentation, Beck makes it possible to articulate normative projects that depart from the mechanisms of security and survival that dominate neoliberal theory. The “liberal schema of survival is contested,” Mitchell writes, “whenever a community refuses to accept expert risk thresholds” (182); for Beck, at stake in such refusals is an implicit normative claim of the form this is how we want to live. As Mitchell is all too aware, it becomes impossible not to think of contemporary vaccine hesitancy and climate change discourse as exemplifying such neo-Romantic collective experiments—for better and for worse.Does regulation come from a sovereign who establishes a rule, or from a more mysterious quality of self-regulation? The first may be exemplified in the institutions of standard weights and measures, the second by monetary policy, where the “natural” rate of interest is determined by a series of inspired guesses by actors who possess neither sovereign authority nor all the facts. The oscillation between sovereign regulation and self-regulation is the subject of Mitchell’s sixth and final chapter. Admirably in my view, Mitchell wants to wean humanities scholars from the tendency to read “self-regulation” entirely through the lenses of governmentality, as if it is necessarily a normalizing project. Inspired again by Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics, Mitchell traces the possibilities of transformation in Kant’s “regulative ideal” of reason and Hannah Arendt’s Kant-inspired “common world.” In this tradition, thinking is inherently social, done in the presence of others and undertaken always from a particular position. Such self-regulation may of course lead to the neoliberal assertion of the market as the “natural” model of all relations; but it may also lead, Mitchell argues, to those practices of collective resource management that we know as the Commons.Methodologically, two points stand out in this consistently enlightening study. The first is how little of its argument hangs on readings of literary texts. To be sure, imaginative works by Thomas Gray, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley do appear, alongside prominent works of Romantic-era prose by Burke and especially Malthus. Still, the only chapter that really gestures toward an interpretive reading is chapter 2, where Frankenstein is posed against Godwin and Malthus as a representative of literary “difference.” Even here, the claim for literature is a comparatively weak one: that Frankenstein “enabled readers to think through the implications of multiple models of population” (68). The second point, very much related to the first, is Mitchell’s studious distance from symptomatic reading. Aside from a couple of measured paragraphs critiquing the “general literary-critical tendency to understand biopolitics as something that should be opposed at all costs” (12), this is not a polemical book. Mitchell simply remarks from time to time that he has little interest in viewing liberalism, biopolitics, Romanticism, or indeed literature itself, as engaged in projects that need to be either exposed or celebrated. Here he follows the lead of the late Foucault, Roberto Esposito, and Bruno Latour. Of course, Romanticism and liberalism are entwined in all sorts of complicated ways; but Mitchell’s goal “is not, fundamentally, to critique Romanticism as a mode of liberal ideology, but rather to understand Romanticism as an attempt to steer the biopolitical critique of liberalism toward more liberatory shores” (9). These two methodological points are related, I think, because by definition symptomatic reading presupposes the importance of its target—why else expend so much interpretive energy on it? By sticking to the entirely correct observation that there are good and bad kinds of biopolitics, just as there are more and less desirable forms of liberalism, Mitchell also lowers the moral and ideological weight assigned to any given text or its interpretation. Rather than proffer ideal solutions to material problems, he says, literary texts propose “a multitude of different models and norms” for grasping the social whole of which they are a part (5). One inevitable result is that Romanticism as a literary movement remains mostly offstage. What we see instead is a Romanticism that helps to orient an affirmative biopolitics—that is to say, one with self-transformation rather than self-preservation as its goal. Readers interested in moving beyond the historical-contextual paradigm that has dominated so much literary study will find much to think about—and to celebrate—here. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722228 Views: 114Total views on this site HistoryPublished online November 09, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism by James Bryant Reeves

Reviewed by: Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism by James Bryant Reeves Lisa O'Connell James Bryant Reeves, Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 260. $99.99 cloth. That God is dead is a commonplace of modern literary history and, at least until recently, of the secularization and modernization narratives that have shaped our understanding of Enlightenment. Yet, despite the presence of many atheists in eighteenth-century fiction, the "literary history of atheism" has largely gone untold. In Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century, James Reeves aims to change that. He offers a fresh, post-secular take on the literary representation of religious non-belief in Britain, arguing that it animated a broad sweep of early fiction, from Tory satire and verse essay to sentimental-moral fiction and pre-Romantic poetry. Reeves's five author-focused chapters make the case that atheism functioned as a richly "generative literary concept" (5–6) and that it did so precisely as a reviled Other for eighteenth-century fictional worlds. The book begins with twinned chapters on Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, for whom the rise of atheistic materialism signaled the degeneracy and dullness of the age. Paradoxically, atheism energized each author's most excoriating satires, including The Dunciad and Gulliver's Travels. The analysis continues into less well-traversed literary territory, with chapters on Sarah Fielding and Phebe Gibbes, mid-late-century female writers of didactic novels (David Simple, Lady Louisa Stroud, and Hartly House, Calcutta), whose polite marriage plots, Reeves insists, were no less reliant on godless worlds and characters, set here against author-sanctioned modes of sympathy, sociability, and (female) community tied to Christian belief. Pivoting back to canonical verse, the book's concluding chapter examines a selection of William Cowper's poems and hymns, in which his abiding opposition to atheism grounds an emergent Romantic critique of slavery, imperialism, and oppression. It is fair to say that, for Reeves, atheism's literary history unfolds under the dispensation of an English Anglican nation-state for which unbelief was the antithesis of a godly, ordered society. Accordingly, British authors became "preoccupied with unbelief," he argues, either as a force of imaginative chaos or as a reliable fictional means "to interrogate discourses of selfhood, sociability, tolerance and empire" (5). Only belatedly, under the influence of avowedly atheist writers like Percy Shelley (whose 1810–11 epistolary prank "The Necessity of Atheism" is the subject of the book's coda) as well as the promise of radical political transformation fueled by revolutionary critiques of religion and absolute authority, did the literary treatment of atheism detach from belief and godliness and connect to modern secularization narratives. Even as it unsettles secularization narratives, however, Godless Fictions does not seek to historicize the literary representation of unbelief by framing it within received intellectual histories of atheism or materialism, or even within the politics of the English state which regulated Christian orthodoxy and promoted broader moral reform and outreach efforts. Instead, Reeves's key analytical move is to insist on the primarily affective nature of literary responses to unbelief, noting that "[r]ather than arguing against atheism on rational or epistemological grounds, eighteenth-century literature often rejects it out of pure reflexive disdain" (7). Early in his study, Reeves tells us that, while eighteenth-century commentators and divines [End Page 339] routinely conflated atheism with Christian heterodoxy (Deism, Socinianism, anti-Trinitarianism, etc.), this was not the case in the literary sphere where the atheist emerged as a reviled fictional figure, native to satiric-dystopic speculative worlds and the minor characterology of the novel. Reeves's affect-oriented approach yields two important insights. The first is that British fiction's recurring negative treatment of godless worlds and characters—materialists, dunces, rakes, freethinkers, misanthropes, and the like (all reviled and almost all male)—is subtended by a steady and insistent theism. But this is not a theism tied to religious creed or to Christian-theological argument. It is, rather, as Reeves notes, precognitive, affective, and intensely imaginative, defined by its hostility to unbelief rather than by any positive or prescriptive conception of the divine. A...

National Debt and Political Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Britain

AbstractThe article traces a hitherto-neglected form of political obligation, one that resulted from national debt and relied on creditors’ self-interest. Eighteenth-century commentators argued that William III had introduced public borrowing to gain support from the people and to maintain the Revolution Settlement. This claim was first made by tories and became a staple argument of opposition authors. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, this connection between national debt and political allegiance was reassessed. Robert Wallace presented the debt as a price worth paying for the excellent British constitution, David Hume considered it as Britain's last hope to maintain the established order. In the discussions of American independence, the association of national debt with political obligation was used for divergent purposes. While Adam Smith and Richard Price utilized it to argue for a reform of empire, Thomas Paine urged the American provinces to unite under an American national debt. Drawing on authors from various political allegiances in eighteenth-century Britain, the article shows how the same idea about national debt and political obligation could be used for different purposes.

Boom, Bust, and Beyond: New Perspectives on the 1720 Stock Market Bubble. Ed. Stefano Condorelli and Daniel Menning.

