Eighteenth-century Studies Research Articles

Relativism in the British and French Enlightenment

Abstract: Long neglected, the history of relativism has been the topic of a number of surveys in recent years. These studies, however, have been ambivalent on whether relativism really existed in the eighteenth century. Following Isaiah Berlin’s contention that the eighteenth-century witnessed the emergence of pluralism rather than relativism, historians have concluded that the Enlightenment at best prefigured nineteenth-century developments in relativistic thinking. In response, this article argues that relativism was a recognizable thesis in eighteenth-century Britain and France. Its principles and consequences were frequently articulated, either to be rejected or defended, by a wide range of philosophers and imaginative authors, from Ralph Cudworth and Ann Radcliffe to Julien Offray de la Mettrie and Alberto Radicati. This neglected chapter in the history of relativism, I argue, matters for several strands in eighteenth-century studies, as it inflected Enlightenment reflections on aesthetic and moral values, human hierarchies, and cross-cultural relations.

“Endeavouring” and Other Eighteenth-Century Fictions

The terminology we use in eighteenth-century studies needs to encompass both the period’s and the field’s global reach. James Cook’s ship HMS Endeavour provides a starting point for considering the terms that were used to imagine the eighteenth-century Pacific from Great Britain, the importance of refusing eighteenth-century fictions in and from the Pacific, and the need to expand our critical vocabulary in the field beyond the frameworks of the transatlantic world. This essay proposes “Endeavouring” as a Pacific-focused corollary to the term “Columbusing” in order to advance anti-colonial scholarship in eighteenth-century studies and broaden its scope and vision.

On Noongar Boodjah: George Vancouver’s Colonial Fictions

This essay reads Captain George Vancouver’s account of his 1791 landing on the southwestern coast of what is now known as Australia through the theorizations and analyses of Indigenous theorists and scholars to expose the colonial fictions that undergird his actions and rhetoric. I then focus on the rhetoric and critical posturing of the settler colonial academy, especially within white-dominated fields like eighteenth-century studies, to consider how its work participates in the processes of Indigenous erasure and points to the need for self-reflexive and reciprocal engagements with Indigenous communities and their knowledges.

Introduction: Ihara Saikaku and Eighteenth-Century Studies

Abstract: This introduction offers Ihara Saikaku's work as a prime example of the need to globalize eighteenth-century studies and briefly sketches some of the challenges of such a task, focusing particularly on how emerging frameworks of world literature engage existing literary categories, particularly realism. Though reading Saikaku's work as realist makes sense in many ways and facilitates his inclusion into existing paradigms of the field, it also risks flattening his work or only engaging aspects of it that would accord with those categories.

Eliot at Yale

Abstract This article locates the origins of George Eliot scholarship in the archival collecting practices and editorial priorities of Chauncey Brewster Tinker and Gordon Haight at Yale University in the early twentieth century. If archives are the prehistory of reception, as the article suggests, then the collecting practices of individuals and institutions have an influence on scholarly production that is pervasive and also directive. This prehistory of The George Eliot Letters recounts how Tinker acquired her letters for Yale and his own collection, and how Haight’s perspective emerged from the institutional subjectivity of the university, library, and English department. Eliot scholarship emerges from the world of elite male book collecting and queer attachments to each other and to the Rare Books Room. The study of the Victorian novel at Yale itself developed in the shadow of eighteenth-century studies, and its dynamism contrasted markedly with the static curriculum of Victorian poetry. These factors contributed to Haight’s neglect of the significance of Eliot’s poetry, and to his exclusion of correspondence addressing it in the Letters. Haight’s sense of ownership of Eliot’s life and achievements has lastingly impacted the horizons of George Eliot studies, which remains artificially secular and oriented toward the novel.

