Eighteenth-century Readers Research Articles

The Gulf Between Heroine and Woman: How The Cry’s Oppositional Double Structure Challenges and Educates Readers

ABSTRACT This article argues that the key to the experimental novel The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754) by Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier lies in the contrasting temporalities of the text’s two genres: the endless debate in the frame narrative and the resolved marriage plot narrated by the heroine Portia. By placing repetition and progression side by side, Fielding and Collier emphasize the gulf between the pain of lived experience and the illusory comfort provided by fictional convention. Amid eighteenth-century literary debates on whether didactic texts should favor realism or idealism, The Cry insists that truly educational novels must represent womanhood pragmatically – as rife with oppression, frustration, and repetition. Through formal features, the co-authors use pace and duration to force their audience to experience the pain of womanhood in real time, then propose a way forward through their heroine’s progressive neologisms. Drawing on Sarah Fielding’s literary criticism, responses to The Cry by eighteenth-century readers, and feminist theory, this essay examines how the novel critiqued the social utility of conventional domestic fiction and exposed the true experience of womanhood.

The Poetics of the Wise Fool in the Music and Letters of Ignatius Sancho

ABSTRACT While the correspondence of the Black British writer, musician, butler, and shopkeeper Ignatius Sancho has long been recognized as pioneering in its use of the sentimental literary style to articulate anti-racist and anti-slavery positions, his music has largely evaded serious interpretative consideration. This essay considers one way in which Sancho apparently used music to convey his moral messages. His song ‘Sweetest Bard’ and his instrumental dance piece ‘Mungo’s Delight’ suggest that he adopted and reappropriated the persona of the ‘wise fool’, a figure well known to eighteenth-century readers from characters such as Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Sterne’s Yorick, and Cervantes’s Sancho Panza. Understanding these two pieces of music through the lens of the wise fool helps to elucidate Sancho’s use of music as a means of calling attention to the prejudices of white British society.

Williams, Helen. Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book

Williams, Helen. <i>Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book</i>

:Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792

:<i>Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792</i>

Who Wrote The Female American?: The Noble Brothers, Circulating Libraries, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Since its publication in 1767, readers have wondered who wrote The Female American; or, the Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield. I argue that eighteenth-century readers and reviewers would have understood The Female American in relation to a particular business model—that of the publisher/bookseller/library proprietor—rather than as the work of a particular author. Yet, through its connection with its publisher Francis Noble, The Female American might, I suggest, have a story to tell us about authorship, not about its own authorship, but about the making of one of the preeminent “Authors” of the eighteenth century: Daniel Defoe.

EmmaDepledge, John S.Garrison, MarissaNicosia, eds. Making Milton: Print, Authorship, AfterlivesOxford: Oxford UP, 2021. xiv + 250pp. ISBN 13: 9780198821892. £70.00; $90.00 (cloth).

EmmaDepledge, John S.Garrison, MarissaNicosia, eds. Making Milton: Print, Authorship, AfterlivesOxford: Oxford UP, 2021. xiv + 250pp. ISBN 13: 9780198821892. £70.00; $90.00 (cloth).

Hieroglyphic State Machine

Hieroglyphic State Machine

Jason S. Farr. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature.

Jason S. Farr. <i>Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature</i>.

Christina Lupton. Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century.

Christina Lupton. <i>Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century</i>.

Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Michael Edson.

<i>Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry</i>, ed. Michael Edson.

Darryl P. Domingo. The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760.

Darryl P. Domingo. <i>The Rhetoric of Diversion in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1760</i>.

Experience and Its Discontents

Experience and Its Discontents

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Scholarly Milton. Edited by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+295.

<i>Scholarly Milton</i>. Edited by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+295.

From Literature to Metadata

From Literature to Metadata Matt Erlin This is not the first time that questions about the "great unread" have been raised with regard to eighteenth-century German studies. In the 1960s and early 1970s a variety of monographs sought to look beyond the canon to consider the entire range of imaginative fiction available to eighteenth-century readers. Thanks to the efforts of such scholars as Marion Beaujean, Marianne Spiegel, Eva D. Becker, Albert Ward, and Rudolf Schenda, to name just a few, we know more about the broader literary landscape of the period than one might assume, not only with regard to its general topography but also the composition of the soil.1 None of the authors of these studies had access to electronic corpora, but they still managed to evaluate an impressively wide array of works. In Der Trivialroman in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (1964) for example, Marion Beaujean includes no less than 46 novels by 27 authors. To be sure, this number represents only a small fraction of the total novels published in Germany in the eighteenth century. Marianne Spiegel includes a list of 1,287 titles (including translations) published between 1700 and 1770 as an appendix to her monograph of 1967, Der Roman und sein Publikum im früheren 18. Jahrhundert 1700–1767. Ten years later, Michael Hadley published his Romanverzeichnis: Bibliographie der zwischen 1750–1800 erschienenen Erstausgaben, which includes publication data for more than 5,000 novels. There is, however, little reason to doubt the validity of Beaujean's interpretations, which aim to classify (sub)genres and trace their evolution, inasmuch as they are based on plausible sampling techniques and corroborated by para- and extratextual evidence. What are the lessons to be learned from these earlier examples of a more comprehensive approach to literary history? The first and most obvious is simply that these efforts exist. The point has already been made in a variety of contexts, but it bears repeating: synoptic, as well as empirical and quantitative analysis, have a long history in literary studies, and whatever transformations are now occurring in the wake of increased access to digital corpora and the tools of data science, they constitute a recalibration rather than a rupture. A second lesson is that the most interesting of these earlier studies adopt a mixed-methods approach, in the sense of combining qualitative and quantitative analysis as well as analysis of textual, paratextual, and extratextual materials. Dozens of scholars have explained why the alleged opposition between close and distant reading is an unhelpful one, and there is no need to [End Page 189] reiterate those arguments in this context. Less attention has been paid to the specific history and potential of the mixed-methods paradigm that "emerged as a 'distinct methodological field' at the beginning of the 21st century" in the social and behavioral sciences.2 The value of mixed-methods approaches, as Berenike Hermann has argued, is that they acknowledge a basic difference between quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well the strengths and weaknesses of each, and then attempt to combine them "in a way that achieves complementary strengths and non-overlapping weaknesses."3 Some of the studies from the 1960s and 1970s adopt an exclusively qualitative approach, albeit one, it should be noted, that is nonetheless best understood as a form of distant reading focused on broad pattern recognition. But these are arguably the least enduring. Eva Becker, for example, presents a plausible typology of the novel around 1780, and her claims regarding "Die Hauptfiguren und ihr Weltbild" (The major characters and their worldview), "Die Umwelt der Figuren," (the characters' environment) und "Die Form der Romane" (the form of novels) seem equally persuasive. The larger stakes and implications of her classificatory efforts, however, remain unclear. Albert Ward, on the other hand, combines literary interpretations (e.g., on the indebtedness of Sophiens Reise von Memel nach Sachsen to earlier devotional literature) with quantitative data gleaned from book fair catalogues and other sources. The result is a range of insightful claims about the social and book-historical contexts out of which the modern German novel emerged in the eighteenth century. The broader literary landscape of the eighteenth...