Tempting as it is to draw simplistic comparisons between the crisis years of 1720 and 2020, two facets of the bubble year stand out as genuinely resonant for our current moment. First there is the international character of the economic disaster that unfolded in 1720: the common intellectual ground between France’s Mississippi Company and Britain’s South Sea Company, and the spiraling repercussions for trade and investment elsewhere in the world when both schemes proved faulty. Added to this is the sheer confusion that typified speculative culture of the time, the widespread bafflement occasioned by the rise and fall of stock, and the chaos the bubbles left in their wake. Condorelli and Menning’s co-edited collection successfully emphasizes both features of 1720’s calamity, but on the latter point—the disorder and turmoil of the times—it replicates more than it explains. Whether by accident or design, the structure of the book and its laissez-faire attitude to different disciplinary approaches create for readers a sense of bewilderment akin to that of the bubbles’ eighteenth-century commentators. There is much of value in the collection, including chapters that directly tackle the question of disorder’s historical significance, but too often the different contributors are not truly speaking to each other, despite the book’s origins in a 2018 conference. The editors seem reluctant either to mediate or arbitrate. Their introduction points out the long-standing interest of financial historians in the rationality or irrationality of 1720’s bubbles, but it provides little consideration of how these debates might map onto the concerns of cultural historians, or vice-versa. Instead, the introduction culminates with the rather exasperating argument that “there is still scope for further research,” a statement that does little to help us navigate the collection’s alternating methodologies and theoretical stances.The book is divided into three sections. The first, “Broadening the Geographical Frame,” is by far the most focused in its rationale, its four chapters effectively contextualizing the Mississippi and South Sea crashes within and beyond Europe. The second and third sections are much more loosely defined. “Engaging with Traditional Narratives” offers four chapters vaguely linked by the theme of reinterpretation; one of these, Menning’s own chapter on the Baltic Sea trade, could perhaps have been included in the first section to better effect. The final section, “Understanding Speculation—Micro to Macro,” then covers very similar thematic ground, its supposed interest in “the perspective of contemporary investors” not setting it apart from the earlier chapters of the book in any meaningful way. There is no conclusion or afterword. More egregiously, there is also no list of contributors’ biographical details. This seems discourteous not only to the contributors themselves, who deserve to have more formal recognition, but to the readers for whom such information would have been a great help. Though it would be reductive to categorize chapters and their authors simply according to disciplinary background, some information about a given author’s research profile would have made it easier to chart the different intellectual traditions represented here.As it stands, readers approaching the book from the standpoint of literary studies will find useful contextual material in many chapters. Malick W. Ghachem’s chapter on “The Mississippi Bubble in Saint-Domingue (Haiti)” is particularly insightful and pertinent to our current times in its insistence on the bubbles’ complicity in the slave trade. A dialogue between the editors, likewise included in the first section of the book, conveniently flags several facets of the pan-European “Stock Euphoria” that may not be familiar to literary historians: most intriguingly, the fact that the Mississippi and South Sea crises did not immediately undermine “the appeal of the joint-stock form” across the continent, and that, to the contrary, other European governments continued to found and promote similar companies, albeit in terms consistent with their countries’ respective sizes and cultures. Again, it is disappointing that the editors do not take the opportunity of their dialogue to bridge the gap between economic history and cultural history more explicitly, but the broad, international perspective heralded by their discussion is one of the collection’s undeniable strengths and should prove valuable to scholars in diverse fields.For more direct engagement with the literature and visual culture of the era, one must look to the book’s third section, several chapters of which deal with contemporary perceptions and representations of the bubbles. Of these, Dror Wahrman’s chapter is the most original in its findings. It is also one of the few points where the book reckons with the historical implications of entropy and confusion, reflecting on the very conflict of interpretive strategies that, elsewhere, weakens the collection’s coherence. Working with the nicely Popean title, “Order from Chaos Springs,” Wahrman argues that 1720 was a landmark year in Western understandings of order and disorder. He posits that the discourse surrounding the bubbles and their aftermath anticipated the economic thinking of Adam Smith by recognizing, at least sporadically, how “aggregate high-level self-organizing order” might emerge from “lower-level disorder.” Wahrman identifies this argument, or aspects of it, in various texts from the time, among them the apologia written in exile by John Law, architect of the Mississippi scheme. By setting these voices alongside more familiar reactions from Swift, Edward Ward, and others, Wahrman successfully demonstrates that the fear of chaos found in the latter was not the sole, inevitable response engendered by 1720’s disasters. On the contrary, at least some commentators argued that the collapse of the schemes was due to excessive manipulation rather than true randomness: “The directors were therefore guilty not of creating disorder but rather of eliminating it.” The bubble year thus provides ample corroboration for the rise of a philosophy of self-organization as charted by Wahrman and Jonathan Sheehan in their 2015 work, Invisible Hands.Compared to Wahrman’s contribution, other chapters that attend to textual and artistic representation are less groundbreaking. Anne L. Murphy provides a thoughtful overview of women’s involvement in the South Sea scheme, including discussion of a range of poems and satirical prints. However, her chapter seems torn between focusing on the actuality of female investment practices and the contemporary perception of them, with its conclusions on both fronts not really taking us beyond other recent research in this area. One of the most notable scholars to have worked on this topic, Amy Froide, is also a contributor to the volume, her chapter (in section 2) discussing continuities between the South Sea crisis and the Charitable Corporation Scandal of 1732. This provides a salutary reminder of the bubble’s enduring currency in British political discourse, though Froide’s analysis might have benefited by giving more attention to Sir Robert Walpole’s role in connecting these events in the popular imagination. It is a shame in any case that the collection does not furnish more opportunity for dialogue between Froide and Murphy, as it remains unclear how the latter’s chapter is adding to or diverging from the analysis found in Froide’s Silent Partners (2017).The book’s final chapter, Christine Zabel’s “From Bubble to Speculation,” resembles Froide and Warhman’s contributions in the longer view it presents of “eighteenth-century readings of the 1720s.” Zabel uses poetry and visual art (including, like Murphy, Hogarth’s The South Sea Scheme), to establish prevailing views in 1720–1721, before moving on to consider later (and particularly, French) reassessments. In doing so, Zabel makes the important observation, too often overlooked in cultural histories of early eighteenth-century finance, that the language of speculation we have come to apply to the events of 1720 is itself anachronistic and informed by subsequent developments. The specific financial meanings of speculation only emerged in the later eighteenth century and were then subject to particular politicization and condemnation in revolutionary France, the events of 1720 getting reinterpreted by “radical republicans” as a clash between the honorable John Law and the vampiric speculators who undermined his system. Though it would have been helpful to learn more about how these new narratives were paralleled (or not) in British politics, the chapter is an apt companion piece to Wahrman’s thoughts on order and disorder. It is fitting that a book which showcases and sometimes struggles with the multiplicity of 1720’s meanings conclude by emphasizing speculation’s own changeable value within financial and political discourse.