Enlightenolatry from Peter Gay to Steven Pinker: Mass Marketing Enlightenment and the Thick Eighteenth Century

Abstract: Peter Gay's two-volume study, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966/69), won the National Book Award in 1966, where its tendentious version of the Enlightenment was embraced as a moderate, hopeful response to the radicalized public sphere of the 1960s. This essay argues that Gay's achievement, and the interdisciplinary seminar that he founded at Columbia University to develop it, provided a key impetus for the organization of the institutional study of eighteenth-century studies. Moreover, the constellation of ideas celebrated as the "Enlightenment" in Gay's work has provided an enduring template for twenty-first-century Enlightenolatrists like Steven Pinker, whose Enlightenment Now (2018) slavishly follows Gay's argument. The persistence of Gay's "undead text," in the sense of Lorraine Daston and Sharon Marcus's phrase (2019), suggests an additional and troubling dimension to eighteenth-century studies beyond the "wide" and "deep" eighteenth centuries as theorized by Felicity Nussbaum (2003) and Joseph Roach (2007).

Gladiator Girls: Transphobia in the Eighteenth Century and Today

Abstract: This article compares eighteenth-century translations of Juvenalian satire about women athletes and the rhetoric surrounding modern female Olympic athletes. Cultural perceptions of women athletes changed dramatically over the eighteenth century as such athletes came to be defined primarily by their femininity, a category that was being made stricter and narrower as gender difference emerged as a coherent ideology in eighteenth-century England. This article posits that eighteenth-century gender ideology is the root of modern transphobia and ends with a call for eighteenth-century studies scholars to examine their own work and sources for unacknowledged biases.

Fractured Visions, New Horizons: Debates in Eighteenth-Century Studies beyond German Studies

Fractured Visions, New Horizons:Debates in Eighteenth-Century Studies beyond German Studies Birgit Tautz The past two years have brought many changes to academic life, one of which promises to be an organizational revamp and opening-up of US-based eighteenth-century studies, at least in their representation through ASECS. Two panels at this year's conference (Baltimore, 2022) are a case in point: the "Presidential Session Roundtable: New Horizons in Enlightenment Studies," and "Visions of Empire."1 While the panelists on the former individually and collectively wrestled with domineering whiteness as a paradigm defining the hitherto accepted scope of Enlightenment reach, the latter offered new impulses for interdisciplinary turns to the global: Historian Junko Takeda offered considerations on cultural erasure of premodern Armenians and their diaspora in the Americas and argued for a reframing of imperial power structures within trade networks (and beyond the carriers of national territory and languages), while literary scholars Hanna Roman and Melanie Conroy urged the reexamination of well-worn tropes in the Western imagination, namely the sunken island of Atlantis and maps, respectively. Roman showed that, while Atlantis is today considered to be thoroughly mythological, it has revealed tremendous power in terms of engineering and reengineering narratives of dominance as well as images of the global North (in juxtaposition with the global South) and thus, ultimately, of European "greatness" and—we might add—mythological whiteness. In the end, Roman put forth an overarching plea for new stories of origin that, unlike the biblical text or sciences with their data and experiments, remain stories of imagination, which, however, encourage us to see the world—and its mythological translations—through a material remnant or illusion, namely a mysterious rock buried beneath an ocean. Conroy explained how three different types of maps circulating in the eighteenth century shaped the visual field for perceiving the world, ultimately establishing scale, dominance, and hierarchies of importance in a visually persuasive though manipulative manner. Finally, Elizabeth Cross cast a critical eye on the French empire—from the perspective of the Indian Ocean world. Reminding listeners not only of the fragile nature of empires whose power postures are always betraying anxieties of impending loss, she delineated how the French empire was subordinated, by both British colonial power and Indian inheritance, and how the French [End Page 115] had to assert their power through trade hegemony. Cross's claims have consequences for debates on national colonial powers that had not been perceived as colonial powers in the eighteenth century or that had been downplayed, relegated to the margins, or excused for playing secondary roles among a cohort of colonial powers—e.g., Germany's stance vis-à-vis colonialism, albeit from a different perspective. Not only does Cross provide additional support for undoing, once and for all, the claim that there were more or less innocent bystanders, such as the Germans, she also invites us to make this claim from outside Europe. Together these examples support one conclusion, namely that our narratives of global engagement must be multidirectional rather than replicating binaries of hierarchy and dominance that always pit West against East or North against South; they also must be truly multifaceted to allow for interdisciplinarity: for example, by intersecting geographical imagination along hemispheric lines with visual perception and representation (e.g., the ways of seeing engendered by certain types of maps) or by complicating one vector (e.g., the national) through the introduction of a transgressive force (e.g., trade networks, eclipsed but persistent indigenous traditions). But it is the "New Horizons" panel that I have been thinking about since March 2022, returning frequently to facets of the discussion as well as to individual books and articles written by a few of the panelists but also to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew Curran's magisterial study Who's Black and Why: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race (2022), in which the authors revisit and translate from the French the entries of a 1741 prize competition revolving around the same question. My reflections on the ASECS panel are mostly in sync, as well as in challenge, with the other parts of the present section in Goethe Yearbook. What...

