Eighteenth-century Literature Research Articles

Grotius’s Impact on the Scandinavian Theory of Contract Law

This article discusses to what extent the widely accepted hypotheses of Hugo Grotius’s crucial impact on the theory of contract law – also in Scandinavia – may be maintained or even positively confirmed. Although few direct references to the works of Grotius can be found in Scandinavian legal literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it would be premature to draw a negative conclusion. An impact of Grotius’s thoughts may rather be demonstrated by thoroughly analysing patterns of argumentation concerning specific contractual topics both in legal literature and case law. The article provides the reader with necessary information on the institutional and intellectual preconditions for the reception of Grotius in the Scandinavian legal orders before discussing the impact of the ‘will-theory’ on the requirements of a legally binding contractual agreement in the works of selected influential legal scholars and in case law in more detail. The analysis confirms that Grotius’s work contributed substantially to shaping the intellectual framework in which the first contract law doctrines in Scandinavia evolved.

Distribution of Street Literature in the Later Eighteenth Century: Some Imprint Evidence from the West of England

Previous articleNext article No AccessDistribution of Street Literature in the Later Eighteenth Century: Some Imprint Evidence from the West of EnglandDavid AtkinsonDavid Atkinson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 114, Number 2June 2020 Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708652 Views: 96Total views on this site © 2020 by the Bibliographical Society of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Breaking the Book: Contrasting Paradigms of Print Culture

I opened Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (2015) (which, paradoxically, I read in digital form on a smartphone) with a lot of anticipation. Laura Mandell is a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, and an enthusiastic pioneer and advocate of digital collections such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) for studying early English texts. Therefore, I expected this book to have insights into how digital texts differed from print, and how academic discourse can make effective use of digital resources, for example to analyse texts. What the book contains, however, is much different. Rather than being an assessment of digital texts, Breaking the Book is much more ambitious: it emphasises changes in print culture for much of the book, only considering digital publishing towards the end. Mandell asks, “how does the book machine work,” by looking at the history of the printed book. The book concludes with a manifesto for print humanities – not, in fact, a manifesto for digital humanities at all, but a claim for how digital print can transform “the book machine.” Nonetheless, a reader will see this book more as a contribution to the history of the printed word than a study of digital humanities.

Satire and The Cambridge Introduction to Satire

Satire and The Cambridge Introduction to Satire

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHannah August is a lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in New Zealand. She undertook her postgraduate study at King's College London, where she specialized in the reception of early modern drama in print and performance. Her work on this topic has appeared in the collection The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660 (Manchester University Press, 2015); she is also preparing a chapter for the forthcoming collection Shakespeare/Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance (Arden Shakespeare Intersections, 2021). She is currently working on a monograph on the history of reading commercial drama in quarto, entitled Playbooks and Their Readers in Early Modern England.Jane Hwang Degenhardt is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work focuses on early modern drama with particular interests in the effects of globalizing processes, constructions of the “human,” and the intersecting histories of race and religion. She is completing a book that explores new understandings of “fortune” that developed in relation to early modern English global expansion. She is also working on a collaborative book project with Henry Turner that explores pluralistic understandings of the concept of “world” in Shakespeare’s plays as a means to imagining alternatives to globalization and an anthropocentric future.Alexander Paulsson Lash is assistant professor at National Taiwan University. His current book project, Theater Worlds: Staging Global London, 1576–1688, shows how early modern theaters shaped the spatial perceptions of playgoers, capturing their experience of disorientation and excitement as London expanded into a global city.Jane Rickard is an associate professor in seventeenth-century English literature at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Writing the Monarch in Jacobean England: Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare and the Works of King James (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester University Press, 2007), and coeditor (with Martin Butler) of Ben Jonson and Posterity: Reception, Reputation, Legacy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a monograph on Ben Jonson and his early readers.Lauren Robertson is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where she is currently completing her first book, Entertaining Uncertainty: The Phenomenology of the Early Modern English Commercial Theater. In it, she argues that the theater actively cultivated experiences of ambiguity and confusion for its spectators, transforming the period's multifarious cultural confrontations with doubt into deeply satisfactory objects of attention.Suzanne Tartamella is associate professor of English at Henderson State University, where she teaches courses in Renaissance and eighteenth-century literature. She is the author of Rethinking Shakespeare’s Skepticism: The Aesthetics of Doubt in the Sonnets and Plays (Duquesne University Press, 2014), as well as articles appearing in English Literary Renaissance, Studies in Philology, and Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Her recent projects include a comparative essay on silent women in Jonson and Shakespeare and a monograph on Christian self-identity and the aesthetics of foreignness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 48, Number 1Spring 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709974 Views: 172 © 2020 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Order as a chronotope of Ottoman political writing

ABSTRACTThis article proposes the concept of order as a major chronotope of Ottoman political writing which has shaped temporal projections such as decline and renewal from the seventeenth century onwards. In chronological order, I discuss the seventeenth-century debates on breakdown of social order and emergence of the sense of decline, and the eighteenth-century literature on Khaldunian concept of nomadic versus sedentary forms of habitation and spatiality of the debates over moral degeneration. The urban space of Istanbul, both material and abstract, as a political and social setting also figures prominently in these discussions and shapes Ottoman perceptions of the European city. Through a discussion of the chronotope of order I also challenge pervasive narratives of Westernisation and progress in favour of indigenous cyclical narratives of restoration and renewal.

