Eighteenth-century Theory Research Articles

“The Darts to Wound With Endless Love!” on Hannah Cowley’s Response to Frances Burney’s Evelina

Abstract The paper traces the intertextual echoes of Frances Burney’s debut novel, Evelina, in The Belle’s Stratagem, a play by Burney’s contemporary Hannah Cowley. The latter was certainly an avid admirer of Burney. In one of her poems she pays tribute to the novelist and praises her ability to achieve uncommon subtlety in the depiction of characters in her writing: “What pen but Burney’s …/… draws from nature with a skill so true” (Escott 2012: 38). The paper, however, argues that the connection between the writers and their literary productions goes much further than the obeisance paid to Burney in Cowley’s admiring verses. The congruence between the plots of Evelina and The Belle’s Stratagem, and, in some instances, the very wording used in the two texts, poses immediate questions about its significance in Cowley’s popular play (which was first produced in 1780, two years after the publication of Burney’s debut). The conclusions suggest that Cowley deliberately drew Burney’s novel into a discussion on viable models of femininity and matrimony in contemporary society. But they also point to a wider phenomenon, namely, the extent to which the relationship between the eighteenth-century theatre and novel was reciprocal. While several recent studies discuss the influence of the theatre on the novel, little has been said on the importance of the novel for the development of the contemporary drama. This new reading of Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem as a response to Burney’s Evelina shows the immediacy with which a literary dialogue could be opened by authors and appreciated by audiences on the vibrant eighteenth-century cultural scene.

Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America by Steven C. Bullock

Reviewed by: Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America by Steven C. Bullock Carrie Tirado Bramen (bio) Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America steven c. bullock Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017 304 pp. In our own time when political leaders have resorted to vitriol, expletives, and even hate speech, it is good to be reminded that this was not always the case. For historian Steven Bullock in his Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America, one has to go back to the long eighteenth century to find a period when leadership was predicated on behavioral restraint. George Washington famously opposed profanity to such an extent that he prohibited cursing among his officers and soldiers; and remarkably, there is only one instance—and this is apparently still debated—when Washington cussed and it was on June 28, 1778, at the Battle of Monmouth. According to a frequently cited passage in Paul Van Dyke's George Washington: The Son of His Country (1931), an officer present at the battle noted that General Washington "swore that day until the leaves shook on the trees" (216). Washington appears in the epilogue of Bullock's narrative as a model of self-control and moderation, even though privately he was known to have a "fierce and irritable disposition" (217). By the end of the eighteenth century, politeness played a crucial role in Revolutionary-era politics, providing an important way to understand how sociality informed the political behavior of Anglo-American elites. Although Bullock's study concludes with George Washington's presidency, in an era when the culture of politeness had become hegemonic, the majority of the book focuses on the years between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution nearly a century later. The emphasis is on the evolution of politeness as a political strategy of leadership that is inextricably tied to notions of authority. For Bullock, politeness represents an important social practice that played a foundational political role [End Page 828] in the transition from authoritarian styles of governance to more democratic ones. The book's introduction provides a superb overview of the argument and a clear sense of its intervention in the long-standing scholarship on eighteenth-century politeness. In reference to this earlier scholarship, Bullock notes that historian Richard Bushman's The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992) and literary scholar David Shields's Civil Tongues and Polite Letters (1997) focus on the social aspects of Anglo-American elite culture with little reference to governing approaches. Where Bushman turns to material history and the emergent culture of consumerism by looking at houses and picket fences, handkerchiefs, and even pickle dishes, Shields understands the social life of Anglo-American elites in their taverns, clubs, and coffeehouses. Neither Bushman nor Shields links politeness explicitly with political authority. More recent scholarship that addresses eighteenth-century theories of government in terms of restraint from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson tends to focus on institutions and structural concerns related to elections and checks and balances. Sociality plays an insignificant role. The foundational premise of Tea Sets and Tyranny is that notions of political authority cannot be discussed in a vacuum, but must involve sociality, culture, and interpersonal relations. Politeness is ultimately about power, where the social and the political are inextricably interwoven. Bullock writes, "Eighteenth-century discussions about manners were intimately intertwined with fundamental political issues, closely linking politeness (discipline of the self) with power (discipline of others)" (2). "Politeness" refers less to social hierarchies of good taste and more to how manners can inform a model of restrained authority and personal refinement through "sympathetic and responsive leadership" (2). The book's most significant contribution is the way it demonstrates how the political is personal, and conversely, how the personal is political in early America. By linking interpersonal behavior with political dynamics, Tea Sets and Tyranny places questions of power firmly at the center of a study of sociality. At the outset, Bullock asserts that he wants to avoid abstraction. To do this, he anchors his analysis in the biographical stories of six individuals: Francis Nicholson, the Virginia governor known for...