Rebuilding Eighteenth-Century Studies as a Relational Ecology

The recent racial reckoning with white supremacist practices within institutions has produced a discourse of how institutions can "decolonize" themselves. This essay specifically scrutinizes how academic organizations like the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) have mined the lived experience and scholarly expertise of its BIPOC and other historically marginalized members as a way to insulate themselves from their own complicity. Giving these members a platform to think through their own painful experiences can be an exploitative practice without meaningful subsequent action that directly acknowledges those experiences. Inspired by Indigenous epistemology, "relational ecology" reimagines the ways in which organizations can begin to transform themselves by centering an ethics of care through responsive acts of listening and through adequate compensation for leadership positions.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Introduction

The Woman of Colour (1808), an anonymous epistolary novel, remained out of print until the 2008 release of Lyndon J. Dominique’s Broadview edition. It has since become central to studies in the long eighteenth century because of its subversion of the marriage plot and the intertwining of this plot with Black liberation struggles through the voice of the mixed-race Jamaican protagonist Olivia Fairfield. In this introduction to an ECF special issue dedicated to the novel, the authors trace developments in Black British history, Black womanist historiography, and global Romanticism in order to situate The Woman of Colour within a radical Black Atlantic tradition. They argue that the novel foregrounds the resistance of Black and enslaved people, and that the refractive force of the plot breaks away from the teleology of colonial conquest and opens up multiple interpretive possibilities.

Editors' Preface

Editors' Preface Patricia Anne Simpson and Birgit Tautz For this editorial team, volume 30 represents our valedictory effort. Over the past year, some of us were able to transition from the Zoom squares to in-person conferences; we tentatively removed our masks, applauded with real hands, and continued debates in the corridors outside conference rooms. Nevertheless, we have come to value even more the continued opportunity to share work in this venue, and we as editors have particularly enjoyed bringing current debates, controversies, and new directions of ongoing, exciting research to these pages. Hans Hahn's "Wielands Singspiel Alceste, ein Stein des Anstoßes für Goethe?" opens this issue with an exploration of the role Wieland's libretto, in particular, played in a literary dispute with Goethe. A certain synergy emerged in a cluster of contributions around issues of gender, influence, and female marginalization among Carl Niekerk's "Lotte's Bird, Female Desire, and the Language of 'Sexuality' in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers," Maryann Piel's "La Roche and Goethe: Gender, Genre, and Authorship," and an editorial by Margaretmary Daley in which she challenges us to confront gender bias. While Niekerk dwells on the scene of the canary's kiss as a moment in the history of sexuality at the edge of its biological and cultural construction, Piel latently picks up on Daley's challenge, restoring La Roche's constitutive role in Goethe's oeuvre (rather than the other way round, as much scholarship has it). Departing from scholarly analyses to the genre of editorial, Daley seeks to challenge women writers' continued relegation to the margins of an eighteenth-century literary canon that she sees revolving around Goethe and/or other "great men"; in picking bias as a Schlagwort, Daley also begins to reflect on the state of the humanities more broadly, oscillating between the seemingly privileged position of choosing one's own research topics and the festering of structural inflexibilities that are contributing to the crisis of the humanities. The next essay in the line-up, "Things of Art and Amor: Mediation in Goethe's Römische Elegien," by Sebastian Meixner and Carolin Rocks, offers an innovative and compelling reading of the figure of Amor as poetic guide, matchmaker, rogue, servant, and mediator to Goethe's own Roman past. By coauthoring the essay, Meixner and Rocks present a model of scholarly research and writing that remains relatively rare in the humanities and that we wish we could have featured more often over the past five years. In "Reading Performatively: Disruptive Gestures in Heinrich von Kleist," [End Page xi] Katherine Pollock brings Kleist's gestures into the framework of contemporary performance theory to implicate the body of the reader in the cognitive production of meaning. We move to a section that resonates with responses to the persistence of bias; it is devoted to new work on "(White) Enlightenment Legacies." In four parts, the section showcases a direction in scholarship we believe is urgent: an inquiry into the role that German Enlightenment thought and the culture of the Goethezeit play in the persistence of anti-Black racism. These brief interventions recapitulate a series of conversations that have emerged from ongoing research and conference presentations. Introduced by Birgit Tautz and Patricia Anne Simpson—"Reexamining (White) Enlightenment Legacies Through a German Lens"—the section builds on novel attention to literature, race, and the Global South in two exemplary ASECS sessions that Tautz attended ("New Horizons"), as well as Simpson's reflection on "Black Actors: Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Decolonial Fantasies." Sarah Eldridge's "Interior Whiteness: Race and the 'Rise of the Novel'" previews the incoming coeditor's book in progress. The section closes with a Tagungsbericht by our colleagues Sigrid Köhler and Claudia Nitzschke, "Racial Classification, Slavery, and Human Rights: The Impacts of the Transatlantic Order in Eighteenth-Century Germany." While the interlude hashes out ongoing debates and the faultlines that chart the present and, hopefully, the future of German eighteenth-century studies, our final forum section glimpses into this future. It arose from a series of MLA panels devoted to the topic of "Unexpected Bodies in the Eighteenth Century." The contributors take a range of innovative and generative...