Vincentas Ignacas Marevičius apie save ir Tėvynę: XVIII a. pabaigos literato (savi)refleksijos

WINCENTY IGNACY MAREWICZ ABOUT HIMSELF AND THE HOMELAND: (SELF) REFLECTIONS OF THE LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITER The article is dedicated to present, still unexplored in Lithuanian historiography, works of the late eighteenth-century writer Wincenty Ignacy Marewicz and to discuss his reflections on his living times. Marewicz (1755–1822) was a poor nobleman, born in Trakai powiat and, having studied there, he later spent in Vilnius a significant portion of his life, trying to survive off his literary activities. He dedicated his works to the nobles, hoping to receive their protection and support, which he also published and distributed on his own. Creative legacy of Marewicz is ample and omnidirectional, however his contemporaries considered him a secondary writer and even graphomaniac, thus he was forgotten by the following generations and was little researched. In spite of any doubts regarding literary skills of Marewicz, we can notice that his writings, often very personal, may be interesting to a historian because of the reflections about himself and his living times. Being avid supporter of state reforms and the Four-Year Sejm, Marewicz in the last years of the eighteenth century wrote pieces that were filled with patriotic spirit, full of contemplations on the destiny of his homeland and of advice to the powerful regarding governance of the country. Writings of the litterateur were close to sentimentalism, with the accentuated desire for authenticity and naturalness. Marewicz promoted ideas of egalitarianism and solidarity of society, criticising the predominant types of relationships. The article discusses works created by the litterateur in the last decade of the century, such as drama, political poetry, biographical narratives dedicated to the nobility and decorations designed for the anniversary of the May 3rd Constitution. Keywords: Wincenty Ignacy Marewicz, eighteenth-century literature, sentimentalism, commemorative decorations.

New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Power, Sex, and Text ed. by Aleksondra Hultquist and Elizabeth J. Mathews

Reviewed by: New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Power, Sex, and Text ed. by Aleksondra Hultquist and Elizabeth J. Mathews Carole Sargent New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Power, Sex, and Text, ed. Aleksondra Hultquist and Elizabeth J. Mathews. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pp. xvii + 242. $150; $57.95 (e-book). If Delarivier Manley came back today she might favor border walls or cheer for Brexit. What rescues her from dislikeability is a wit more worthy of Elaine May than Theresa May, and memorable political firepower that helped bring down a government. With this irascibility in mind I approach this collected volume, one that aspires to fresh perspectives yet remains polite, only occasionally manifesting Manley's mixture of shocking libel, alarming politics, and unexpected laughs. In "The Adventures of Rivella as Political Secret History," Rachel Carnell, one of Manley's most rigorous scholars, explains why Manley's autobiography is not a postmodern mashup, but a political secret history in code, much like its explosive predecessor The New Atalantis (hereafter TNA), and also a successful dunning letter to Lord Harley. Reading Rivella in its proper political context gives us the real Manley, as "we begin to understand the counter-narrative of Queen Anne's reign, told through the voice of a Tory blackmailer" (Manley), "rather than a Whig one" (Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough). "The Politics of Servitude: The Husband's Resentment. In Two Examples in Delarivier Manley's The Power of Love," presents Manley torn between two patrons, George I and the Jacobite lady to whom she dedicates The Power of Love. Earla Wilputte sees this as being "emotionally involved with one … but legally bound to another," reflecting a national "adulterous attraction" for the Stuart Pretender. However, where Wilputte's Manley is "not explicitly endorsing Jacobitism" and "probably not really pining for the Stuart Pretender," I would counter that where there's smoke there's fire. Wilputte's chapter adds essential content from an understudied work to continue scholarly debate about Manley's politics. [End Page 224] In "Vengeance, Vows, and 'Heroick Vertue': Reforming the Revenger in Delarivier Manley's Almyna: or, The Arabian Vow," Misty Krueger astutely offers revenge as "a lynchpin in Manley's turn from heroic tragedy to civic drama." She compares "Almyna" to "The Royal Mischief" from a decade earlier, recasting the strong female heroine as one who "must not instigate revenge," but instead become, in Dennis's words, "the preserver of nations." Krueger concludes that Manley "shows the potential for language to combat men's destructive tendencies and for women to champion civil rights." While I might quarrel with the last two words, since my Manley was more about royalist order than civil freedoms, I agree that a "masculine female heroic" genre captures her style. "'Through the Black Sea and the Country of Colchis': A Geocentric Approach to Delarivier Manley's The Royal Mischief" goes where Manley scholarship should have eighty years ago, to "explicitly Islamicate themes" of women playwrights in the late seventeenth century. Focusing on the well-known triumvirate of "Female Wits," Bernadette Andrea locates elements of a "counter-orientalist stance" in Manley's otherwise predictably fashionable orientalist imagination. Manley is not writing about Turkey or Persia in The Royal Mischief, Andrea argues, but "Colchis and Abcas in the Caucasus region bordering the Black Sea," Islamic sites of the era, and the literary goal of Jason, his Argonauts, and Medea. We do not get to sex until part 2, and Manley would never have made us wait! In chapter 5: "Interrupting Pleasure: Ideology and Affect in The New Atalantis," Erin M. Keating finds key TNA incidents in line with tropes from late-seventeenth-century pathetic tragedy. The notorious story of Charlot and the Duke, one of Manley's most exploitatively sexual, shows how Restoration tragedy could have predicted that "desire … is ultimately destructive of its object." Dismissing important scholarly readings of Elonora as allegorical, Keating treats her as a literary character, an approach I contend the text itself resists. Her observation that Elonora is the only distressed woman to retain her virginity, however, marks a core contribution for future work. Jennifer Frangos enlists twenty-first-century asexuality studies...