Colloquy: Attention, Anxiety, and Audition's Histories

In a 2015 piece for the New Yorker (“Music, Fiction, and the Value of Attention”), literary critic Nicholas Dames thus muses on the dwindling cultural prestige of the novel: its difficulty in sustaining relevance, sales, and above all, attention. Music, Dames posits, has access to a cognitive power that prose cannot command, and perhaps this is why it has become the object of such elaborate description in contemporary fiction (Richard Powers's Orfeo, Colm Tóibín's Nora Webster, and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, among other novels). Here, sustained accounts of musical listening aspire to the “waves of [neural] connection” or the “rapt submergence” inspired by sound—forms of focus seemingly unavailable to text. But can accounts of attending to music restore a tragically lost literary attention? Do we even want it back? These are some of the issues Dames raises, in a piece that gestures toward a rich body of work on histories of literary attentiveness (including his own scholarly writing), while revealing a thinner understanding of auditory focus. Old myths about music's power to bewitch the mind (to induce a “dream of absorption”) intermingle, in his essay, with newer theories about its potential to “[light] up long-dark regions in [the] head.” We are left with questions about the aesthetic power of listening, its relationship to histories of philosophy, psychology, and cognition, and, in a more pointed sense, its role in defining states of attention or distraction.Dames's article forms part of an outpouring of popular writing intent on diagnosing and renovating our lack of focus. Alongside the New Yorker, venues including The Atlantic and, more recently, the New York Times have featured essays on rebuilding, strengthening, marshaling, and protecting our attention.2 Such general interest pieces are responses to a wave of work from the scientific and corporate domains: psychological and neuroscientific research on the cognitive workings of attentiveness, new diagnoses (especially ADHD) from the medical field, business models exploring the “psychic economy” of attention, and—moving beyond the human—efforts in Artificial Intelligence to extrapolate “attention mechanisms” for algorithmic learning. Across disciplines, there is an acute sense both that the power of focus is crucial, and that our access to it is dwindling—a problem often attributed to encroaching technological environments, information overload, and the cultural fetishization of speed and productivity.3 Our inability to agree on a coherent definition of attention coexists with the widely held sense that the path to salvation lies in laying bare its cognitive mysteries. We are, it would appear, suffering from a modern epidemic of distraction, one that we must make a concerted effort to understand and address.And yet inattention is clearly not a problem unique to the present day. The sense of yearning for a lost, utopian moment of focus—a condition of full awareness, self-knowledge, spiritual fulfillment, or connectedness—is perennial. Artistic productions are perhaps an obvious site from which to undertake an investigation of attention's histories; indeed, explicit engagements with the theme in relation to the visual arts can be traced at least to Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) and to Jonathan Crary's subsequent recasting of the problem of attention as one of modernity in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999). Over the course of the last decade and a half, the rapid emergence of cognitive historicism has allowed us to expand our consideration of the mental processes of visual attention to include those associated with reading and writing. Foundational in this regard have been studies of Romantic neural sciences and psychology by Alan Richardson and by Dames himself, which pioneered the application of historical models of cognition to literary analysis.4 Explicit histories of attention dating from the early 2000s—cultural, religious, and scientific—have provided a theoretical infrastructure for more pointed studies of cognitive focus extending back to Aristotle and Augustine, and up to Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin.5 Most recently, scholarship on the history of attentive modalities has focused on literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—that is, on the era in which philosophical and moral panic about distraction began to anticipate modern levels.The field of literary studies has shown that, over the course of the revolutionary and early Romantic periods—when industrialization, burgeoning commodity culture, globalization, and modern telecommunications began to transform the landscape—many of the anxieties about cognitive focus that we now regard as “contemporary” had already coalesced.6 Indeed, attention had long since held a central place within Enlightenment thought, situated by philosophers and aesthetic theorists as a keystone of the aware, fully participatory self. In France, eighteenth-century responses to René Descartes's Meditations (1641), and to Jean de La Bruyère's figure “distraction” (Les caractères, 1688), initiated a lively exchange about attentiveness, thoughtlessness, and reverie that occupied thinkers from Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Johann Caspar Lavater.7 In Germany, new ways of theorizing the mechanisms of focus in the work of Georg Friedrich Meier and Johann Georg Sulzer were taken up and extended by later thinkers who included Ernst Platner, Novalis, and Christian Friedrich Michaelis.8 And in Britain, John Locke's account of the role of volition in attention led to a grappling with the interrelationship of passive and active modes of attending by philosophers such as David Hartley, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart.9By the late eighteenth century, acute awareness of the political, economic, and aesthetic demands of cognitive focus—and a sense of its growing scarcity—shaped not only critical discourses but also forms of production: poetic modes, plot types, narrative style and pacing, and even page formatting. Literary scholars have offered up fascinating analyses of poetic inattention in William Cowper, William Wordsworth, and John Keats;10 of concentration and distraction in Jane Austen;11 of forms of rapt or wondrous cognition in Stéphane Mallarmé and Gustave Flaubert;12 and of aesthetic attentiveness in Karl Phillip Moritz, Georg Simmel, and Friedrich Nietzsche.13 Moving well beyond fiction and poetry, their work demonstrates attention's crucial role in bridging Romantic literary, medical, theological, and economic worlds. This historical cross-disciplinary orientation has persisted; indeed, the heavily diversified nature of attention research today is an extension of the scientific and philosophical collaboration that the topic stimulated across the breadth of the long nineteenth century.But what about music? And what of Dames's proposition that musical listening stimulates forms of focus unknown to other media? This idea is not entirely unfamiliar, and becomes less so when we consider the works singled out for description by Dames's authors—Bach's Goldberg Variations, Mozart's Requiem, Beethoven's symphonies, Franz Schubert's “An die Musik,” and Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (among others). The “lost” focus Dames fantasizes seems to be located in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoires, which cast “a spell … more primal, maybe, than prose.” His claim resonates easily with extant histories of listening, particularly those of James H. Johnson (1995), Thomas Tolley (2001), and Matthew Riley (2004), which identify the eighteenth century as the moment at which key discourses relating to auditory attention and distraction were first articulated.14 During this period (long before the sonic fictional descriptions highlighted by Dames), philosophers, musicians, and critics had already homed in on auditory awareness as an important index of focus or its deficit. Indeed, Locke's insight that an unnoticed sound literally goes unheard regardless of its impact on the sensing organ—his paradigmatic example of the way the mental state of absorption alters our perception—would be subsequently taken up by other philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.15 To be attentive was to focus on a specific object for some duration, as Reid observed; in other words, attentiveness entailed a mental state characterized by a distinctive (and often altered) sense of temporal flow.16Histories of listening are histories of attention. The reverse is not always true, although capacities of sonic awareness, recollection, and retention are often yoked, in broader discussions of creative invention, to acute powers of focus and, by extension, aesthetic insight. Over the course of the late eighteenth century, more explicitly musical forms of attending, including the rhapsodic absorption invoked by Dames's authors, become metonyms for the cultural ideal of attentiveness itself. We might locate the origins of this mode in the article “Unité de mélodie” in Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique (1768).17 Or in Adam Smith, who praised instrumental music for its potential to “fill up, completely the whole capacity of the mind, so as to leave no part of its attention vacant for thinking of any thing else” (before 1795).18 Certainly, it was in place by the time Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder described the “true way of listening” as “the most attentive observations of the notes and their progression … the distancing and withdrawal from every disruptive thought and from all extraneous sensuous impressions” (1792).19This kind of intensive focus was—or would be—inextricably bound up with idealist tenets, canonicity, nationalist ideologies, and theological injunction. Equally clearly, it was freighted with an Enlightenment valorization of concentration over wandering or diffuse forms of attending. Hardly surprising, then, that Dames, though fascinated by the phantasm of complete musical absorption, is also wary of it, pointing out that unwavering attention “does not necessarily equal perceptiveness.” Why, then, he asks, “do we … feel so strongly that our artworks must nourish it?” The question is a useful one, and might be extended to encompass others. How are modes of attending, including Wackenroder's “true way,” enforced, embraced, manipulated, or evaded? What role does auditory attention play in wider economies, or ecologies, of focus and distraction? What are its limits? And what relationship does musical attentiveness bear to affect, ethics, or identity formation? Work emanating from the fields of sound and media studies has already broached some of these questions,20 as has scholarship focused on histories of experimental psychology.21 In the contributions that follow, we broaden the scope, contemplating music's interaction with cultures of attention from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Theories of focus and distraction shift considerably across this period, but a sense that the content and meaning of music is inextricable from the forms of attention it demands remains stable. In many circles, problems relating to the temporality and ephemerality of sonic experience are recast as cognitive challenges that, as our work suggests, become inextricable from aesthetic and political programs of attentive conditioning.A number of unexpected threads run through the colloquy. Our contributors resist the hegemony of focused listening dictated by German idealist aesthetics, foregrounding the importance of music and auditory cultures to less familiar modes of attentiveness ranging from British conceptions of interest qua reward (Mathew) to the performance of pathological focus in European medical contexts (Raz) and the importance of vacant or idle attention in Schubert (Brittan). The stakes of the psychic economy and the role of gender in constructions of attention appear as themes in a number of essays, as does the idea of attentiveness as a tool in forging individual and national consciousness (Kieffer). The long historical sweep of the set reveals that the heritage of Wackenroder's “true way of listening” continued to haunt fin-de-siècle and Weimar Republic listeners attempting to grapple with their own acculturation as auditors, the political implications of listening, and the weight of attention's musical histories (Steege). Issues of agency surface repeatedly, including the role of volition and acquiescence in musical attending, and the centrality of distraction to self-aware forms of auditory focus.Attending to attention is, of course, a tricky business, but it is also illuminating. Centering our inquiries on historical cognitive processes themselves allows us to home in on the patterns of spotlighting, filtering, and dispersal that shape theories of creative production as well as modes of musical consumption, analysis, and investment. Our intention is to provoke questions as well as provide preliminary answers—to consider how and at what cost we pay attention.Days before Joseph Haydn arrived in London from Vienna in January 1791, the Morning Chronicle published an excited preview of the major musical events that were planned for that year. In addition to the Hanover Square concerts, at which Haydn was to be the star attraction, the list included the “professional concert under the able conduct of Cramer,” “two rival Opera houses,” the “Antient concert,” the “Ladies subscription concert” on Sunday evenings, “Oratorios twice a week” during Lent, and the “Academy of Antient Music.”22 And there was more: there would have been concerts in the main pleasure gardens, large musical gatherings sponsored by organizations such as the Anacreontic Society, and countless semi-private musical performances in the houses of the gentry. Never before would Haydn have witnessed such a glut of music making.By the end of his second full season, Haydn was regularly attracting immense crowds to the Festino Room at Hanover Square, which comfortably held around 800 people: “1500 people entered the door,” noted the socialite Charlotte Papendiek on her ticket following the concert of May 3, 1792. This program, advertised in several newspapers, was as densely packed as the room: a couple of symphonies, some songs, a “Concertante,” a cantata, concertos for violin and for harp, and—a finale surely guaranteed to bring the house down—the Earthquake from Haydn's Seven Last Words.23 Any ticket holders who were unable to get a good look at Haydn amid the crush were in luck: the Morning Chronicle announced that Thomas Hardy's dashing oil portrait of him—an image that was already circulating as an engraving published by John Bland—was on show that very day in the gallery of the Royal