The Persistence of Bias in German Eighteenth-Century Studies

The Persistence of Bias in German Eighteenth-Century Studies Margaretmary Daley In my recent book on German women novelists around 1800, I argue that a canon of German literature around 1800 exists, whether scholars desire it or not. Optimists might counterargue that there are multiple canons, multiple methods by which titles are selected. A more pessimistic view would look at the field of German studies and see the persistence of a gendered, not to say sexist lens, despite at least three waves of change brought on by feminist literary critics and theorists. Opinion is certainly divided. In this think piece, I take the pessimistic view that yes, we have a canon and despite inroads and new research, it unfortunately skews persistently toward male bias. I put forth this viewpoint in hopes of stimulating discussion and contributing actively to positive change in the field. To support my opinion, I argue as a scholar for other scholars and begin by looking back at the same relevant issues of canonicity and period themselves and measure both how times have changed and how they have not, comparing the specific case of women authors in German literature to more general developments in the humanities overall. In 1783, Sophie von La Roche published the passage below in her journal, Pomona für Teutschlands Töchter, addressing her readers directly, speaking as a woman to women about women: Ich hoffe meine Leserinnen sind mit mir zufrieden, daß ich sie vorerst mit den Verdiensten unsers Geschlechts bekannt mache, weil ich sie dadurch ihre eigene [sic] Fähigkeiten näher kennen lehre, und vielleicht den edlen Ehrgeitz erwecke, auch in ihrer Art und nach ihren Umständen Vorzüge des Wissens und der Beschäftigungen zu erwerben.1 I hope that my readers are satisfied with me, in that I shall first make them familiar with the accomplishments of our sex, because through this, I can make them aware of their own capabilities, and perhaps arouse in them the noble ambition to acquire the advantages of knowledge and of occupation, each in her own way and according to her situation. Here, in the context of a think piece for the Goethe Yearbook, I wish to draw attention to multiple aspects of La Roche's direct apostrophe of her readers and the passage overall. First, La Roche's implicit pedagogical strategy notes that an effective preliminary step to a critical understanding of [End Page 63] literature recognizes how important identity politics are. It takes into consideration how individuals learn by seeking out similar people and identifying as a group—here, female readers with female authors. Second, the educational project of Pomona2 can remind us of the sometimes not obvious pedagogical impact of our own contemporary academic journals.3 For example, reading articles published in the Yearbook implicitly continues the education of the reader, even though, unlike Pomona's readers, many of these are peers of the article authors, with expertise as profound as that of the contributors. When speaking of and to her readers from 250 years ago, La Roche theorizes ways of reading that implicitly acknowledge a power differential between men—who had more frequent and open access to a wide range of texts—and women, who read through a less privileged lens as mere "female readers." While new approaches in academic publications are exciting, they continue to school their readers and may bear implicit bias. Finally, because the quotation stems from 1783, it exemplifies two general challenges for contemporary scholars of German literature around 1800. The first challenge is the age of the text: for example, the use of the word "Geschlecht" in 1783 differs from its use in 2022. The second challenge occurs at the level of the persistence of culturally biased valorization. One instance is the negative judgment against the original text, with the author's dropping of the secondary ending on the adjective "eigene." Had Pomona long been treated as an important contribution to all literary history and not merely women's literary history, a standardized modern, critical edition of the journal might exist. Had there been centuries of unbiased respect, such an edition might note the conditions of female education in the...

