Eighteenth-century Literature Research Articles

The Fiction of Amatonormativity: Reactions to Queer Platonic Relationships in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Eighteenth-century literature is rife with intense female friendships, relationships that often challenge or supplant heteronormative bonds in women’s lives. These connections can be productively identified as “queer platonic relationships” (QPRs) for the ways they resist heteropatriarchal norms. In this article, I trace the conflict between QPRs and amatonormativity—the social and political primacy of romantic relationships—across four texts from the period. These depictions constitute part of a rich, understudied archive for scholars of asexuality and aromanticism, allowing us to trace the ongoing social enforcement of amatonormative ideology and the evolving political stakes of QPRs as sites of feminist resistance to heteropatriarchy.

Sociability and the Discourses of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Sociability and the Discourses of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Did Suetonius really call gout morbus dominorum? A philological and historico-medical reconstruction.

Current scientific literature often defines gout as morbus dominorum, in agreement with the Greek-Roman representation of podagra (ποδάγρα, literally "foot-trap") as a consequence of gluttony and libertinage. Several authors place the origins of this expression with the Roman writer Suetonius, without however quoting any specific primary source. We have investigated this problem again and scrutinized primary sources ranging from the Roman World to the early Middle Ages. A search on the database of Latin texts for the expression morb* domin* failed to identify any positive correspondence, not only in Suetonius' works but also in those of other Latin authors. As a matter of fact, the expression morbus dominorum appeared for the first time in the literature on podagra in 1661 in Jakob Balde's book Solatium Podagricorum. Since then, this definition has been endlessly repeated in seventeenth- to eighteenth-century literature on gout. In 1866, while lecturing on the diseases of the elderly, the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot first ascribed the expression morbus dominorum to Suetonius. However, this attribution is unsupported by primary sources. In conclusion, Suetonius never used the wording morbus dominorum, which was probably coined by Jakob Balde in 1661. The origin of this erroneous ascription dates to Jean-Martin Charcot's lectures in 1866. Key Points • Albeit a much-quoted sentence in rheumatology,the Roman author Suetonius never called gout morbusdominorum. • When referencing historical point in rheumatology, a careful perusal of the primary sources should beimplemented to avoid misquoting and false myths.

Post-Saidian Studies of Eighteenth-Century European Literature and Culture

Abstract: A review of Noel Malcom's Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750; Daniel O'Quinn's Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815; and Samara Anne Cahill's Intelligent Souls?: Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century Literature.

Herron, Shane. Irony and Earnestness in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Dimensions of Satire and Solemnity

Herron, Shane. <i>Irony and Earnestness in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Dimensions of Satire and Solemnity</i>

The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century. Eds. Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen

<i>The International Companion to Scottish Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century</i>. Eds. Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen

Spreading the Work: Introducing Eighteenth-Century ‘Derivatives’ in the Classroom

AbstractThe article reflects the experience of teaching an interactive seminar on the topic of rewriting the history of eighteenth-century literature through non-canonical texts. As such, the article considers firstly how to introduce graduate students to the revisionist scholarly debate recasting eighteenth-century literature and secondly how to adapt it in a way that is more relatable to them as digital natives with their concomitant mediatic skills. Attempting a participative literary historiography where students put together a new body of literature based on ‘derivatives’ (excerpts, abridgments, unauthorized imitations, or continuations of originals found on online databases) calls for a systematizing frame. The article proposes to achieve this through the preparatory reading of a choice of canonical works that reflect the contemporary critical responses to the proliferation of print. Not only does this first step avoid the dispersion of participants’ findings, but it also helps participants toward an easier understanding of the Foucauldian dynamics of discourse and how they inform his key notion of the author function and, ultimately, of the literary canon. By the time participants turn to choosing a derivative text in the second half of the course, the article argues, they have a clearer sense of the revisionist importance of such an endeavour.

Irony and Earnestness in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Dimensions of Satire and Solemnity by Shane Herron

<i>Irony and Earnestness in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Dimensions of Satire and Solemnity</i> by Shane Herron

Resounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670–1850

Resounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670–1850

Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 by Melissa Mowry

Reviewed by: Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 by Melissa Mowry Peter Degabriele Melissa Mowry, Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1742 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2021). Pp. 250; 3 illus. $80.00 cloth. Melissa Mowry's Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History follows the traces of a non-elite communal practice of hermeneutics and a collectivist politics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literary history. The book has five chapters, the first of which functions as an introduction, as well as a short but provocative coda. Throughout, Mowry looks to the Levellers as the positive articulation of a collective hermeneutics that she claims has been buried by the standard narrative of the rise of liberal individualism, and she argues that the political and literary history of the period she examines should be reconceived as a consistent attempt to eradicate this collectivism in favor of a conservative individualism. This is in stark contrast to the conventional narrative of early eighteenth-century political and literary history which argues that an individualist ideology produced a new liberal and anti-absolutist politics. For Mowry, by contrast, the theater of the Restoration and early novels by Defoe worked tirelessly to disavow the possibility of collectivist thought and politics. This refraction of the traditional narrative throws up some surprising and enlightening results. The Tory Aphra Behn and the dissenting Whig Daniel Defoe, for instance, are, in Mowry's account, engaged in the same political project of anti-collectivism rather than existing on opposite sides of a partisan political spectrum. This new lens thus reorients our vision of this period and stands as a profound challenge to conventional ways of understanding the relation of Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature to political ideology. Collective Understanding models a new form of literary criticism that Mowry terms collective hermeneutics. Mowry's reading of the Leveller tradition in the second chapter of the book demonstrates this practice by paying attention to the ways in which texts "articulate relationships rather than statements/principles/ideas, or even identities" (13). This method allows Mowry to recover the contribution of Leveller women to the political praxis of the group, and to demonstrate the way Leveller texts worked by producing affective relationships. These relationships, Mowry argues, are the very basis of political association for the Levellers, a communal political thought that forthrightly challenges the sovereign exceptionalism being developed contemporaneously by theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin. Mowry argues that instead of a popular sovereignty that would grant "the commonalty the sovereign power of exceptionalism," the Levellers claimed "a more fluid and socially grounded account of authority, stabilized through the affective bonds of collectivity" (57). Mowry deftly recovers this theory of association by her method of reading Leveller writings, a process in which instead of focusing on ideas or individual authorship, she follows traces of collective and social production of texts, from authorship, to printing, to distribution. The claim that Mowry makes through her practice is a significant one: that the kind of liberal, individualist criticism we are accustomed to practice makes it impossible for us to see the very collectivity characteristic of the Leveller movement, and that only a changed critical practice can recover a communitarian and sociable politics. The final three chapters of Collective Understanding focus not so much on tracing the positive development of a collectivist politics, as on finding the remnants of this collectivism in literary and ideological works that are determined [End Page 484] to erase it. Chapter 3 argues that attending to the work of William Davenant and Aphra Behn can demonstrate that "the royalist push to regain cultural authority over the late seventeenth century" enlisted literature to "secure the value and cultural centrality of exceptionalism and singularity" (129). Mowry thus reads the Restoration period as an ideological battle between an alliance of sovereignty and singularity against collectivism. The most interesting account of this battle comes in Mowry's readings of Behn's rewriting of the history of Bacon's rebellion in The Widdow Ranter. The play, for Mowry, is an "indictment of collectivity" (123) in which the "aggregated authority of the first-hand accounts" on which Behn's (and others') knowledge of the...