Academy. Publicity, ticketing, the jostling of celebrity singers and instrumentalists, reports and reviews published before and after the concert in newspapers and journals, not to mention the subsequent sale of parts and piano reductions of Haydn's newest music (some of which were hawked even in the concert venue): this was information overload, of a kind that Haydn had never previously experienced, a bracing encounter with the hubbub of the early “attention economy.”The concept of the “attention economy” was unpacked most comprehensively in a book of the same name by Thomas Davenport and John Beck, published between the founding of Google and the launch of Facebook.24 Though their idea was crucially shaped by the new forms of monetary and social commerce made possible by the Internet, it was premised on an analysis of information richness by the economist Herbert Simon, who, decades earlier, had been responding, together with media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, to a predigital iteration of public anxiety about the overabundance of data and the concomitant possibility of cognitive exhaustion. “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes,” Simon explained. “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”25It is tempting to say that Simon merely expressed, in the technocratic terms of his postwar moment, media-induced anxieties of much longer standing. Indeed, in that spirit, the philosopher Galen Strawson cites René Descartes's reassuring complaint that “it is impossible for individuals to examine the huge number of new books that are published every day”—a sentiment that was possible as early as 1642.26 But this would be to ignore the historically distinctive conception of the human mind that underpins any kind of attention economy: there are no forms of attention without the web of social practices and material infrastructures, techniques and technologies, that make them thinkable.Foremost among the technologies that shaped Davenport and Beck's analysis was, of course, the web page (a standard unit of our phenomenal landscape nowadays), and we might pause to consider how the average web page reinforces the conceptual premises of the attention economy. Having atomized our attention into clicks, the web typically displays a center encroached upon by advertising, peripheries that are laid as so much bait. The parsing of our attention into clicks to be harvested by these pestering margins—discrete parcels of response to seduction or surprise—has everything to do with money. As in the prosopopoeia of the commodity early on in Marx's Capital, when Marx reports on what the commodity would say if it were to speak, clickbait appeals to us in a voice made of barely more than social relations, a voice whose distinctiveness and seductiveness, in the Marxian analysis, nonetheless occludes these relations themselves.27 For the commodity that is bought and sold in the course of our clicks (as we might recognize when the advertising that pops up on our browsers uncannily predicts our desires) is actually our attention itself. Every click reifies it and passes it on to somebody else, who can use it to gather still more. This transaction—as Tim Wu, among others, has noted—produces “attention” as a kind of psychic currency.28The idea of attention as currency is a good deal older than the Internet, however. It is to some degree implied in words that nowadays seem oddly to blend monetary and psychic meanings, such as “investment” and “interest.” It was in the eighteenth century that this blend was established—when, as historians of commercial society have long observed, subjects also became consumers, and were increasingly assailed by inducements to invest in things. This was especially true in the metropolitan landscapes of eighteenth-century England. Thus the eponymous protagonist of Frances Burney's Evelina (1778) is introduced to the world in large part through the bundle of activities captured in the novel's most fashionable neologism: “shopping.” “There seem to be six or seven men belonging to each shop, and every one took care, by bowing and smirking, to be noticed,” marvels the innocent Evelina. “I thought I should never have chosen a silk, for they produced so many, I knew not which to fix upon,” she continues, describing the kind of distraction and information overload that have become motifs of the present-day attention economy.29 Amid this whirl of competing investments, many eighteenth-century commentators remarked on the risk of overstimulation, and the related epidemic of boredom appeared, an idea now loosened from the centuries-old theological condemnation of ennui. The London beau monde, explained Samuel Johnson, was “always endeavouring to raise some new desire that they may have something to persue [sic]”—seeking somewhere to invest its mental capital, lest its psychic currency should accrue no interest.30Johnson and his contemporaries eagerly cultivated the new genres and formats of the eighteenth-century attention economy, the literary style and presentational forms that Shaftesbury had dubbed “the miscellaneous manner of writing”—the gatherings and re-gatherings of notes, quotes, and anecdotes that constituted the bulk of the period's publications.31 It is something of an irony that the continuing moral panic about the fracturing of our attention spans in the smartphone age tends to contrast an emerging form of (in)attention modeled on the Internet—an assemblage of jerky, metonymic clicks and links—with the austere and bounded self-presence of the book. Yet in the eighteenth century, the book was by no means self-evident as a symbol of cohesion and continuity: “Among the Variety of matter treated of, every Reader may find something worth laying up,” promised William Dover in the preface to his Useful Miscellanies (1753).32 The oft-repeated metaphor of knowledge as a disparate collection of useful items to be laid up as capital, whether in the memory or on the page, extended at least as far back as John Locke's distinctively mercantile image of the educated mind, common in late seventeenth-century thought, as, in part, a “magazine of materials,” well stocked with experience.33 Given the long-standing metaphorical interplay of physical storehouses, psychic spaces, and new media forms, one can well understand why the eighteenth-century literary entrepreneur Edward Cave should have adopted the word “magazine” to denote a publication: the shop or warehouse of miscellaneous things.Next to these literary technologies of the attention economy, the music historian could place a cluster of media platforms that came to prominence toward the end of the eighteenth century: the ticketed public concert (of the kind that Salomon and Haydn staged in London), the purpose-designed concert rooms where such diversions took place (such as those at Hanover Square), and the copious printed materials (announcements, reviews, and related musical publications) that mediated these events. And the music that Haydn and others composed in this commercial environment inevitably contained formal traces of the new attention economy. Music historians are well used to the claim—argued in connection with Paris by James Johnson, London by Thomas Tolley, and German-speaking centers by Matthew Riley—that new ideals of attention (or, sometimes, a species of attention called “attentiveness”) may have developed in the late eighteenth century, and that they may have accompanied social practices such as listening in relative silence.34 Less common, however, is the idea not only that musical publications and performances might have been subject to changing techniques of attention, or might have been in dialogue with changing listening publics, but that musical forms, styles, and genres could be considered among the technologies that produced the modern currency of attention itself.I have argued elsewhere that several of Haydn's London compositions both responded to and taught the relatively new concepts of interest and the interesting in music, via musical technologies that were designed not merely to capture audience attention in the concert room, but to sustain this attention in an iterable way, in part by acknowledging and spurring the further production of music-related discourse.35 One of the period's most energetic producers of such discourse, Charles Burney was only the most prominent of contemporaries to laud the “contrivance, and the interesting combination of the whole” in Haydn's symphonies.36 These interesting musical combinations kept him, and everybody else, writing and talking. Following their earliest performances, several of the London symphonies acquired nicknames that pointed out, in the baldest terms, their most interesting features. The “Surprise”—the unequivocal hit of the 1792 season—was perhaps the most lastingly popular of them, reportedly inducing raptures with its sudden timpani stroke and orchestral tutti in the midst of its otherwise placid Andante. These symphonic nicknames are evidence, I have argued, not merely of Haydn's newly blatant attention-seeking in London's densely populated attention economy, but of a new range of social relations mediated by the London music market: publicity and advertising, critical extraction and elaboration in newspapers and journals, and the expectation of future iterations in formats such as piano transcriptions—all technologies that made possible new modes of musical curiosity, discrimination, and attentiveness. It seems to me that, in this case, the term “interest” proves more useful and revealing to the historian of this period than its more immediate-sounding cousin “attention,” not only because it cropped up repeatedly in contemporary commentaries on Haydn's music, and not only because it more clearly connoted economic models of personal involvement, which were especially relevant as concert impresarios and music sellers competed to sell tickets and publications. More than this, the iterative, discourse-oriented nature of the interesting—more obviously than the apparent suddenness of attention-grabbing—points toward the many technologies and media forms that worked to turn ephemeral strategies of musical attention-seeking into more lasting capital. Haydn's music generated interest, and thus value, over and over.By contrast, “attention” risks implying a capacity of mind that is somehow thinkable apart from the technologies and social relations with which it is always enmeshed. Now and again, William Weber's important exploration of the question “Did people listen in the eighteenth century?” frames the history of musical attention as though it were predominantly a quantitative matter, a question of the ways in which “other musical cultures” valued and inculcated greater or lesser amounts of attentiveness.37 I would be more inclined to say that, in the absence of the media infrastructures and social relations characteristic of the incipient capitalism that Haydn first encountered in England, one cannot speak meaningfully of attentiveness as though it were a measurable degree of psychic investment—in other words, that particular conceptions of attention require particular economies. As in the case of the insistent appeals of clickbait or the seductive voice of the Marxian commodity, even the most distinctive and instantaneous moments of the London symphonies were produced and sustained by a series of social relations: compressed into the single click of attention are the complex patterns of musical mediation that model attention itself.Since the nineteenth century, most discussions of musical attention have been structured around a series of ethically freighted oppositions: attentiveness versus distraction, continuous versus intermittent, depth versus surface, interest versus disinterest, structural versus culinary, and so on. Yet the music of the late eighteenth-century commercial metropolis might reveal what the attention economy and its ostensibly more virtuous opposites have in common: a conception of all attention as a kind of expenditure, and thus the belief that even the most superior forms of attention involve investing one's psychic currency wisely, and in the choicest things.Nineteenth-century European medical texts abound in reports of patients allegedly seeing, tasting, smelling, or hearing by means of their internal organs or their extremities. These dislocations traversed corporeal and national boundaries. In Aix, Estelle L'Hardy heard with her wrist, elbow, and stomach, while in Bologna, a woman heard with the palms of her hands, the soles of her feet, and the pit of her stomach.38 Ann Finn of Dublin could hear only when spoken to on her abdomen, while Johanna Anschütz of Vienna heard with the hollow of her hand.39 The patients—typically young women—acted as if some or all of their senses had been transferred to another limb or organ, one that alone was capable of perception. Contemporary physicians ascribed these sensory transformations to a trance-like state of catatonic passivity. Alternately termed “hysteria,” “catalepsy,” “ecstasy,” or “somnambulism,” this condition was typically diagnosed as arising either spontaneously from organic causes or as a result of a mesmeric magnetization.40The phenomenon of “transposition des sens” or sensory transposition, as these altered capacities became known, was first described by Jacques-Henri-Désiré Petetin in 1805. Petetin (1744–1808), a Lyon-based physician with an interest in medical electricity, had been summoned to treat a young female somnambulist. At one point, she began to sing compulsively.41 Unable to attract the woman's attention in this disordered state, Petetin grasped her, and in doing so slipped and fell across her body, crying out, “It is truly unfortunate that I cannot make this woman stop singing.”42 Astonishingly, his outburst brought about an immediate reaction from the invalid, who halted her song. From this, Petetin concluded that she had heard him only because, as he stumbled, his mouth had made accidental contact with her abdominal region. In his subsequent investigations, he discovered that the site of hearing could also be transferred to her feet and fingertips. The woman further revealed that she sang only to distract herself from an additional altered sensory capacity: her sight had been transposed inward, affording a literal clairvoyance in the form of the horrifying view of her internal organs. These symptoms led Petetin to speculate that, under certain conditions, the loci of sensation could roam and concentrate throughout the body.43After Petetin published this case history in 1805, reports of transposed senses began to appear throughout Europe. The diagnostic category of sensory transposition persisted for over a century in the face of repeated debunking by expert commissions.44 Moreover, the conspicuous role of musical performance in Petetin's symptomology remained remark

