Eighteenth-century Literature Research Articles

The Interdisciplinary Century: Tensions and Convergences in Eighteenth-Century Art, History and Literature

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Julia V. Douthwaite and Mary Vidal, Introduction: the history and current polemics of interdisciplinary work I. Knowledge networks and 'undisciplined objects' Daniel Rosenberg, We have never been interdisciplinary: encyclopedism and etymology in the eighteenth century and since James D. Herbert, Looking at Louis XIV looking: the unity of the disciplines under an absolute monarch Isabelle Michel-Evrard, Les ressources interdisciplinaires de l'etude de l'illustration au dix-huitieme siecle Mimi Hellman, Object lessons: French decorative art as a model for interdisciplinarity II. Rescuing the trivial Mary Sheriff, Disciplinary problems in the history of art, or what to do with rococo queens Jennifer Milam, Play between disciplines: the problem of the ludic in rococo art and Enlightenment culture III. The politics of interdisciplinarity Joan B. Landes, Trespassing: notes from the boundaries Mark Ledbury, But is it art history? Some thoughts on disciplines, tensions and territories in studies of eighteenth-century art IV. Defamiliarising the familiar Gregory S. Brown, Beaumarchais, social experience and literary figures in eighteenth-century public life Amy S. Wyngaard, Literary texts or historical documents? Revisiting the debates on Retif de La Bretonne V. Literature and law Joan I. Schwarz, Evidence and analysis for interdisciplinary research in eighteenth-century law and literature Miriam L. Wallace, 'Doing' history, or what I learned from the 1794 London Treason Trials Lisa Jane Graham, Scandal: law, literature and morality in the early Enlightenment VI. Centres and margins, on past and future Laurent Loty, Pour l'indisciplinarite David Andress, Can culture really explain politics? Interdisciplinary historiography, enlightenment and revolution Joan DeJean, On becoming a historian... Summaries List of works cited Index

The Public, the Private, and the In-Between: Revisiting the Debate on Eighteenth-Century Literature

Susan Dalton. Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003). Pp. 206 + ix. $70.00 cloth. Alessa Johns. Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Pp. 212 + xi. $34.95 cloth. Patricia Meyer Spacks. Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Pp. 242 + vii. $36.00 cloth. A critical rethinking of the ubiquitous terms "public" and "private" in the eighteenth-century context informs the three books under review here. Susan Dalton, Alessa Johns, and Patricia Meyer Spacks explicitly address the influence of Habermas' 1962 Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (translated, in 1989, as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society) on the entire field of eighteenth-century studies. In their nuanced readings of eighteenth-century literary and cultural production, Dalton, Johns, and Spacks question the prevalent interpretation of Habermas as establishing a strict binary opposition between the public and the private and, perhaps even more importantly, an equation of the private with the domestic and the public with the political. While Habermas has coined these terms and injected them into the critical discourse about the eighteenth century, the strict demarcation of supposedly separate spheres is more a product of Strukturwandel's subsequent reception than of Habermas' theory itself, prompted by critics' desire to establish some kind of coherent categorization for the complex nature of eighteenth-century life and letters. Habermas himself discusses the intersections of the public and private spheres and explores the arising ambivalences. He argues that the opposition between the "intimate sphere of the conjugal family" (51) and the "public sphere" was, above all, a discursive construct because the intimate/domestic sphere formed part of the private sphere of the gradually developing market economy. Even though the domestic was imagined as unaffected by the workings of the private realm of the market economy due to the accelerating division of labor and family life in the eighteenth century, both were connected not only to each other, but also to what Habermas calls the "public sphere in the world of letters" and "the public sphere in the political realm" (51). While the ideological construction of these separate spheres affected reality to some extent and women became increasingly equated with the domestic in the discourse of the time, an analysis of this reality also shows how porous and connected these areas were. Habermas' discussion of these intersections serves as the starting point for the studies of eighteenth-century literature and culture by Dalton, Johns, and Spacks. They explore the space which Habermas himself highlights but which has often been overlooked: the third space where public and private aspects meet in complex and ambivalent ways. The authors' well-reasoned and compelling analyses of these intersections [End Page 394] in British, French, German, and Italian writings underline the complexity of eighteenth-century textual production by men and women. In Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Susan Dalton looks with a historian's eye at the correspondence of four French and Italian salon women, Julie de Lespinasse, Marie-Jeanne Roland, Giustina Renier Michiel, and Elisabetta Mosconi Contarini. Dalton explores the communities formed by social networking and polite sociability in the eighteenth-century republic of letters and investigates salon women's engagement with the political and philosophical debates of their time. Her argument perceptively unravels the ambivalence that characterizes these elite women's theoretical writings and their practical applications. Yet, rather than classifying these ambivalent moments as contradictions, Dalton disentangles these women's strategic negotiation of gender discourses. This mediation allowed them to express their political views at the same time that it enabled them to echo discourses of propriety and...