Unexpected Bodies in Eighteenth-Century German Culture

Unexpected Bodies in Eighteenth-Century German Culture Patricia Anne Simpson and Birgit Tautz Since the 1990s, interdisciplinary scholarship has been reframing a discourse about "extraordinary" bodies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson) and the cultural construction of these as "unexpected" from a range of perspectives, including queer studies, intersectional feminism, posthumanism, disability studies, ecocriticism, and critical race theory. Garland-Thomson's path-breaking work decisively shifted a medicalized discourse to another register. Her intervention has reverberated across academic disciplines and activist platforms alike. The body—erroneously presumed to be human—continues to organize inquiry into the limits of the human. Although scholarship about the body frequently reflects presentist perspectives, eighteenth-century aesthetics, with anthropocentric roots in Enlightenment thought and totalizing tendencies derived from assumptions about the body as a self-identical, logical "whole" likewise offer extensive material for the analysis of bodies beyond the human. In a previous "Forum on (New) Directions" (2021), two contributions, in particular, highlight the innovation related to "unexpected" bodies in our field. Stephanie M. Hilger's"Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century" calls attention to the health humanities, which "allow for a fresh perspective"; she elaborates: "Eighteenth-century thinkers wrestled with the separation of the humanities/mind from the sciences/body, yet they rarely questioned the supremacy of the mind."1 Eleoma Bodammer's "Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies" seeks to extend the model of critical disability studies to our field, encouraging a discussion that "could take a variety of directions that might help to explain responses to disability in aesthetic theories, debates on humanity, and the history of emotions."2 This, the final forum section of our editorship, builds beyond the horizons of the medical humanities and critical disability studies by foregrounding the cultural construction of the "body" and all its articulations in the eighteenth century. The contributions impressively show that, although anthropomorphic beliefs about the wholeness of the body frequently seek to ground and legitimize themselves in the eighteenth century, the actual historical landscape was much more porous, multifaceted, and in flux, indeed decentering anthropocentric mindsets, creative dispositions, and perspectives on eighteenth-century literature, culture, and the body. [End Page 137] The contributions to this forum bring the "unexpected" bodies into focus: they are extraordinary, anomalous, amorphous. Inspired by two panels sponsored by the LLC Forum Executive Committee on Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century German Literature, the contributors contemplate a range of human and nonhuman bodies marked by gender, ability, race, anomaly, and associations in the material and ecological environment. Bodies of water, plant life, bewitched bodies, and aesthetic, "uncontainable" bodies—all invite an innovative reimagining of German-speaking European literature and culture in multiple representations of nonnormative, nonconforming bodies. Patricia Anne Simpson University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bowdoin College Birgit Tautz University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bowdoin College NOTES 1. Stephanie M. Hilger," Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century," Goethe Yearbook 28 (2021): 301–06, here 304. 2. Eleoma Bodammer, "Disability Studies and New Directions in Eighteenth-Century German Studies," Goethe Yearbook 28 (2021): 307–313, here 310. Supplemental Bibliography Allingham, Liesl. "Gender and Narrative Crisis in Christoph Martin Wieland's 'Novella without a Title.'" The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation 56, no. 4 (2015): 427–44. Google Scholar Calzoni, Raul and Greta Perletti. Monstrous Anatomies: Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2015. Google Scholar Dale, Amelia. The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2019. Google Scholar Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Google Scholar Deutsch, Helen and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. Defects: Engendering the Modern Body. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Google Scholar Engelstein, Stefani. Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse. Albany: SUNY P, 2009. Google Scholar Farr, Jason S. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2019. Google Scholar Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Google Scholar ———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Google Scholar ———, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles...

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...

Mind over Body? Stigma, Staring, and the Self

Mind over Body?Stigma, Staring, and the Self Anna C. Spafford Novelty is fragile and staring volatile because the longer we look, the more accustomed a once surprising sight becomes … Seeing disability reminds us of what Bryan S. Turner (2006) calls "ontological contingency," the truth of our body's vulnerability to the randomness of fate. Each one of us ineluctably acquires one or more disabilities—naming them variably as illness, disease, injury, old age, failure, dysfunction, or dependence.1 The eighteenth-century German literary canon does not, as a rule, focus specifically on unexpected bodies in central characters, with some notable exceptions such as those discussed by my esteemed colleagues in this forum. This being said, there is an emphasis on stigma across literary genres and periods in this century of German literature. This thematization of stigma and the precarity of individual existence culminates in an intense interest in psychological pathologies in Sturm und Drang as well as Weimar classicism. This interest has problematized distinctions between mind and body and emphasized the influence of an individual's social and material context on their psychology. In this forum entry, I attempt to outline parallels in the portrayal and function of various stigmas in this broad literary period, which is credited with the development of modern individuality. I posit that Garland-Thomson's theory of the extraordinary body is an extension of this modern individual, who, contrary to popular understanding, is in fact born of, sustained, and afflicted by stigma. When we think of the individual in eighteenth-century German literature and especially the literature of the Goethezeit, we think of an individual with agency. All men, according to Locke, are Adam—created in God's image and sovereign over their inheritance. According to Kant, every individual is charged to use his own mind. With the rise of Lutheranism and especially among Pietists, it became the individual's responsibility to find his or her own private way to God. In literature, we see the creation and rise of the novel—an individualistic endeavor if ever there was one. In sentimental works, Enlightenment values and pure emotions lead the hero or heroine to a good life of moral steadfastness in the face of an immoral world. Gellert's Swedish Countess weathers political intrigue and physical capture. She witnesses incest and suicide—all unscathed. Her happy ending is directly attributed to her strength of character. Almost fifty years later, Caroline von Wolzogen's Agnes von Lillien suffers similar adverse circumstances, with similar reward. [End Page 141] Even if we look to the Sturm und Drang, where plots are characterized by human volatility and suffering, we find stories of individual strength where our protagonist is strong, just not strong enough. Karl Moor in Schiller's drama Die Räuber (The Robbers) is an excellent example of strong individuality that becomes bent towards its own destruction. Then we have Weimar classicism. The Bildungsroman: What greater act of individual strength is there than one's own journey to self-discovery? Gnothi sauton—know thyself. Any weakling—even Faust!—can conquer the world when given enough power. The true challenge of life becomes self-knowledge. Given this focus on individual fortitude in German literature of the mid- to late eighteenth century, we might want to characterize this period as one that neglects stigma and in which few, if any, extraordinary bodies may be found—existing only on the margins of these narratives: characters weakened with age, oddly androgynous youth. And yet we know from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Erving Goffman—one of her major theoretical inspirations—that stigma is a universal human experience. It is the nature of norms that deviation is the norm. Being the focus of attention—positive or negative—is an isolating experience. While Kant and Locke's ideals portray individual human fortitude of momentous proportion, they both knew themselves to be writing counterfactual narratives. Private property ought to exist. People ought to think for themselves and not just follow their local thought leaders. Similarly, the agency shown in late eighteenth-century literature demonstrates the difficulties of individuality: Gellert's countess only demonstrates her tempered morality by being forced to operate as a beleaguered...