Rōrensu Sutān no Sekai [The World of Laurence Sterne] ed. by Takeshi Sakamoto

Reviewed by: Rōrensu Sutān no Sekai [The World of Laurence Sterne] ed. by Takeshi Sakamoto Kaz Oishi Rōrensu Sutān no Sekai [The World of Laurence Sterne], ed. Takeshi Sakamoto. Tokyo: Kaibunsha, 2018. Pp. 381. ¥3,000. In 1897, just before his two-year stay in the United Kingdom, the Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki (known then as Natsume Kin'nosuke) published an article on Tristram Shandy in the literary journal Kōko Bungaku. This was the first time that Sterne and his works were properly introduced to the Japanese public. Sōseki describes Sterne's life and character and the traits of his writings succinctly and expresses his particular admiration of the singular qualities that Tristram Shandy holds in terms of structure, language, and plot: "The morbidly neurotic author 'Sterne' has been best known to later generations through the eccentric, licentious, and morbidly neurotic novel Tristram Shandy." He observed, "No other novel makes fun of human beings, plays the fool, or makes people laugh and cry so well." As Kazuki Ochiai emphasizes in his chapter on the Japanese receptions of Sterne, it is extraordinary that a Japanese intellectual could appreciate the humor and satirical language of an eighteenth-century English novel at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, Sōseki incorporates both Shandean wit and satire in his own novels, which he began to write a few years after his return to Japan. Consciously or not, all the essays in the collection share, or are rather possessed by, the wonder Sōseki felt at Sterne's works. Written in Japanese, the essays provide a perfect introduction to Sterne for Japanese students and will provoke renewed interest in him and eighteenth-century literature more generally by demonstrating their significance in today's [End Page 229] Japan. Masaru Uchida's introduction offers a historical overview of Sterne criticism, from the contemporary reception in Britain and Europe, to early twentieth-century acclaim by Mikhail Bakhtin and Virginia Woolf, to scholarly works since the 1950s by well-known authors such as Traugott, Frye, New, and Keymer. The first two chapters by Sakamoto present concise, yet insightful pictures of "A Political Romance" and Tristram Shandy. Sōseki's viewpoint is echoed in Sakamoto's comment that "a music of human sorrow runs at the bottom of the comic world of the novel Tristram Shandy." The chapters that follow cover a range of Sterne's other works including Sentimental Journey and the sermons, examined in the context of the eighteenth century's literary and publishing environment, while also tracing their reception and reverberation in Japan. There are several useful collections of essays for beginning readers of Sterne, but Sakamoto's collection makes an invaluable addition, offering Japanese readers accessible discussions of Sterne and his works. The most perceptive and original readings of Sterne's novels are offered by Masaaki Takeda's "Laurence Sterne's Poetics" and Masashi Suzuki's "The Power of the Moon: Lunacy in Blake and Sterne." Takeda establishes Sterne's fiction in the tradition of "deceptive" literature. He contrasts Sterne's fictive language with that of Swift's, arguing that while A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels register the author's sharp, rigorous observation of reality, Sterne embraces "the deceptive nature of reality" by playing the fool both in person and in his novels. "His vivacity and cheerfulness are produced when he exposes himself to deceptive and illusionary reality. For this reason, he can laugh at physical frailties." Unlike Swift, Sterne fully accepts the distance between language and reality, Takeda argues. Sterne is keenly aware that the more he writes the further reality recedes; hence, the narrative procrastination of Tristram Shandy. For Sterne, the act of writing is an endorsement of our linguistic inability to capture reality, demonstrating language's deceptive nature while expressing genial sympathy toward those imprisoned in the world of perceptions and sentiments. Sterne's fictive language thus establishes the modern poetics of Zweideutigkeit, a quality Nietzsche found in Sterne, the joining of mirth and sorrow, making readers feel as if they are floating in a world of existential instability. Suzuki provides another new reading of Tristram Shandy by explicating the hitherto...