The ‘1735’ Faulkner Edition of Swift's Works

The first attempt at a collected edition of Swift's Works remains little studied and decidedly puzzling in several important respects. Eighteenth-century commentators mostly either ignored it or derided it as scrappy and discreditable. For the next two hundred years, it was usually regarded as an irrelevance or an embarrassment. In the last half century, however, it has been increasingly treated as Swift's attempt to create a literary monument for himself. Unfortunately, we have little evidence as to how much involvement Swift had in the selection of the contents or how much textual oversight he exercised during the process of publication. Such evidence as we possess suggests probably not a lot in either case. Recent scholars have generally agreed that the 1735 text of Gulliver's Travels has greater authority than the London edition of 1726, but beyond that much remains questionable. Analysis of the contents of the Works does not suggest that Swift saw it as a 'monument' or as a claim to literary eminence. For whatever reasons, the edition omits important published works (including A Tale of a Tub ), as well as Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (written 1731) and The History of the Last Four Years of the Queen (a work important to Swift, but not published until 1758). Conversely, the edition does include a great many trivial and occasional pieces. It heavily emphasizes Irish works, not the writings of 1710-14, the period to which Swift harked back nostalgically for the rest of his life. The Faulkner Works comes across as an odd melange of major and minor works plus topical trivia, not as a systematic attempt to build a posthumous reputation. Given Swift's longstanding casual attitude towards the publication or even preservation of most of his works, moreover, we would be unwise to assume that '1735' possesses textual authority except in the case of Gulliver .

A World of Impostures

As anyone who has delved into history of forgery can testify, sheer number of examples is positively breathtaking. Forgeries are ubiquitous. Yet it has also been noted, and in fact noted by many eighteenth-century commentators themselves, that Age of Reason produced an unusually large number of famous fakers: Thomas Chatterton, James Macpherson, George Psalmanazar, William Henry Ireland - to name just four, and just four in England. It is also striking degree to which period accounts of these forgeries routinely list other cases by way of comparison, many of which have been all but lost to us. A review of French edition of 's phony Description of Formosa, for example, published in 1705, compares him to false Princess of that had come to Paris a few years earlier. Some of her story has been preserved in memoirs of French Jesuit Louis Le Comte, who had spent considerable time in China and who had been called in to unmask her. He reports that she had been welcomed into most elite circles of Parisian aristocracy (and that she continued to play her role even after she had been exposed). We would certainly like to know more about her adventures.1A century later another East Asian impostor turned up in Bristol known as Princess Caraboo, who claimed to be from island of Javasu. Her story, like 's, is relatively well documented, and yet upon publication of full history of this female Psalmanazar in 1817, its author pauses to remind us of other cases such as fasting woman of Tetbury, Johanna Southcote, and the famous cheats and disguises of Bampfield More Carew.2 A 1764 review of Psalmanazar's memoirs lists Elizabeth Canning, Ashley and Jew, and Cock Lane Ghost.3 Subsequent writers such as William Hazlitt, Vita Sackville-West, and Ernest Hemingway all mention along with additional cases from their own day4The realm of literary forgery (including piracy) is even more densely populated, and not simply with famous examples like Chatterton, Macpherson, or William Lauder. Who remembers Richard Rolt, Alexander Innes, John Eccles, or William Douglas, M.D. - all of whom are listed in an aside on literary fraud in Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791)?5 A full list would be endless, and proliferation of fakes of every imaginable sort (counterfeits, frauds, impostures, hoaxes, art forgeries, pirated books) is matched only by our seemingly insatiable interest in finding out everything we can about them. Thus list of books about forgery is also dauntingly lengthy, both at macro and micro levels, both scholarly and popular, in all languages, fields, and periods. Do we really need another book on (eighteenth-century) forgery?It is into this minefield that Jack Lynch's new book, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate, 2008), bravely treads - and succeeds admirably. What is different about book is term detection, which is to say means by which eighteenth-century people actually went about trying to prove veracity (or lack thereof) of any particular claim. The real focus is not those who did faking but instead those who argued about it: How were these cases actually debated and discussed by eighteenth-century inquirers, and what do they tell us about eighteenth-century conceptions of world? (vii).The process of how a forgery could be proved or disproved was indeed undergoing major changes between time of (1704) and Ireland (1795), in arenas such as conception of personal identity and its consistency over time, of ownership of texts and copyright, of plagiarism and pirating, and of value and status of various kinds of legal evidence. Rather than organizing book according to individual examples and how each of them played itself out - a common technique that usually ends up just repeating stories themselves, entertaining as that might be - Lynch chooses to arrange material thematically. …

Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (review)

Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution. By Michal Jan Rozbicki. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). Pp. 304. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by Sarah KnottLiberty is a social relation and, as such, signifies an asymmetry of social conditions. This is the well-known insight of sociologist and cultural critic Zygmunt Bauman. Armed with an organic and hierarchical view of society, early moderns also knew this. Inequality did not just precede ideas about freedom; it was the very basis of eighteenth-century notions of liberty. The coexistence of inequality and freedom, and the insight that liberty is inherently a privilege that comes at the expense of others, challenges fond beliefs in universal human rights.In Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, Michal Jan Rozbicki seeks to apply the understandings of Bauman, and of eighteenth-century commentators, to the American Revolution. Historiography has been hampered, he suggests, by importing purist notions of liberty into a premodern past. Elite-centered and hagiographie accounts of the Revolution, such as those of Gordon Wood, just like the people-centered and prosecutorial (231) accounts of Gary Nash and Howard Zinn, presume that modern liberty was foundational. AU have followed too naively the universalist intonations of all men are created equal and unalienable of the Declaration of Independence. Interpreters of both celebrated and forgotten Founders, Rozbicki argues, have indulged in a pious and fundamentally ahistorical accounting of the national founding, falsely celebrating the Founders' courageous prescience, or wrongly chastising leaders for the rank betrayal of women, slaves and ordinary people. Interpretations that point more gently to inconsistencies or to the paradox of freedom and slavery, he suggests, are just as wrong-headed.The ambitious task Rozbicki sets is marked by a welcome openness to theory and a determined historicization. He seeks nothing less than to shuck off modern-minded delusions and to retell the history of liberty and the American Revolution from scratch. The grounding for such a history is culture: [sjetting our sights on culture - the space where shared meanings were formed, identities were negotiated, beliefs were expressed, values were reproduced, and symbolic representations of reality and order were fashioned - would bring Revolutionary liberty down to earth, where it actually resided (234). On that ground, the evolution of American liberty depended primarily on the pursuit of advantage over others and on social aspiration.The resulting account begins with British legacies. The British political classes' belief in an unequal society and in the social order underlay their understandings of liberty; they apprehended freedom as distributed in rank-specific shares. Indeed, it was entirely possible for an Enlightenment thinker such as Frances Hutcheson to advocate the enslavement of the idle poor. Such ideas transferred to the colonial gentry, among whom a hierarchical vision of society and liberty was entirely engrained. Set on independence, the American ruling elite cleverly made an imperial conflict about taxes into a struggle for universal rights, their overblown rhetoric signaling absolute confidence in their right to rule and in the political impotence of nonelites. Meanwhile, the claim to be the natural guardians of a free people's liberty enabled a grounding of political authority even more powerful than that of heredity. But from the 1 780s, other groups adopted similar tactics, taking up universal claims in order to forward particular rights and enfranchisements, and forcing a backlash among their privilege-loving rulers. Unexpected party factionalism only sped up this dynamic, with elite Federalists and Antifederalists alike appealing to ordinary people and unintentionally raising political consciousness. Ultimately, even if they won independence and succeeded in political revolution, the American elite's universalist notions of liberty proved something of an own goal. …

Addisonian Afterlives: Joseph Addison in Eighteenth-Century Culture

Eighteenth-century commentators often used the Bible and sacred inspiration as a tool for measuring the significance of Joseph Addison and his writings. The quasi-scriptural character of Addison's writings was more than a matter of their popularity; it was an effect of Addison's role in the culture. Aside from being a widely read author and respected normative guide, Addison was taken as a model of social being. The esteem for his writings shaded into an admiration of his personality. While Addison's virtue and elegance embodied polite culture, he could also represent the other-worldly and pious aspirations invoked by the Scriptures themselves.

Making Mother Obsolete: Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and the Masculine Appropriation of Maternity

Making Mother Obsolete: Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and the Masculine Appropriation of Maternity Meghan L. Burke (bio) The titular “secret” of Eliza Fenwick’s 1795 novel Secresy, or The Ruin on the Rock is one of hidden maternity.1 On multiple conceptual levels, this secret both creates and destroys. Quite literally, the clandestine pregnancy of the imprisoned heiress Sibella Valmont involves the creation of an illegitimate offspring, the physical and emotional turmoil of which destroys the illfated young mother. Additionally, Sibella’s pregnancy is an embodiment of an intangible yet more powerful “creation,” that of female agency and community. In a departure from the typical, tragic, illegitimate births of literary convention, Sibella’s maternity represents free female will. The bond it cements between the pregnant woman and her female confidante, Caroline Ashburn, also signifies the ways in which maternity serves as a site of communal power and authority for women. This sense of community is evident when Caroline rushes to aide Sibella in the concealment and control of her new maternity, particularly when patriarchal authority threatens to reclaim and effectively check the girl’s transgressive reproduction. That a “secret” experience of pregnancy—a mysterious gestation occuring in the unseen dark of the woman’s womb—serves to bind the two heroines of Secresy together in an alliance of female authority is not a radical notion. Throughout centuries [End Page 357] of European society, childbirth and reproduction were viewed as completely within the realm of female control and solidarity, as women—mothers, midwives, other female relatives, and friends—gathered together to share their knowledge and support from the earliest stages of pregnancy through the parturition and postnatal “lying-in.” Not only would these women share their expertise and advice with one another, but also, as men were almost completely excluded from scenes of birth, women were the sole proprietors of the facts of what exactly happened during each specific birthing-room incident. These were their secrets to keep. Secresy is also generally understood as a novel of the failures of female communities, and, in a seeming paradox, pregnancy lies at the heart of the most tragic of these failures as women are persecuted for the same agency and solidarity that maternity afforded them. In this manner, the events of Secresy reflect the era’s dominant perceptions of how a “secret” female childbirth culture could exist dangerously outside the realm of rational, patriarchal control and become a palpable source of anxiety. If creation itself is seen as fundamentally located within feminine processes unavailable to men, male claims to cultural and biological dominance do not appear impervious to challenges; the seeming supremacy of female reproductive biology can generate insidious doubt in men’s ability to reproduce and create anything. The collective nature of women’s power over reproduction is perhaps most threatening to male hegemony, as control over the facts of childbirth essentially results in control over social systems as a whole: because physical sites of reproduction such as wombs and childbeds appear secreted from men, the fearful possibility exists that the true identity and legitimacy of every infant, from the nation’s lowest newborn to its future king, could be either maintained or masked by the manoeuvrings of scheming mothers and their midwife collaborators. Lisa Forman Cody describes this historical fear that “women gathered alone together were outside the reach of patriarchal control and that when these women succumbed to their innate desire to deceive and rule men, they were acting politically.”2 When secrecy surrounds female reproductive practices, women have the ability to conceal illegitimate class [End Page 358] infiltration and disrupt the proper flow of paternal inheritance and authority. The “lesser” sex thereby gains incalculable influence over important patriarchal structures. In the eighteenth century, changes occurred in England that began to actively combat this apparent weakness in the patriarchal social order: male authorities set about demystifying woman’s natural, invisible procreative power—which, by virtue of its invisibility and exclusion from male subjective experience, had already gradually been painted as “unnatural” in the dominant masculine discourse of the culture—and began conquering the world of birth. Both eighteenth-century commentators and modern-day scholars have offered a number of motivations...