‘A new discovery’ of Charles Hoole: method and practice in seventeenth-century English education

ABSTRACTThis article offers the first modern explication of the educational writings of Charles Hoole (1610–1667), arguing that his writings offer significant insight into the educational aims and methods of school instructors in seventeenth-century England. From attending to the needs of slow learners, to promoting learning games, to emphasising that children should be treated as rational actors, Hoole’s A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (1660) fused theoretical expositions on the aims of education with practical recommendations to schoolmasters on how to succeed in these aims. Hoole’s writings, as well as the earlier humanist pedagogical treatises of his peers, demonstrate that early and mid-seventeenth-century schoolmasters were already discussing and potentially implementing a number of educational initiatives that historians have traditionally credited to John Locke and later eighteenth-century educational theorists.

Music Lessons on Affect and Its Objects

This article places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in eighteenth-century music theory. Because theorists in that period struggled to explain how music functioned as a sign, they began to propose an alternative, materialist theory of vibrational attunement in order to account for music’s affective power. By refracting contemporary affect theory through this historical antecedent, the essay argues for renewed attention to the objects in the world that generate affects in subjects.

Nietzsches Katharsis. Tragödientheorie und Anthropologie der Macht

Abstract Nietzsche’s Catharsis: The Theory of Tragedy and the Anthropology of Power. Nietzsche’s conception of catharsis undercuts the Aristotelian tradition by emphasizing that catharsis does not aim at a purification of the passions but at a cleansing of human judgment from moral sentiment. As such, Nietzsche develops a naturalistic counter-model to eighteenth-century theories of pity (e. g. Rousseau, Lessing). By bringing together ancient Greece and the experience of modernity, this counter-model shifts the concept of catharsis into the realm of the political and enriches the theory of tragedy with an anthropology of power. What is at stake in Nietzsche’s discussion of catharsis is an insight into the instability of normative order, which is triggered by the modern experience of the „phenomenon of Napoleon“ as an overcoming of Enlightenment conceptions of moral conscience. If modernity has to be understood along the lines of tragedy (e. g. Hegel), Napoleon Bonaparte is the cathartic event in the realm of the political.

Noël-Antoine Pluche’s Le Spectacle de la nature, ou, Entretiens sur les particularités de l’histoire naturelle as an Instrument for the Government of Bodies

This article reads Noel-Antoine Pluche’s best-seller Le Spectacle de la nature ou Entretiens sur les particularites de l’histoire naturelle (1732-1750) as a contribution to eighteenth-century theories of government. It contends that the Spectacle’s didactic as well as entertaining volumes on animals, building on and reenforcing the vogue for natural history among the eighteenth-century reading public, helped formulate and disseminate new ideas on how to increase France’s prosperity. Interpreting Pluche’s descriptions of animals in the light of Foucault’s claims about the emergence of ‘biopolitics’, this article argues that his natural histories of animals provided the Spectacle’s upper-class readers with tools for rendering the bodies of those lower down the social hierarchy as productive as possible without external coercion and thus for contributing to the country’s political economy by exercising their management functions. Through the interpretation of several examples from Pluche’s bestiary of hard-working animals, it shows how descriptions of animals were used as an instrument for reconstructing and disseminating the concept of ‘work’. The essay thus provides an account of the intertwining of natural history, political economy and the shaping of the individual in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Decoding Rameau: Music as the Sovereign Science. A Translation with Commentary of Code de musique pratique and Nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore (1760) by Mark Howard