ASECS at 50: Interview with Maximillian Novak

ASECS at 50:Interview with Maximillian Novak Rebekah Mitsein (bio) and Maximillian Novak Reflecting on his early days of graduate school at UCLA in an article for the launch issue of Digital Defoe in 2009, Maximillian Novak observed that he was "far from your single minded, professionally oriented graduate student," unsure what field to specialize in and absorbed by a range of writers and critical questions.1 "My favorite author was Swift," he wrote, but it was the topic of "Defoe and economics" that ultimately grabbed Novak's attention. At the time "it seemed as if ideas were swirling around Defoe's work and reputation, as if studies in Defoe were becoming possible in a way they had not been before." Novak entered that conversation with a dissertation that became his first book, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Univ. of California Press, 1962), in which he pushed back against the tendency to read Defoe as a champion of economic individualism, instead presenting Defoe's fiction through the lens of his mercantilist sensibilities and arguing for the moral and social complexity of Defoe's characters. Several monographs and a compendious biography (Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions, Oxford Univ. Press, 2001) followed, covering topics ranging from Defoe's engagement with natural law (Defoe and the Nature of Man, Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), to the intersections among Defoe's fiction, journalism, historical writing, and interest in painting (Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe's Fiction, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983). In the introduction to Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives (Univ. of Delaware Press, 2015), Novak wrote that he first began publishing on Defoe with an aim "to establish Defoe as a significant thinker both outside and inside his fiction."2 Across a six-decade career, Novak has done that and more, not only rendering Defoe's protean oeuvre more approachable and meaningful for subsequent scholars, but also making significant [End Page 379] contributions to the study of the eighteenth-century novel by scrupulously situating it within the era's cultural, political, and economic networks. Nevertheless, Novak never left the broad curiosity of his early days in graduate school behind. Interspersed with his research on Defoe are several volumes of John Dryden's Works (Univ. of California Press, 1956–2000), a book on William Congreve (William Congreve, Twayne, 1971), an overview of eighteenth-century literature that examined the contradictions and conflicts within the period's literary ideals (Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Macmillan, 1983), a book on the twentieth-century Jewish American writer I.J. Singer written with Estelle Gershgoren Novak (The Writer as Exile: Israel Joshua Singer, AMS Press, 2016), and numerous essays on Dryden and Jonathan Swift, among other eighteenth-century literary luminaries. Novak received a Ph.D. from UCLA in 1958 and a D.Phil. from Oxford in 1961. He taught at the University of Michigan from 1958–1962. He then returned to UCLA where he remains, continuing to bring eighteenth-century literature to life for newcomers and old hands alike. Rebekah Mitsein: You've been a part of ASECS for much of its history, first appearing on an ASECS program as an organizer in 1971, when UCLA hosted the society's 3rd annual meeting, and serving on its executive board from 1978–1981. What are your most noteworthy recollections of ASECS? How has the organization influenced the study of the eighteenth century? Maximillian Novak: I recall the formation of ASECS at an MLA. The meetings of that organization were arranged around a few plenary sessions—none of the many seminars that exist now, and there were few such sessions allotted to the Restoration and eighteenth century. Donald Greene, who was one of the early organizers of ASECS, expressed his dissatisfaction to me and the need for an organization such as ASECS. There was so much important scholarship and criticism that needed to be discussed. The founding of ASECS helped to reveal the centrality of the period to the literature, arts, history, and philosophy of later periods. This may seem obvious now, but nineteenth-century writers had made a conscious effort to deny the importance of the previous century. Mitsein: Do...

Scribleriana

Scribleriana Howard Weinbrot Roy Wolper (1931–2020) Click for larger view View full resolution The last of the founding editors of The Scriblerian, Roy S. Wolper, died on July 10, after a long battle with cancer. He had continued his lifelong crusade against careless writing and slipshod thinking well into his eighties and he remained available to the current Scriblerian editors for advice and encouragement to the very end. We celebrated Roy’s career in the Spring 2017 issue of the journal, so will not repeat ourselves here. Paul K. Alkon (1935–2020) Paul Alkon died from cerebral bleeding on January 13, 2020. He received his A.B. from Harvard in 1957 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1962. He went on to a distinguished career at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland, the University of Minnesota, and finally as Leo S. Bing Professor at the University of Southern California, 1980–2007. There was special honor in that endowed chair: Paul Alkon was Donald J. Greene’s successor. Paul was indeed a worthy heir of the Bing professorship. He was a founding member of ASECS, and a convener of its national meeting at the University of Maryland in 1971. He was a brilliant, [End Page 110] clear, learned teacher and writer with broad ranging interests, at which he regularly exceled. He published numerous articles, five books, and one co-edited volume; of especial interest to Scriblerian readers are his Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (1967), Defoe and Fictional Time (1979), and Origins of Futuristic Fiction (1987). He held a Guggenheim in 1983–84. One of his special talents was anticipating work that predicted the direction of subsequent research. Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline, for example, included a major chapter on Johnson’s sermons. Defoe and Fictional Time anticipated studies of time as perceived and used in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Paul Alkon was my friend from 1958 until his death in January 2020. During those many years I saw Paul build ship models, a harpsichord, fill book shelves with eighteenth-century books, books about science fiction, Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia, Inuit art, and almost any other matter on which an ever-hungry mind could feed. I will remember him as a friend, colleague, paradigm of scholarly and pedagogical excellence, husband, and father. One of his daughters wrote an apt sentence for honoring him: “In lieu of flowers, reach out to a friend and discuss a book you love.” Howard Weinbrot University of Wisconsin Philip Harth (1926–2020) Philip Harth died peacefully on April 28, 2020 at the Attic Angel Community in Middleton, Wisconsin. Phil received his MA from the University of Chicago in 1949, and his PhD, with Honors, in 1958. R. S. Crane was one of his mentors. From 1954 to 1956 Harth was a Fulbright Scholar at University College, London, and spent much of his time at the old North Library of the British Museum. That concentrated effort nurtured his doctoral dissertation, earned his position at Northwestern University (1956–1965), and evolved into his first book, the still invaluable Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of “A Tale of a Tub” (Chicago, 1961). The importance of his book was made plain in 1966 when the University of Wisconsin English Department tempted him to Madison to replace the retiring and distinguished Ricardo Quintana. Harth’s appointment assured Wisconsin’s enduring importance as a center for the study and teaching of eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Harth’s subsequent books were Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (Chicago, 1968), and Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda and its Contexts (Princeton, 1993), and an edition of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (Penguin, 1989). Harth made plain that religion and politics are necessary to understand ancestral achievement. This uniformly admirable body of research, together with numerous articles and reviews, was supported by major grants: the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, the Clark Library, the Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Reed College Humanities Institute, the University of Virginia as visiting professor, and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin. In 1977 Philip...