Древнерусское «Сказание о сивиллах» в восприятии читателя XVIII в.

The article is devoted to a special copy of the Old Russian Tale of the Sibyls from the second half of the eighteenth century in which the texts of prophecies are supplemented with vernacular verses of divinatory character. The Sibylline prophecies, devoted exclusively to Christian themes in the Middle Ages (the Coming of Christ, his birth from the immaculate Virgin, and the Day of Judgment), acquired in modern times a lower, everyday role. The regularity of such attitude towards a medieval text on the part of the eighteenth-century reader is shown against the background of a wide range of medieval and new Western European and Russian literary works.

The Elusive Public, Then and Now

In Writing in Public, Trevor Ross repeatedly characterizes key phenomena—eighteenth-century concepts of the public, literature, and the legal treatment of these and related issues—as elusive. He does so using a small set of associated adjectives: “incoherent,” “indeterminate,” and “ambiguous,” among others. This essay explores how Ross’s practice in this regard might be linked to his historical focus, first by cataloging Ross’s approaches to elusiveness and unfolding some of the implications of his attributions. On some topics, such as the orientation of members of the eighteenth-century public toward other members of that public, Ross’s accounts of indeterminacy are especially sensitive and persuasive. But his accounts of experiencing various kinds of elusiveness remain relatively fragmentary. Curiously, Ross attributes little significance to eighteenth-century readers’ exposure to and processing of explicitly fictional narrative. Consideration of the dynamics of fictional discourse suggests a further way to conceptualize some of the forms of elusiveness Ross identifies, as well as, perhaps, a way to explain their proliferation, their variety, and the roots of Ross’s approach to them. The essay proposes, ultimately, that Ross’s approach to elusiveness might be more a symptom of his own historical moment than a feature of his subject matter.

Between Fantasy and Philosophy: Saʿdi, Translator of Voltaire’s Zadig

Zadig ou la Destinée opens on a preface supposedly written by Sadi (sic), who seems to suggest he is the translator of the story which is to follow. The article will investigate the role played by Voltaire’s reference to Saʿdi in Zadig as an Oriental prop for the narrative’s exotic setting, but also, more importantly, as participating in its philosophical content. Travelers’ accounts had brought growing interest in Persia, and Saʿdi would not have been unfamiliar to an educated public; the Orient more generally became an experimental space for Enlightenment thought. Playing on the notion of the translator as cultural bridge, the article examines the uses Voltaire makes of Saʿdi in Zadig and whether these correlate to the eighteenth-century French reader’s perceptions of the Iranian poet.

How to Read: Lessons from Christoph Martin Wieland’s Shandean Turn in Der neue Amadis

Abstract This article situates Wieland’s Der Neue Amadis within the history of reading pedagogy in Germany. It begins by arguing that Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy furnishes Wieland with the narrative techniques for advancing critical reading practices. It proceeds with a brief outline of the major developments in eighteenth-century reading pedagogy, which culminate in the use of imaginative literature as a means to develop various mental faculties. Lastly, it formulates the pedagogical goals of Der Neue Amadis and compares them to other reading methodologies of the time. The main argument is that reading Der Neue Amadis with an eye for its pedagogical goals gives us a clearer picture of how imaginative literature could be seen to promote the goal of enlightenment. (AS)

José Celestino Mutis' appropriation of Newton's experimental physics in New Granada (1761-1808).

This paper characterizes José Celestino Mutis' (1732-1808) appropriation of Newton in the Viceroyalty of New Granada. First, we examine critically traditional accounts of Mutis' works highlighting, on the one hand, their inadequacy for directing their claims toward the nineteenth-century independence from Spain and, on the other, for not differentiating between Newtonianism and Enlightenment. Next, we portray Mutis' complex Newtonianism from his own statements and from printed sources, including a variety of works and translations from British, Dutch, and French authors, in addition to a wide range of Newton's writings, unusual for an eighteenth-century reader in the Americas. Finally, we analyze a salient claim of Mutis' Newtonianism in order to depict his appropriation and transformation of Newton's ideas: the characterization of Newtonian experimental physics as a useful science. In so doing, Mutis further developed metaphysical and methodological positions not present in Newton's works.