Reviewed by: Decoding Rameau: Music as the Sovereign Science. A Translation with Commentary of Code de musique pratique and Nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore (1760) by Mark Howard Stephen Mantz Decoding Rameau: Music as the Sovereign Science. A Translation with Com mentary of Code de musique pratique and Nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore (1760). By Mark Howard. (Teorie musicali, no. 2.) Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2016. [xxv, 653 p. ISBN 9788870968460 (paperback). €40.] Music examples, illustrations, facsimiles, bibliography, index. With the publication of Decoding Rameau: Music as the Sovereign Science, Mark Howard provides the first translation into English of two treatises by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764): Code de musique pratique and Nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore, which were published together in late 1760 or early 1761 (Paris: L'imprimerie royale). The Code is a pedagogical work consisting of seven methods for learning music. It is arguably Rameau's most complete work on practical music, the culmination of his life's work as a teacher of performance and composition. The bulk of Howard's book is a commentary on this important treatise. In the introductory overview of the Code, Rameau reviews the seven methods (pp. 35–40): 1) teaching music, "even to the blind" (i.e. rudiments, p. 35); 2) the position of the hand on the harpsichord or organ; 3) the art of forming the voice (i.e. voice production); 4) harpsichord or organ accompaniment (i.e. a thorough-bass method); 5) composition; 6) accompanying without figures; and 7) improvisation. The sections on accompaniment and composition form the heart of the Code, comprising ten of its sixteen chapters. The Nouvelles réflexions is a brief essay on how the corps sonore (sonorous body) is the key not just to music but to all arts and sciences. Though an independent work, it appeared in print alongside the Code and served as a kind of "speculative" (p. 589) or theoretical supplement. The source for Howard's translation is the facsimile in volume four of Erwin Jacobi's Complete Theoretical Writings of Jean-Philippe Rameau (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1969); however, because Howard includes the page numbers of the original edition in [End Page 624] the margins, the reader can easily use virtually any facsimile (or original) with the translation. I found it useful to consult the digital version of the treatises found in Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86232474 [accessed 29 December 2017]). In his citations, Howard provides page numbers from both Jacobi's edition and the original print. Rameau includes many detailed musical examples in the Code, which are here transcribed into modern clefs and incorporated into the text. The original edition places the examples in a separately paginated, 33-page section; Rameau's labeling of the examples (e.g. "Example D1, page 1") refers to this section. He advises the reader to "separate the engraved examples from the book containing the Methods—especially when it concerns Accompaniment—in order to place them on the Keyboard stand while the methods are next to it. One can easily look from one book to the other that way" (p. 39). In the commentary, Howard corrects and painstakingly documents errors in the examples, but he incorporates the published corrections for errata in the text without notice. Rameau's writing in his treatises is notoriously awkward, dense and disorganized, and the prose of the Code and Nouvelles réflexion is no different. Couple this with the technical vocabulary of eighteenth-century theorists in general, and Rameau in particular, and the challenge facing Howard as the translator of these works becomes clear. It is a formidable task, which is certainly one of the reasons these works are only now being made available in English, more than 250 years after their publication. Howard strives for a balance of readability (idiomatic English) and fidelity to the original text. He is conservative in his approach, so the results can still be difficult to comprehend at times—perhaps inevitably so. Howard keeps the capitalization and italics in the original publication that convey Rameau's emphasis of specific terms and concepts...