The Strategy of Faculty of Letters: Advocating Eighteenth-Century Studies Curriculum on a Budget

The Strategy of Faculty of Letters:Advocating Eighteenth-Century Studies Curriculum on a Budget Heather King (bio) Like most faculty in eighteenth-century studies, I am the sole practitioner in our English department. This is hardly surprising: of the twenty eighteenth-century-related tenure-track jobs to begin in Fall 2017 discussed on the "Restoration and Eighteenth Century" Academic Jobs Wiki, the bulk of them sought candidates able to teach "transatlantic" or "postcolonial" material and to cover the entirety of the long eighteenth century, across genres, often throwing in Milton, Shakespeare, or Romanticism for good measure.1 That trend didn't change in jobs that will begin in Fall 2018—of nineteen jobs, the majority explicitly requested interdisciplinary interests. We are teaching in the age of the historical generalist, the pre–1800 literature job opening. There is a strong case to be made that such a generalist approach actually suits eighteenth-century studies. After all, the figures whom we study did not consider themselves bound by narrow disciplinary divisions and might in fact have mocked narrowly focused "virtuosi."2 Adam Smith lectured on belle lettres and jurisprudence as well as advancing moral philosophy and establishing the field of economics. Dramatists like John Dryden and William Davenant made it clear that texts could be endlessly refashioned across generic modes like tragedy and comedy and, indeed, across genres, like [End Page 377] turning William Shakespeare's Tempest into an opera. The practice of active, engaged relationships with respected texts is equally instructive to us today. If we combine our love of the eighteenth century with the interdisciplinary models that characterize it, we can find surprising ways to infiltrate multiple areas of our curricula, perhaps especially at small schools with smaller budgets. Taking seriously the intellectual and artistic practices that cross genres in our period—such as adaptation or embracing innovations in textual dissemination—has led me to questions that transcend my department and strategies for promoting my field as part of the humanities. Interdisciplinary connections are gaining prominence as a response to the crisis in the humanities as universities come up with innovative ways to collaborate. Many of these initiatives, however, are associated with institutions that have substantial resources the rest of us may lack. Schools like Stanford University, Rice University, the University of California-Davis, the University of Florida, or Arizona State University boast humanities institutes or centers for the humanities that run a range of innovative programming supporting faculty research, collaboration between students and faculty, speaker series, and other community outreach programs. Just down the road from my home institution, Pomona College is kicking off a Humanities Studio this fall, with support from a Mellon Grant, that will also focus on student-faculty research, speakers, and programming.3 But splashy events like this aren't possible at my cash-strapped university. In the absence of deep pockets, what can we accomplish? The University of Redlands, where I have taught for eighteen years, is a small, private comprehensive university, with approximately 2,250 students in the College of Arts and Sciences. We are tuition-dependent, with a very small endowment. In 2008–2009, I was chair of the English Department. Prompted by the recession budget crisis and anxieties about coming cuts, I began what I called simply a "Humanities Chat," inviting my colleagues who studied or taught the humanities to gather.4 It was clear after the first meeting that the feeling that we were in this together improved morale. At subsequent meetings, I pushed for pragmatic steps like coordinating our department teaching schedules so that we no longer offered eighteenth-century philosophy at the same time as eighteenth-century literature. To promote our fields, we needed to make it easier for students to delve into them, after all. Thanks to colleagues who took on leadership roles, that conversation has grown into the Humanities Advisory Council. Council members are elected at the departmental level by English, History, Art History, Philosophy, Modern Languages, Religious Studies, and interdisciplinary programs with humanities cores. We then elect a chair, who attends monthly chairs' and [End Page 378] directors' meetings with the Dean, reviews teaching schedules to look for energizing connections and avoid conflicts, and helps...