The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 (review)

Reviewed by: The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 Vincent Carretta Colin Kidd , The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Pp. vii, 309. $27.99. Punning on the meanings of forging as both creating and counterfeiting in The Forging of Races, Colin Kidd traces the sad story of the ways the Bible has been misappropriated during the past four centuries to explain racialist theories of human origins and descent, as well as to justify racist doctrines of enslavement and domination. As Kidd emphasizes, "The subject matter of this book is not the Bible itself, but its human interpreters. The bible itself is largely colour-blind: racial differences rarely surface in its narratives" (2–3). "Race," Kidd notes, "exists as a property of our minds, not of their bodies." Consequently, "the historian of race becomes, inevitably, a connoisseur of polymorphous perversity" (18). Anyone interested in a concise account of how perverse definitions of race can be will profit greatly from Kidd's "Prologue: race in the eye of the beholder." Kidd easily demonstrates how arbitrary and unreliable complexion is as a way to try to separate humans into distinct groups of sub-Saharan Africans and others. For example, different and more objective tests comparing fingerprints, ear wax, body hair, the presence of the lactose enzyme, or the sickle cell gene mutation, blood types, or DNA would lead to radically different groupings of humans. As so-called whiteness studies have shown, definitions of "race" based on complexion are historically and socially contingent: the same person can be classified as "white" in Brazil and "black" in the United States. Italian Americans can be acculturated into "whiteness." Nearly half of The Forging of Races is devoted to the period before the nineteenth century. Many readers will be surprised to discover that although scripture "contributed significantly to western constructions of race," its contribution was ambivalent. Indeed, "a decline in the authority of scripture opened up an ideological space for the uninhibited articulation of racialist sentiments" in the [End Page 121] nineteenth century and beyond (19). Throughout the period Kidd covers, particularly during the eighteenth century, an orthodox Christian reading of the Bible as a monogenetic account of the direct descent of all humans from common parents, Adam and Eve, through Noah and his sons, acted to limit attempts to argue for the significance of complexion and for the superiority of one "race" over another. To the orthodox Christian, through the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the second Adam, all humans could be redeemed from the original sin they inherited from their common ancestor, the first Adam. Orthodox Christianity allowed for racialist, though not necessarily racist, speculation about a number of issues, such as the complexions of Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, and Jesus. Polygenetic claims, very rare in the eighteenth century, that multiple "races" descended from ancestors older or other than Adam and Eve asserted the heresies of pre- or co-Adamism in the face of Acts 17:26: "And [God] made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." As Kidd notes, "in general, race mattered less to early moderns than their twenty-first century descendants imagine" (61). But where there is a will to justify racism and slavery, a way will always be found. Apologists for race-based slavery who sought Biblical sanction for their beliefs and behavior seized upon textually groundless readings of Genesis going back to the early Middle Ages that could be reconciled with monogenesis. The mark, or curse, placed on Cain after he slew Abel became identified with a black complexion. Even more potent for racist ideology was the curse Ham supposedly incurred for having mocked the nakedness of his father, Noah. Ham's son Canaan and his descendants were alleged to have been cursed with a black complexion and enslavement by Noah's other sons and their descendants. Kidd is careful to point out that a fully developed racist ideology did not exist in the eighteenth century, and that eighteenth-century commentators on the significance of Ham were as likely to...

Romantic Mentoring and Mathetes' Letter to "The Friend"

To himself every fresh idea appears instruction. --The Friend WRITTEN BY JOHN WILSON AND ALEXANDER BLAIR, THE LETTER FROM in Coleridge's The Friend (1809-10) seems to owe even its pseudonymous signature to the equivocal intellectual guidance regretted by its young authors in their age. Blair would recall that Thomas De Quincey proposed the signature which derives from New Testament Greek for pupil or disciple. (1) The name itself apt, as the of Wilson and Blair presents himself to The Friend as one seeking guidance. The late second-century epistle from which it presumably taken an apology, however--addressed by one to a pagan named Diognetus wishing to learn about Christianity--rather than the apostolic text that it suggests. The disciple the teacher, then, though Diognetus himself has been plausibly identified with a teacher of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, thus further complicating (or enriching) the epistle's pedagogical premise. It difficult to say whether, in proposing Mathetes as a pseudonym, De Quincey was following eighteenth-century commentators who mistakenly identified the epistle as apostolic or whether he simply liked the paradox involved in an epistle from a disciple offering guidance to a teacher. The fact that the 1818 edition of The Friend introduces Mathetes' Letter with a motto from Marcus Aurelius suggests that Coleridge liked the paradox. Whether William Wordsworth, who wrote The Friend's response to Mathetes, liked it another question. His reply suggests a wholly serious flame of mind. Since he actually named by as a Teacher who has been given to our own age (2: 228), (2) he was an obvious choice for respondent. Wordsworth no more a Diognetus to Wilson's and Blair's Mathetes, however--at least in the terms of the original second-century epistle--than the letter addressed to him an apology, though perhaps this could be described as an apostle in search of an apologist. And to some extent, Wordsworth that apologist. The solace he offers typically Wordsworthian, looking back to the consolatory admonitions of Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) with its advice that, faced with the prospect of a degenerate age, disillusioned youth should look within and find strength in what remains behind. While in the end backing away from a directly pedagogical role, Wordsworth promises that the guidance sought by will in course of time flow naturally from my labours (2: 230)--an unmistakable allusion to the philosophical poem that would issue, partially at least, as The Excursion (1814). What little critical commentary Mathetes' letter has attracted focuses on Wordsworth's response, especially as it addresses assertions made by about nature as preceptor. (3) Recently, however, Deirdre Coleman has dismissed both letter and response as peripheral to Coleridge's concerns in 1809. (4) Whether this exclusion based on the fact that Coleridge had no direct hand in the letter and its response or on more substantive reasons not clear. Coleridge himself seems to have felt that they were pertinent enough to be included not only in 1809 but in subsequent editions of The Friend as well. The present essay argues that this brief, but auspiciously presented, (5) correspondence does in fact speak to Coleridge's concerns in 1809, and on the same philosophical/pedagogical grounds as those on which The Friend treats Regency manners and morals. In his seminal essay on The Friend, in Coleridge's Blessed Machine of Language, Jerome Christensen argues that more than any other of Coleridge's works The Friend is the test of language itself as a vehicle of anything but itself, as being capable of communicating true principle or, at the very least, the truth of principle. (6) Similar doubts about language have surely prompted to write his letter on behalf of a generation of young minds in need of guidance among the intellectual thickets of post-Pittite England. …

"The Manufacture and Lingua-facture of Ballad-Making ": Broadside Ballads in Long Eighteenth-Century Ballad Discourse

1.As Tessa Watt has observed, Any study of impact of printing in England must take account of fact that one of first widespread and widely affordable forms of printed word was song. Ballads were among earliest products of press, and they were also among largest classes of printed materials. Some three thousand distinct were printed 1550 and 1600, and number of circulating during this period may have reached as high as between 3 and 4 million.1 In 1557, Stationers' Company received its royal charter of incorporation, and from about 1586, a small number of stationers began buying up newly created rights to copy ballads. In 1612, printing of became exclusive right of five printers, and in 1624, this consolidation of rights culminated in formation of a syndicate called partners.2 Because it was more profitable to reprint for which one already held copyright than to acquire new materials, economic imperatives in effect made these stationers custodian[s] of tradition.3 Their warehouse of stock would influence market... for next three hundred years.4 By late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when scholars first began collecting from oral recitation rather than from print and manuscript sources, many of that they transcribed from the mouths of people may have owe[d] their survival to reinforcement of printed word.5The eighteenth century saw vast expansion of print trades throughout Britain. It also saw emergence of a substantial printed discourse about ballads. In commentaries in periodicals, in prefaces to printed collections of ballads, in essays printed in these collections, and elsewhere, a wide variety of authors commented both negatively and positively on balladry as a hybrid oral and textual practice. Today, many scholars follow great nineteenth-century scholar Francis James Child (1825-1896) in dividing into two principal categories, traditional (or popular) and broadside ballads, but in early eighteenth century this conceptual division did not exist. As Albert B. Friedman observes:The traditional (Sir Patrick Spens, Edward, and like)... canonized in Professor Child's monumental collection ... [were] not even tentatively differentiated from other until well along in eighteenth century. Before that time, a ballad, so far as either men of letters or plain citizens were concerned, was a doggerel poem written to a familiar tune, printed on a folio sheet or long slip, and sold at bookstalls or hawked about streets by ballad-singers.6For many eighteenth-century commentators, term ballad implicitly referred to a broadside ballad. In a 1735 letter to The Grub-street Journal, one Democritus condemned scandalous practice of ballad-singing as:the bane of all good manners and morals ... a continual nursery for idlers, whores, and pick-pockets; a school for scandal, smut, and debauchery; where our youth of either sex (of lower class especially) receive first taint, which by degrees so contaminates mind, that, with every slight temptation, they become abandoned, lewd, and strangers to all shame.He then argued that printers of (that is, broadside ballads) should have to pay stamp taxes as newspaper printers had to do:I am not so much of a lawyer, as to determine, whether come under stamp act, tho' it seems reasonable to suppose it. ... And pray, what reason can there be, that your Journal, and all other news-papers, should pay a duty to government, and yet every filthy ballad, that tends to nothing but poisoning minds of our youth, should pay no duty at all?7For Democritus, ballads are a hybrid oral and textual form linked to commercial printing. They are also associated with the middle sort and the lower class especially rather than with elites. …