The “Fellowship of Sense”: Anna Letitia Barbauld and Interspecies Community

The “Fellowship of Sense”: Anna Letitia Barbauld and Interspecies Community Inhye Ha (bio) Through concerted scholarly efforts since the 1990s, anna Letitia Barbauld’s poetry has regained its richly deserved canonical status after what William McCarthy has termed “more than a century of near-total obliteration.”1 McCarthy and Olivia Murphy’s coedited collection of critical essays about Barbauld marks a watershed in Barbauld scholarship and simultaneously illustrates the enduring relevance of her poems in the context of the twenty-first century. Due primarily to the poet’s multifarious engagements in contemporary dissenter politics, science, moral and aesthetic philosophy, literary taste, and education in late-eighteenth-century Britain, her poems display a wide range of topics and voices. Among those, Barbauld’s concerns with nonhuman species are prominent and take on increasing exigency, especially when read in the context of recent posthumanist scholarship advocating environmental ethics.2 Scholarly responses to Barbauld’s treatment of the nonhuman have varied [End Page 453] widely. Sylvia Bowerbank, Darren Howard, and Michelle Levy have construed the animal presence within Barbauld’s poems and prose works as an apt vehicle to enlighten and educate children.3 Similarly, Felicity James and Ian Inkster highlight Barbauld’s symbolic significance as a Unitarian educator who deftly employed the trope of personification primarily for a pedagogical purpose.4 With a focus on the Scientific Revolution, Julia Saunders and Mary Ellen Bellanca place Barbauld’s animal poems within eighteenth-century women’s engagement in science, moral philosophy, and theorization of feelings.5 Indeed, the emotions of pity, sympathy, and benevolence Barbauld expresses in the face of vulnerable, helpless creatures are connected to crucial cultural discourses of sentiment that had been prominent in Britain since the mid-eighteenth century. Building on such historicist readings of Barbauld’s treatment of nonhuman species, Laura Mandell and Alice G. Den Otter respectively investigate the intersection of the political and the literary: the former persuasively articulates the political dimension of Barbauld’s use of personification, a literary device designed to “stimulate political activism” by contesting the status quo.6 Den Otter, in a similar vein, connects Barbauld’s representation of the caterpillar to contemporary British sympathy with the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte and the concomitant efforts at pest control in late eighteenth-century Britain.7 Under the banner of disparate theoretical practices, these scholars share the common assumption that nonhuman species play a predominantly representational role in Barbauld’s animal poems, providing Barbauld with a poetic subject instrumental for her references to supposedly broad and significant human realms of social and ethical concern. For example, the caterpillar—probably the most often-discussed poetic object in Barbauld’s animal poems—has long been read as a metonym for suffering political subjects in the 1790s, including dissenters, women, slaves, and Corsicans. [End Page 454] This essay, however, argues that Barbauld’s animal poems elucidate an eighteenth-century posthumanist formulation of self and community, one that arises from the poet’s ability to register the beauty and vitality manifested in nonhuman species.8 The birds, insects, flowers, and trees that populate Barbauld’s poetry and prose constitute an integral part of both her ethical and aesthetic concerns.9 Focusing on encounters between human observers and nonhuman creatures in poems like “The Caterpillar” (1816) and “The Mouse’s Petition” (1773), I assert that these poetic meeting points epitomize a two-way street where a nonhuman tames a human subjectivity in profoundly ethical ways.10 Conversely, Barbauld also reveals how the ethical human subject—one who discerns nonhuman agency and vitality—can help to create an affective community in which species differences are properly addressed and respected. The essay begins by exploring how the persona of Barbauld’s poem “The Caterpillar” moves progressively from empirical observation to aesthetic experience as a means of theorizing ethical action.11 I argue that Barbauld distinguishes herself from previous eighteenth-century theorists of aesthetics—Joseph Addison, Francis [End Page 455] Hutcheson, Joseph Priestley, and Edmund Burke—through her understanding that colors are central to the experience of beauty: she ultimately revises traditional ideas of the beautiful, both by equating colors with the vitality of the nonhuman and by explicitly connecting the perception of...

Wollstonecraft's Widow: Understanding the Dead Husband's Gaze

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft promotes her case for women’s education by contrasting a profligate, coquettish widow with her reasonable, self-controlled counterpart. Wollstonecraft suggests that the reasonable widow disciplines her desires, in part, by internalizing a vision of her dead husband’s gaze. This article provides an overview of the literary history of the dead husband’s eyes and English property law regarding widows before placing Wollstonecraft’s widow alongside eighteenth-century theories about the internalized gaze. Prior to Wollstonecraft, the dead husband’s surveillance was usually imagined by male authors who assumed a prescriptive tone, wielding the gaze as a panoptic device. Wollstonecraft’s revision of earlier treatments complicates that dynamic. She envisions a widow who welcomes her husband’s eyes with a performative flair before asserting the authority of her own gaze. In the process, Wollstonecraft transforms a degrading cultural imperative into an impetus for the widow’s empowerment.