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

Reviewed by: Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Jason S. Farr Jeremy Chow FARR, JASON S. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019. 206 pp. $99.95 hardcover; $34.95 paperback; $34.95 e-book. With his recent monograph, Jason S. Farr showcases the constellated nature of disability and sexuality in the literature of the long eighteenth century by emphasizing, one, how this intersectional lens has been heretofore limited in extant scholarship and, two, how eighteenth-century writers implicitly and explicitly gesture towards their layered integration. Novel Bodies bridges the established fields of eighteenth-century disability studies and queer studies, which have—until recently—been conducted separately, to become an astute model for intertwining theories of disability and sexuality. Farr argues that eighteenth-century conceptions of disability plague the formation of subjectivity (by Locke’s definition at least) and that the literature of the period encodes “disability as a manifestation of queer desire” (27). In so doing, Farr embarks upon crip-queer/queer-crip readings that can enrich eighteenth-century studies and its continued investment in elucidating marginalized representation within the canon and beyond. The two-word title, Novel Bodies, lays bare Farr’s bipartite goals. First, by way of tackling theories of embodiment, Farr engages the lived realities of disability and sexuality as they “stage an array of eighteenth-century debates covering contemporaneous topics as diverse as education, feminism, kinship, medicine, and plantation life” (1). And second, with his pun on “novel,” Farr excitingly reads the [End Page 346] eighteenth-century novel as a literary form that replicates disability and ableist politics and representation within its very narrative structure. Novel Bodies thus innovatively envisions what I will call “crip-formalism” (crip, of course, a word that has been recently recuperated by disability theorists and disabled individuals) that extends from recent explorations of new-formalism and queer formalism: necessary revisions of staid formalist approaches so as to center literary form as it uncovers historically and culturally situated political, social, and identity-based significance. Farr’s crip-formalism opens realms by which culturally-inscribed and institutionalized attitudes towards and descriptions of disability are framed by narrative form, and thus positions the novel as a structural mirror to “various kinds of disability… vital to the social, physical, and psychological makeup of Georgian Britain” (27). By focusing primarily on the emergence of the novel in the period (Richardson, Haywood, Smollett, Scott), Farr’s crip-formalism navigates a parallel track by which to understand the rise of the novel discourse that has long been heralded as integral to understanding the eighteenth century. Farr’s take plaits identity and embodiment with form. Four chapters and a coda comprise Novel Bodies, which moves chronologically from 1720 to 1817, though Farr draws from Restoration-era (Rochester, Wycherley) and earlier seventeenth-century primary sources (Bulwer, Bacon) by which to historicize his claims of disability or “deformity”—the latter a more analogous term for the eighteenth century. The introduction adumbrates the theoretical territory and offers a reading of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto as a litmus test that realizes one of Farr’s most provocative close readings: Conrad, presumed and murdered heir to the Otranto throne, as a “crip haunting of heteronormativity” (18). The introduction patiently traces the evolution of disability, deformity, degenerescence, sound-ness, and other critical terms that valuably lay out the provenance of eighteenth-century disability studies. However, I wish this same patient attention was paid to “queerness” or “queer”—terms that alongside disability and crip share parallel recuperative, reparative, and weaponized histories. Farr’s capacious use of queerness signifies interventions in sexuality, gender, and sex. Chapter 1 addresses the social deaths and histories of deaf subjectivity in Enlightenment Britain by examining three representations of Duncan Campbell—a celebrity deaf prophet feted for his divination talents—by Christopher Krentz, Eliza Haywood, and allegedly Campbell himself. Farr’s visual analysis of the frontispiece to John Bulwer’s Philocophus, or, the deafe and dumbe man’s friend (1648), which is likewise captured on the cover of Novel Bodies, emblematizes his lamination of disability and queer close readings. Chapter 2 pairs Samuel Richardson...

Persistence of Folly: On the Origins of German Dramatic Literature by Joel B. Lande