From Manual to Digital: Women's Hands and the Work of Eighteenth-Century Studies

Digital resources like the HathiTrust Digital Library, Early English Books Online, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online are increasingly central to humanities scholarship, a trend that has only accelerated as academic jobs disappear, institutional budgets tighten, and an ongoing global pandemic limits travel and access to archives. These electronic resources are not simply a panacea in precarious times, however; they are the product of a global information economy that depends on uncredited, invisible, and underpaid labor. The academic humanities are complicit in exploiting and erasing these technology workers, as a growing body of investigative research has shown. This essay contributes a new case study of an offshore outsourcing project commissioned by and for eighteenth-century scholars: the digitization of The London Stage, 1660–1800 by China Data Systems Corporation in 1970. That electronic transcription, which continues to underpin the present-day London Stage Database, was performed by women keypunchers whose labor was systematically feminized, racialized, and devalued in advertisements and corporate media. Drawing connections to the rhetoric around projects like Google Books and the Text Creation Partnership today, I highlight the recurrent figure of the hand and its vexed role in policing the boundaries between agential and alienated labor. Turning to the period that gave rise to contemporary understandings of intellectual property, I conclude by examining a receipt recording three copyright sales between Susanna Centlivre and Edmund Curll. In this ephemeral manuscript, I find a story richly suggestive of how we might reimagine scholarly labor and knowledge work in our moment of technocapitalism.

Notes on Abolitionist Pedagogy from Philadelphia

Rooted in Arundhati Roy's insistence that "the pandemic is a portal" through which to imagine a world beyond the current crises of racial capitalism, this essay reflects on what abolitionist pedagogy might mean by offering an account of the author's own institutional location and of her students' engagements with activists, artists, and community members who draw crucial connections between the University of Pennsylvania's material relation to the city of Philadelphia and the ongoing reality of racialized criminalization that is a legacy of the eighteenth century. Building on this situated example of abolitionist pedagogy, the essay offers a broader model for how the intellectual, social, and material practice of eighteenth-century studies might be more actively engaged with local social-justice struggles, which are not separate from the eighteenth-century histories we study. The essay attends to the material locations of academic work, from the hotels that host our conferences to the universities that employ (or don't employ) us as scholars.

Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out

Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out

The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of Eighteenth-Century Britain

The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of Eighteenth-Century Britain

Klein, Ula Lukszo. Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Klein, Ula Lukszo. <i>Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature</i>

Teaching Eliza Fay's Original Letters from India (1817) through Classroom Editing

Travel writing is an ever-growing area of interest in eighteenth-century studies, but it can be difficult to teach. Students often find the writing dry and unrelatable, and faculty who have had little experience with travel writing in their own educations may not know which texts would prove useful to their courses. In this article, I discuss the travel narrative with which I've found the most pedagogical success, Eliza Fay's Original Letters from India (1817). Fay's initial journey to India includes a range of captivating adventures, including encounters with Marie Antoinette in Paris, bandits in Egypt, and Hyder Ali in Calicut, where she was imprisoned for fifteen grueling weeks. Original Letters' publication history (including editions by Walter Kelly Firminger in 1908 and E. M. Forster in 1925) is also complex and speaks to larger issues in the editing and promoting of women's writing, so the text makes an interesting case study for those interested in everything from postcolonial studies to book history. In this article, I discuss the editorial treatment of Fay's work and ways in which to situate Original Letters within British travel writing history as well as in-class exercises and a collaborative editing project that have larger implications for travel literature and women’s writing in general.

Stewart, Dustin. Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

Stewart, Dustin. <i>Futures of Enlightenment Poetry</i>