From Love of Money to Love for Love: Heiresses on the Long Eighteenth-Century Stage

Abstract Heiresses have been overlooked in seventeenth and eighteenth-century theatre criticism. When they are discussed, it is usually alongside the prodigal hero’s resolution of his financial difficulties and rakish behavior through marriage. Financially and sexually desirable, the heiress is therefore an important and influential character in the marriage plot. This article presents a literary historical analysis of the changing representation and function of the heiress in comedy, to argue that the evolvement of the heiress in the marriage plot reveals emergent and shifting discourses about money, family and sentiment in the long-eighteenth century. The treatment of the heiress on the eighteenth-century stage reflects a sentimental response to the role of money in marriage in line with the ideology of companionate marriage. Whereas, on the late seventeenth-century stage, the heiress acts as economic manager and wittily protects her financial interest.

ウィリアム・シェンストンの庭園論 : 姉妹芸術論の観点から(分科会III-A[空間とテクスト],研究発表III,第六十回美学会全国大会報告発表要旨)

ウィリアム・シェンストンの庭園論 : 姉妹芸術論の観点から(分科会III-A[空間とテクスト],研究発表III,第六十回美学会全国大会報告発表要旨)

Parenthetic Aside in a 1789 Analysis of Mozart’s K. 284

In a 1789 treatise, the Darmstadt musician J.G. Portmann presents what amounts to a multi-level harmonic analysis of Mozart’s Sonata for Piano in D, K. 284, I. Portmann’s interpretation of the movement’s exposition is in line with concepts expressed by other eighteenth-century theorists, but suggestively differs from standard modern conceptions of the form, especially in its understanding of what nowadays is labeled as the secondary theme.

The Serendipity Tango: "Volume 1, Number 1"

Marking the anniversaries of the founding of Latin American Theatre Review and Modern Drama as well as the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, this personal essay looks back on the experience of studying theatre at the University of Kansas in the 1960s and learning the importance of serendipity in research projects in the performing arts. It also looks forward to the immediate future of the field by profiling new and forthcoming books derived from dissertations written by members of the Performance Studies Working Group at Yale. Topics addressed include the archival and oral recovery of past performances, critical genealogies of raced and queered identities, the development of modern notions of celebrity and subject-formation in the eighteenth-century theatre, the reactionary avant-garde, and the importance of surveillance and confession in contemporary mediated performance.

Représentations du théâtre russe dans la presse francophone des Lumières

In the eighteenth century, journals carried information and promoted literary productions. They also acted as conduits for the reception of foreign cultures: thus, they show the ambiguities of Franco-Russian cultural relations. They acted as a medium that facilitated debates and polemics. This phenomenon is particularly interesting when the journalists discussed theatre, because this art form can act as a political and social instrument. Interest in the Russian theatre in French-speaking periodicals in the eighteenth century was not only a sign of greater interest in ‘Russian subjects’, but also formed part of a general reflection about contemporary drama. This trend was characterized by more openness towards foreign cultures. During this period of theoretical questioning, national theatre cultures tended to strengthen their specificities, while also using borrowings and translations from others theatres. The interest of French theatre aficionados for Russian theatre is well-known, as is the enthusiasm of the purveyors of Russian theatre for French theatre. However, the choice of words used to describe Russian theatre in the Francophone press—whether they be of praise or of criticism—can hide other goals, such as showing the greatness of Catherine II’s government or insisting on the role of the French model in Russia’s cultural development. In this paper, a corpus of selected articles is used to show several practices and issues o pertaining to the topic of the Russian theatre in the Francophone press. We question several possible political and aesthetic consequences of the image of Russia, which were spread by French-speaking periodicals in Europe. Furthermore, we try to analyze the role played by the specific discourse used by the periodicals in order to demonstrate its importance for researchers working on eighteenth-century European theatre and cultural relations.