Reviewed by: Persistence of Folly: On the Origins of German Dramatic Literature by Joel B. Lande Elwood Wiggins Joel B. Lande. Persistence of Folly: On the Origins of German Dramatic Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2018. 354 pp. In casting around for a title, Joel Lande could have justifiably paraphrased that of Nietzsche's own first book: "The Birth of German Drama out of the Spirit of the Fool." This shorthand gives an idea of the forceful case that Lande persuasively makes in his book, Persistence of Folly: On the Origins of German Dramatic Literature. He shows that far from being a transitory phenomenon that waned after the 1730s, the fool can, in fact, provide a key to understanding the historical development of German literature in the entire eighteenth century. To do so, Lande draws upon insightful analyses of contemporary performance practice, genre theories, and discourses of nationhood. Anyone interested in the literature, history, and cultural currents of baroque and Enlightenment Germany will benefit from this engaging book. Traditionally, the fool (known in German stage practice under a large variety of names: Hanswurst, Pickelhering, etc.) is supposed to have slowly disappeared from the German-speaking lands after his banishment in an elaborately staged ceremony in 1737. By the time authors such as Lessing and Goethe raised German dramatic literature from obscure backwaters into international recognition, they did so noticeably without the hitherto most beloved figure of the German stage: the raunchy Hanswurst. But Lande shows that, though displaced from his motley costume, the function of the fool is at work in surprising ways in both mid- and late eighteenth-century drama. Lande's argument is clearly developed in both the overall trajectory and in strong readings of individual chapters. The book is divided into four parts of four chapters each. In the first part, Lande lays out the performative practices of seventeenth-century clowns so that the continuity of the fool's function will be recognizable among the widely different forms of later drama. Lande begins with a bowdlerized transformation of Hamlet (1710/1778) in order to sketch out the concerns and dichotomies that will typify the fool's actions as the "reproduction of a theatrical form." Chapter 2 traces the fool's peregrinations as an itinerant immigrant from England in seventeenth-century Germany. Chapter 3 brings one important feature of the fool's presence into focus: his ability to act both within the fictional world of the play as well for the spectators without. Here Lande sensibly introduces "the term liminality" to describe the fool's transgressive status. A brief nod to Victor Turner or Richard Schechner, whose use of this term became a touchstone for modern performance studies, would have been helpful at this point. Yet though Lande explicitly wants to make stage business integral to his methodology, he does not engage with any performance theorists in this book. Further elucidation of the limis of the fool's performance would also have helped frame the suggestive discussion on space and time in chapter 4. [End Page 370] The second part narrates the overdetermining "myth" of the Hanswurst's banishment under the direction of Caroline Neuber and Christoph Gottsched. Lande gives an invigorating overview of mid-eighteenth-century German debates about comedy. He lights on the suggestive image of the "parasite" to explain the positions of Gottsched and Lessing vis-à-vis Plautus and Terence. His ingenious claim that the banished fool has metamorphosed into a "flaw internal to the protagonist" provides a compelling approach to sentimental comedy. The third part, perhaps the strongest of the book, traces the subsequent role of the fool in discourses of social order, morality, and the formation of national and cultural identities circulating around the Sturm und Drang era. In chapter 10, "The Place of Laughter in Life," Lande distills the task of humor as "an instrument for fabricating new knowledge." Jokes in this appraisal would share the same potency as metaphor in both Aristotle's and Ricoeur's accounts. This chapter also offers a brilliant reading of J. M. R. Lenz's New Menoza as a reversal of Gottsched's expulsion of the Hanswurst. Here, however, a consideration of Lenz's own theoretical...

ASECS at 50: Interview with Kevin Joel Berland

ASECS at 50:Interview with Kevin Joel Berland Sonja Lawrenson (bio) and Kevin Joel Berland Kevin Joel Berland is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. Berland's contribution to eighteenth-century studies is both prolific and profound. His research focuses on early modern intellectual history and literature, yet he has also produced distinguished scholarship on diverse aspects of the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. The vast scope of his intellectual interests encompasses a dazzling array of areas of study, from physiology, physiognomy, and poetry, to Orientalism, travel writing, and Irish print culture. His most recent publications center upon colonial North America, with his scholarly edition of The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover (2013) garnering high praise for its innovation, integrity, and rigor. Within ASECS, however, Berland is as esteemed for his academic mentorship and support as he is respected for his scholarly achievements. Alongside many other professional distinctions, in 1993 the Society presented him with a special award acknowledging his pioneering work in the digital humanities. C18-L, the international online forum he founded in 1990, remains a vital virtual community within eighteenth-century studies. A former president of East-Central ASECS (EC/ASECS), Berland continues to contribute generously to the scholarly community not only through his editorial roles with Eighteenth-Century Life and Literary Compass, but also through mentoring activities, including his participation in the hugely popular "The Doctor is In" mentoring sessions at the annual Society meetings. Sonja Lawrenson: Given this year commemorates the 50th anniversary of ASECS, I would like to begin this interview by asking you about your earliest memories of [End Page 539] the organization. When did you first become involved in ASECS and what are your most noteworthy recollections of those early days of participation? Kevin Joel Berland: Like many ASECS members, I entered the Society through a regional group—in my case, EC/ASECS. I attended my first regional meeting the year after starting my job at Penn State, and my first ASECS presentation was in the EC/ASECS panel at an ASECS conference, as most regional groups offer a less imposing environment for graduate students and junior scholars. It seems to me, however, that it is much easier for junior scholars to get space on the conference program than it once was, perhaps because people are more prepared and doing scholarship much earlier in their careers. At its best, ASECS provides a space for testing ideas and critical approaches in a community of common interests, as well as support for individuals' sense of themselves as participants in the exchange of ideas. Networking is another key function of ASECS; I know many ASECS members who have gained opportunities for research, conference participation, and publishing through connections made at ASECS meetings, including regional meetings. This factor is exceedingly important for faculty not teaching in their major field; the number of eighteenth-century jobs is limited, and many excellent new Ph.D.s cannot find tenure-track positions in their field, so many wind up in positions teaching composition or as generalists in undergraduate courses. Separated from the dynamic exchange of ideas in graduate school, new faculty need to keep their scholarly minds alive. This was certainly my case as an entry-level faculty member, and, years later, I still benefit from conversations and suggestions from practically every conference I've attended. I have always left ASECS conferences on fire with enthusiasm for the ideas I've absorbed and the possibilities for my own scholarship. Lawrenson: As a longstanding participant of ASECS, what do you consider as the Society's most important contribution(s) to the field of eighteenth-century studies? How has the Society influenced the trajectory and agenda of eighteenth-century studies in the United States and beyond? Berland: Perhaps it was only a subjective view on my part, but when I started coming to ASECS conferences in the 1980s, it seemed that a sizeable majority of members—and conference panels—focused on literary studies, and especially on canonical English/British literature. But it was also a time in which female authors were being "rediscovered" and the (practically) all...