Kendini Yaratan İyilik Timsali Margery: Aydınlanma Döneminde Çocuk Edebiyatı

Considered one of the earliest novels of modern children’s literature, John Newbery’s The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes harmonises moral instruction with entertainment, and it presents an exemplary female character for its child readers. Even though Newbery’s novel can be read as a modern Cinderella story with its eponymous Goody Two-Shoes transforming from an orphan into a lady of profession and good fortune, the novel also stands out with its celebration of the tenets of enlightenment. Goody Two-Shoes not only represents John Newbery and John Locke’s ideas concerning the education of children, but she is also a child of the Age of Enlightenment with her unique pedagogy, individualistic attitude, emphasis on rationalism, and rejection of the occult. In her character, Goody Two-Shoes, namely Margery, brings together patience, virtue, industriousness, and self-confidence, thereby becoming a female child counterpart of the individualistic literary characters of the eighteenth-century literature. Her social and economic mobility ensured by her own endeavours renders her a self-made child who contests normative gender roles drawn by the patriarchy. This paper analyses Newbery’s The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes as an example of children’s literature in the Age of Enlightenment with a specific focus on Margery’s development and the values she represents.

Vincento Ignaco Marevičiaus „Abiejų lyčių edukacijos sistema“: apie natūralaus ugdymo adeptą Lietuvos Didžiojoje Kunigaikštystėje

Wincenty Ignacy Marewicz’s “A System of Education for Both Sexes”: About an Adept of Natural Education in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania The article discusses the system of children’s education presented in Proiekt nieuskuteczniony prozą i wierszem (1788; The Unfulfilled Project in Prose and Verse) by Wincenty Ignacy Marewicz (1755–1822). The article examines how the writer, who came from the petty nobility of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, adapted the new ideas of pedagogy that were spreading in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. An attempt is made to discern what was typical in W. I. Marewicz’s work and what individual nuances were given to it by a particular personality. In the work discussed, the author’s pedagogical views are presented in the chapter “Systema Edukacyi dla Płci oboiey” (A System of Education for Both Sexes). The writer sets out his system like a narrative to his future wife about how he would bring up their future children. It is noteworthy that although the access to the works of Western pedagogical theorists was limited, the system of children’s education described by W. I. Marewicz was close to the model of natural education developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. W. I. Marewicz based his work on the postulate that the child’s great teacher is nature. In his project, the child’s upbringing takes place in the countryside and is based on observation of nature and the child’s direct experience. The writer envisages the upbringing of the child from infancy, the parents’ active involvement in their children’s education, and supports the notion that teachers should take into account the child’s age characteristics and individual needs. He resorts to the means of ‘negative education’, when the child seems to be acting on his or her own initiative, but is guided by an educator who protects the child from wrong things. At the same time, we can observe that W. I. Marewicz adapted the system of natural education by using his own life experience and taking into account the realities of his own country. The educational system described by W. I. Marewicz is aimed at the upbringing of a decent citizen. It is based on the attitudes that the writer used to declare in his patriotic works: work for the good of society, obedience to the king, respect for religion, the striving for the unity of the nation, and hatred of outsiders who undermine the state. Keywords: Wincenty Ignacy Marewicz, eighteenth-century literature, natural education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham

A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham

Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out

Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out

Robinson Crusoe After 300 Years, ed. Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley

<i>Robinson Crusoe After 300 Years</i>, ed. Andreas K. E. Mueller and Glynis Ridley

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. <i>1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope</i>

Schmidgen, Wolfram. Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730

Schmidgen, Wolfram. <i>Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730</i>