Interpreting the Infinitesimal Mathematics of Leibniz and Euler

We apply Benacerraf's distinction between mathematical ontology and mathematical practice (or the structures mathematicians use in practice) to examine contrasting interpretations of infinitesimal mathematics of the 17th and 18th century, in the work of Bos, Ferraro, Laugwitz, and others. We detect Weierstrass's ghost behind some of the received historiography on Euler's infinitesimal mathematics, as when Ferraro proposes to understand Euler in terms of a Weierstrassian notion of limit and Fraser declares classical analysis to be a "primary point of reference for understanding the eighteenth-century theories." Meanwhile, scholars like Bos and Laugwitz seek to explore Eulerian methodology, practice, and procedures in a way more faithful to Euler's own. Euler's use of infinite integers and the associated infinite products is analyzed in the context of his infinite product decomposition for the sine function. Euler's principle of cancellation is compared to the Leibnizian transcendental law of homogeneity. The Leibnizian law of continuity similarly finds echoes in Euler. We argue that Ferraro's assumption that Euler worked with a classical notion of quantity is symptomatic of a post-Weierstrassian placement of Euler in the Archimedean track for the development of analysis, as well as a blurring of the distinction between the dual tracks noted by Bos. Interpreting Euler in an Archimedean conceptual framework obscures important aspects of Euler's work. Such a framework is profitably replaced by a syntactically more versatile modern infinitesimal framework that provides better proxies for his inferential moves. Keywords: Archimedean axiom; infinite product; infinitesimal; law of continuity; law of homogeneity; principle of cancellation; procedure; standard part principle; ontology; mathematical practice; Euler; Leibniz

The Impossible Temptation of Noise in Late Eighteenth-Century English Music

As Hogarth’s famous print, The Enraged Musician, makes clear, “sound” and “noise” are antithetical notions. Noise is defined negatively as a disruptive element. “It works as a deconstruction”, Paul Hegarty claims. Historically, in the Aristotelian tradition, music used to be thought of as an art based upon harmonious sound and correct proportions, that is, as fundamentally opposed to noise, which did not depend on harmony or mathematical rules. Such a conception was, however, to be gradually overruled by theories of the sublime which accomplished a shift from the object (i.e. music) to the subject (i.e. the listener). Music was gradually “freed”, as it were, from its dependence upon mathematics, and since – for Burke – terror was considered the main cause of the sublime, the temptation arose to suggest sublime terror in music by procedures of imitation of natural noises. This, however, clashed with another dominant aspect of the theories of musical expression that directed that whatever was harsh or discordant could not claim the title of “music.” This paper attempts to analyse the epistemological and aesthetic crisis that resulted from the eighteenth-century theories of expression and of the sublime in England, and which made “noise” both something that one was tempted to introduce into music to create sublime effects, as well as something that was fundamentally incompatible with harmonious sound and expression.

Kostümierung der Geschlechter: Schauspielkunst als Erfindung der Aufklärung by Beate Hochholdinger-Reiterer