Introduction: Disseminating Design: The French Connection

The theme of the present issue originated from a session of the Design History Society Conference (2001) dedicated to examining the visual and textual descriptions of design in eighteenth-century England and France. The session invited answers to the questions: how was design communicated between makers and patrons, designers and entrepreneurs and producers and consumers? What visual, verbal and written languages were used? Were these languages becoming standardized, and how were designers, makers and clients trained to 'write' and 'read' them? Lastly, how did eighteenth-century commentators describe the objects they saw before them? While such issues of translation and dissemination are common enough in discussions of design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,1 they have not, thus far, featured prominently with respect to the eighteenth century, historians of which tend overwhelmingly to be preoccupied with the fixed, finished product rather than with the flux of process. The present issue is offered as a partial remedy for this lack. It has seemed fitting to allow France to play the glory part because then and thereafter she was heralded, admired and envied as a leader in design: the British House of Commons' Select Committee on the Arts and Principles of Design, convened in 18356, was still looking to the greater artistic content in French design for the explanation of the success of her 'fancy works', wallpaper and silk particularly, by comparison with their British equivalents.2 The English were habitually caricatured as hard-working, solid and mechanical in their talents, lacking those qualities of imagination and originality upon which superior turnover apparently depended.3 The 1835-6 Committee believed that one of the surest means of instilling a better knowledge of the principles of good design in the manufacturing classes lay in the foundation of design schools. In the implementation of this view, it had been anticipated by Shipley's Academy, founded in 1754, and the subject of Moira Thunder's contribution to the present collection. Thunder is less concerned, however, with the polemics of design than with measuring the impact or effectiveness of the education offered by such schools-to put it another way, with the translation of design into product. By a careful examination of the annual competition drawings in textile design, which she evaluates in terms of their translatability into cloth, or 'weavability', she challenges Matthew Craske's recent conclusion that design schools in Britain were largely without positive effect on trade and industry.4 Certain it is, at any rate, that contemporaries were persuaded of the practical utility of the Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce-the title by which William Shipley's venture was later, and is now, better known-and set about establishing sister institutions in imitation of it. In France more than forty design schools were founded in the second half of the eighteenth century and, as Renaud d'Enfert's recent study has shown, the pattern of their geographical distribution corresponds closely in over 40 per cent of cases to the distribution of the textile industry, a statistic that strongly suggests that manufacture helped shape 'where it did not actively invest', in pedagogical innovations.5 Examination of the curricula of these schools reveals that the content of the

Translating Rabelais: Sterne, Motteux, and the Culture of Politeness

In a study of 1933 which has long provided the most comprehensive account of Rabelais's presence in English literary history, Huntington Brown presented eighteenth-century gentility as instigating an unfortunate enervation of the Rabelaisian spirit. Noting the movement in the age of Queen Anne to a 'more ladylike standard of speech', Brown argued that 'English letters since the revolutionary period of the eighteenth century have been for the most part unhappily genteel, and hence proportionately barren of anything like true Pantagruelism. Sterne himself was tainted with the new plague, as he betrays in his devious and itching treatment of sex.' For Brown, the contagion of politeness became so widespread during the eighteenth century that even Sterne himself a writer who would be lauded by William Warburton as the 'English Rabelais' was unable entirely to inoculate himself.2 The civilized sapping of Rabelaisian energy pinpointed by Brown involved processes of cultural adaptation which, in recent years, have been less pejoratively analysed in terms of the 'genteelization' or 'feminization' of discourse which began to take place from the later seventeenth century onwards. As Lawrence Klein has argued, part of the cultural project of politeness was the encouragement of a 'conversational' style which would refine written discourse and render it gentlemanly. Branching out from the arena of social behaviour to encompass discourse generally, social politeness the 'art of pleasing in company' also became during this period the refined discourse of literary politeness (or, in Klein's suggestive formulation, the 'art of pleasing in texts').3 As cultural historians have increasingly emphasized, moreover, for many eighteenth-century commentators the genteelization of discourse was an important part of a national movement towards refinement a movement in which the civilizing role of women was frequently viewed as instrumental. Against Brown's distaste for the refined and the ladylike, therefore, we are now more willing to accept on its own terms the eighteenth-century encouragement of a decorous

Pope, Dryden, Milton, and the Poets' Secret

My subject is a relatively unexplored area of Pope's wit, his wit as a reader. use wit in the broad eighteenth-century, Lockean sense, meaning the ability to perceive resemblances. Allusion, or something like it, may be studied in an uncustomary way, not mainly to reveal implicit augmentations of meaning, or sources, or misreadings, but to discover how well one author understands another. concentrate on how Pope read Paradise Lost. Pope may be shown to have read it unusually, profoundly. He gives evidence in The Dunciad of having understood-to a virtually unprecedented and long-unmatched degree-Milton's poetic signs and even Milton's distinctive sign system. In two recent essays, have begun to look into this matter. One examines the extent to which eighteenth-century and later commentators on Paradise Lost were attentive to its intratextual parallelism. It is a question of some importance because that poem is so remarkably a tissue of parallels large and small. was drawn to the question when a graduate student, Marilyn Hertling, expressed surprise at Merritt Hughes's remark in his edition of Milton that not until 1947, in Balachandra Rajan's Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader, did a critic first observe (in print, as circumspection requires me to add) that Satan, Sin, and Death constitute an infernal parody of the Trinity-this somehow despite such lines as Sin's, spoken to Satan: I shall reign / At thy right hand voluptuous, as beseems / Thy daughter and thy darling, without end.' How extraordinary; and yet my search through the eighteenth-century commentators reveals no evidence that they saw an infernal trinity, or, indeed, saw much in the way of intratextual parallels at all. My second essay makes a similar point about the commentary (though not the translated poems themselves) in Pope's Homer: that only parallels which are markedly contrastive, calling for the discriminating power of Lockean judgment, get much attention.2 Yet it may be that some readers saw, or began to see, the infernal trinity and other significant parallels; some poets may have been in on the secret. Ronald Paulson, in his Book and Painting, refers in

Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia

R ECENT studies have given clear indications that poverty had become a major problem in eighteenth-century America, especially in the urban centers.' But lost in generalized notions of increasing stratification, growing propertylessness, and swollen poor relief rolls is a particular understanding of when and why poverty became the lot of a large number of city dwellers, who and how numerous the poor were, and how ideology and conditions interacted in the responses of public officials and city leaders to this blotch on the promise of American life. Because extensive records of private and public agencies that dealt with poor relief have survived for eighteenth-century Philadelphia, it is possible to provide some tentative answers to these questions for at least one colonial city and, in the process, to uncover new data about changing conditions in that city before the Revolution. Philadelphia might seem an unlikely place to study poverty in colonial America because the city has been viewed so often, both by eighteenthcentury commentators and by modern historians, as representative of the nearly unlimited possibilities for ascent. The legend of Benjamin Franklin on his way to wealth has clouded historical vision for a long time. Moreover, it is widely believed that Quaker humanitarianism, upper-class benevolence, and progress were the distinguishing characteristics of Philadelphia life. This view has been most compellingly presented by Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh, whose study of the social uses of the favors of providence in Philadelphia portrays an elite who believed intensely in the Enlightenment view of the perfectibility of mankind. Regarding the indignities of poverty, illness, injustice and misfortune as affronts to