Fruit and Horticultural Symbolism in British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

Fruit and Horticultural Symbolism in British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century

Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature by Samara Anne Cahill

Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature by Samara Anne Cahill

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

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

Teaching Eighteenth-Century British Literature beyond the Pale

Teaching Eighteenth-Century British Literature beyond the Pale Rebekah Mitsein (bio) In 2017 college students all over the country launched high profile and controversial protests against the tendency to put white art, white culture, and white aesthetics at the center of the humanities classroom. During the now infamous boycott of Humanities 110 at Reed College, for example, students took issue with the fact that the required humanities class focused largely on the translatio studii of intellectual history from the Mediterranean westward. Students argued that the class "perpetuates white supremacy—by centering 'whiteness' as the only required class at Reed."1 Whethe one agrees with these students' tactics, their complaint prodded a sore spot for those of us who teach historical literatures and whose background and training is in specifically Western literary traditions. Although surveys of eighteenth-century literature might include Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative or Phyllis Wheatley's poetry, the discipline is continually haunted by its Eurocentric canon. Even when we are teaching global or colonial texts like Oroonoko or Robinson Crusoe, we often put whiteness at the center of the curriculum, in part because it seems that our authors inevitably put whiteness at the center of their own worlds. In the spring of 2017, I taught an advanced undergraduate seminar called Global Crossroads in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, which I then taught as a graduate seminar in the spring of 2018. In these classes, I experimented with strategies to teach literature written largely by white [End Page 131] British authors from a more global perspective. I paired these canonical texts with material chosen to encourage students to consider how the discourse, narratives, knowledge, aesthetics, or material culture of non-Europeans became central to how eighteenth-century British writers represented the world (table 1). In other words, instead of starting the class from the premise that the British literary tradition invented the way Britons thought about "the global" in the eighteenth century, we examined the ways that global contact created the British literary tradition. This was a time, after all, when British travelers, readers, and writers were pushing their own intellectual, geographical, and cultural boundaries. There is no reason to assume that this global context—and the figures and discourses that animate this global context—did not have an impact on the British literary imagination. The course material I chose to illustrate the scale of these crossroads fell into three broad categories. The first category included global texts to which eighteenth-century Western readers had access, either as translations or epitomes, like the writings of early modern Arabic and North African geographers or the Ethiopian story of the Queen of Sheba retold by Hiob Ludolf and James Bruce. The second category included reports from European travel narratives of local informants describing their own cultures (embedded narratives) and reports of local arts and acts of self-representation (music, ritual, or dancing). The third category included non-alphabetic texts and material culture (art objects, artifacts, maps, textiles, goods created specifically for export to Europe, etc.). The organizational structure of the syllabus classified some texts as Western or British and others through the sweeping oppositional categories of non-Western, or non-European, which was in a way antithetical to the aims of the course; however, this structure also served as a concrete example of the paradigm the course was meant to push against and provided an opportunity to discuss the limitations of well-intentioned multicultural approaches to creating an inclusive reading list, neither of which were self-evident to my students. In other words we were not equipped to fully dispense with such geopolitical binaries, but we practiced recognizing them and then using the course readings, assignments, and discussions to sketch out alternatives to them. Students responded to prompts on Canvas (an online learning management system with a built-in discussion board) that asked them how exposure to this range of materials encouraged them to think differently about the European texts on the syllabus. For example, I paired Oroonoko with a translation of François d'Elbée's description of the luxurious Fon court at Ardra, along with lists of goods published by John Ogilby and Richard Hakluyt that were most...

Knights Errant of the Distressed: Horace Walpole, Thomas Chatterton, and Eighteenth-Century Charitable Culture

In this article, I examine how notions of charity shaped eighteenth-century literature. I begin by examining Horace Walpole’s philanthropy, which I argue belied his posthumous reputation for miserliness, and proceed to trace the theme of charity in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), looking closely at the role of St. Nicholas, patron saint of gift-giving, who intervenes at crucial moments in the plot. I then reexamine Chatterton’s approach to Walpole in 1769 seeking patronage for his pseudo-medieval “Rowley” poems. Walpole’s infamous rejection stemmed in large part, I suggest, from his view that Chatterton, as a paid apprentice, was simply not entitled to a handout. Chatterton disagreed. A major revaluation of Chatterton’s “Rowley” poem, “An Excelente Balade of Charitie” (1769), follows. The poem, traditionally seen as a cry of despair, should rather be understood as a vigorous, indignantly satirical reworking of the Good Samaritan parable at Walpole’s expense. I conclude with reflections on how Walpole and Chatterton’s disagreement affected later ideas of charity for impoverished authors, and on the ways in which individual charitable practices might be said to influence literary form.