Beate Hochholdinger-Reiterer, der Geschlechter: als der Aufklarung. Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014. 471 pp. + 12 illustrations.Lessing famously lamented in the 101st Stuck of his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Wir haben Schauspieler, aber keine Schauspielkunst. Hochholdinger-Reiterer's extensive inquiry probes the points of intersection among the discursive invention of acting as art, the Neuordnung der Geschlechter (45), and the matrix of social shifts that accompanied these eighteenth-century developments. In conversation with recent works on gender, Anthropologie, and Naturlichkeit by Alexander Kosenina, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and others, the present monograph pursues gender Codierungen und deren Verkorperungen (29) not only in the eighteenth century but also well into the twentieth. The methodological choice to analyze gender, metaphorical father figures, and national identity with minimal psychoanalytical, feminist, or poststructuralist jargon makes the work readable for a large audience. The methodological focus is on the foundational role that gender metaphors play in discourses from theater to national identity politics and academe. As a result of this broad discursive interest, the resources examined are remarkably comprehensive, including philosophical treatises, theater periodicals, letters, and theater histories, as well as analytical references to theories by Koselleck, Habermas, Kantorowicz, and others. Bourdieu's concept of habitus is also explicitly formative in that it guides the examination of the process by which physical practices, such as theater performance, interact with and affect social norms. Tracing cultural Kostumierung and its social implications in the largest sense, the book is a thorough and wellstructured study of das Oszillierende der Geschlechtercodierungen (409) in eighteenth-century theater and culture.Following an establishing theoretical chapter, three chapters address aspects of the gendered history of theater: Mundlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit, Vaterfigur en und Storfaktoren, and Nation und Erbe. At the outset, the author parses the ongoing negotiation between masculine-coded national theater reform efforts and feminine-coded illiterarische, korperbetonte, ungeregelte und 'unreine' (275) pre-Enlightenment theater. Hochholdinger-Reiterer demonstrates with extensive examples how the Erfindung of written theories, rules, and theater reviews marks the intellectualization and metaphorical masculinization of acting around 1750. The third chapter focuses on Conrad Ekhof (1720-78), the father of German acting, who through historiographical texts becomes the object of over two centuries of Vater-Kult (152). Hochholdinger-Reiterer even provocatively suggests that, preceding the establishment of a German state, Ekhof serves as a father figure for all artistic and practical aspects of German national identity in the eighteenth century (159). Simultaneously, mid-eighteenth-century actresses are characterized as Storfaktoren who resist reform, and women are excluded from the discursive realms of the theater. In the final third of the eighteenth century, however, interest in the acting body intensifies and a Kultus der Schauspielkunst (221) establishes itself. Hochholdinger-Reiterer posits that, in light of this oscillating masculinization and subsequent feminization of theater, there is a fundamental codependence among the development of the theater of illusion, the rise of realistic-psychological acting, and the naturalization of the two-gender model (275).The fourth and final chapter, Nation und Erbe, examines the implications of these gendered cultural changes for German and Austrian national identity, as well as for the history of theater studies, particularly in twentieth-century Austria. …

Eusebio Vela’s Mexican Hagiographies: Self-fashioning in Eighteenth-century Theater

Eighteenth-century actor and playwright Eusebio Vela, long thought to be born in Mexico but actually born in Spain, dominated Mexico City’s Coliseo theater for decades and has been variously interpreted as a creole patriot or as a Spanish propagandist. Vela’s four extant plays, which treat the fall of Spain, Telemachus’s wanderings in the Mediterranean, the spiritual conquest of Mexico, and the life of Saint Francis, complicate overly rigid distinctions between Spanish and Mexican playwrights. They do not simply impose imperial ideologies; rather, they demonstrate Vela’s engagement with Mexican history and social reality while simultaneously reenacting the playwright’s own emigration from Spain and subsequent rooting in Mexico. The Francis play in particular, which was considered lost for centuries and has never before been analyzed critically, echoes the millennial apocalpticism of the first Franciscan missionaries while simultaneously questioning the institutionalization of Franciscanism in eighteenth-century Mexico. Vela’s attunement to the themes of disaster, fluidity, and conversion reveals that his surviving corpus is complex, nuanced, and worthy of further study and inclusion in the colonial Mexican theatrical canon.

Werther Goes Viral: Suicidal Contagion, Anti-Vaccination, and Infectious Sympathy.

The fear that suicidality could spread through textual contagion-that textually represented suicide could enter the reader's mind and cause self-destruction-took hold long before Émile Durkheim theorized it in the Victorian period. This article argues that the fear of suicidal contagion and the horror of vaccination, both of which raged in Britain in the long eighteenth century, were linked to ideas about sympathy and the importation of the Other into the Self. With reference to the psychoanalytic notions of extimité and étrangerété; the eighteenth-century medical theories of William Rowley and Edward Jenner; the philosophy of "sympathy," as adumbrated in the work of John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume and Edmund Burke; and two key novels of sensibility (Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther), this article examines the root of a belief that exists even today: that, in a suicidal process, the invading Other could become the Self and, Trojan horse-style, destroy it from the inside.

Jesus and Hume among the Neuroscientists: Haidt, Greene, and the Unwitting Return of Moral Sense Theory

The latest trend in ethics, sometimes dismissed as a fad, is the effort to connect ethics to empirical science. Two different versions of this “latest thing” can be found in the work of Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene. Their projects are, at least partly, unwitting recoveries of eighteenth-century Christian moral sense theory. Such similarities need not worry Christian ethicists but should instead inspire a careful retrieval of sentimentalism. It provides much of what today’s empirical ethicists hope to deliver without the pitfalls.