"Almost the Same, but Not Quite": English Poetry by Eighteenth-Century Scots

"Almost the Same, but Not Quite":English Poetry by Eighteenth-Century Scots Corey E. Andrews In a response to David Morris's article "Burns and Heteroglossia," Carol McGuirk asserted that "the logical line of argument in encouraging a serious interest in Burns will lie in connecting him to, rather than sundering him from the practices of eighteenth-century literary (and especially poetic) discourse."1 In the ten plus years since the publication of her article, critics interested in eighteenth-century Scottish poetry have answered McGuirk's call, producing an array of intriguing interpretations that aim to connect Burns's work to British poetic discourse.2 However, English poetry by eighteenth-century Scots—that is, poetry written in English—has continued to create obstacles for critics, often due to its perceived aesthetic deficiencies. Along with this, the tendency to align English verse by Scots with other assimilationist practices has long been a trademark of pathology-oriented analyses, a cottage industry that has had deep roots in Scottish literary studies.3 Although recent criticism has moved considerably away from such wide-ranging assumptions, English poetry by eighteenth-century Scots still has not received the attention needed to connect it to the mainstream of eighteenth-century British poetic discourse. One particularly influential contemporary approach to eighteenth-century Scottish poetry has employed Bakhtinian theory to account for its multiple language usage. Although this methodology allows for a more nuanced analysis, it has yet to adequately address the role of English poems by Scots. For instance, Morris's article elaborated how Bakhtin's ideas concerning heteroglossia in novelistic discourse could be fruitfully applied to Burns's verse. Defined as "the principle of mixture which creates a new, compound or pluralized discourse from previously separate national languages or distinct social dialects," heteroglossia was perceived by Morris primarily in those Burns works that have a "hybrid" status, employing English and Scots to greater or lesser degrees.4 Registering the equivalency (or lack thereof) between the two appeared to be one of Morris's primary goals, along with the suggestion that [End Page 59] the key poetic and theoretical value of Burns's body of writing is in fact its embodiment of heteroglossia. In her response, McGuirk not only refuted previously held limitations on applying the concept of heteroglossia to poetry, but also argued for the necessity of accepting that the Scots vernacular revival "was mediated by Augustan genre theory."5 This focus on the hybridity of Burns's language usage (a feature of both articles) extends to the poetic analysis, where poems and songs that exhibit a blended Scots and English are a primary source of interest for Bakhtinian analysis. A second strain of the Bakhtinian approach has employed the theory of the carnivalesque to eighteenth-century Scottish poetry; such poems as Burns's "The Holy Fair" and Robert Fergusson's "The King's Birth-Day in Edinburgh" have been proffered as Scottish exemplars of the carnivalesque, often presented as the paradoxical mingling of high and low cultures.6 This type of Bakhtinian analysis also tends to favor the hybrid, this time figured more through poetic content than heteroglossia. Although such Bakhtinian approaches open the range of possible interpretations of eighteenth-century Scottish poetry, the number of poems that exhibit heteroglossic or carnivalesque qualities is limited. Critical attention appears to remain focused on hybrid poems by eighteenth-century Scots, while their verse solely in English continues to be ignored. Instead of deploring such poems' lack of either aesthetic quality or heteroglossic attributes, this analysis will explore how and why English poems by Scots are an integral part of eighteenth-century Scottish literary practice. Until English poems by Scots are seen more as the result of conventional poetic choices rather than the products of assimilation or cultural imperialism, the perception of eighteenth-century Scottish verse will continue to be restricted to only a very select group of Scots or hybrid Scots poems. One possible reason for the lack of interest in English poetry by Scots may have to do with its imitative nature. Compared with the apparent originality of eighteenth-century Scots poetry, examples of English verse by Scottish poets often seem to lack a defining character, exhibiting...

The Making of the Modern Child: Children's Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: The Making of the Modern Child: Children's Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century Patricia Demers (bio) Andrew O'Malley . The Making of the Modern Child:Children's Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth CenturyRoutledge2003. x, 192. US $90.95 Our notions of the child as educable and influenced by mentors and surroundings predate the theories of Jean Piaget or Maria Montessori or Jerome Bruner. Andrew O'Malley's richly detailed study assembles convincing evidence to argue that contemporary concepts of childhood have been shaped by and have responded to the middle-class ideology of the late eighteenth century. The most impressive feature of The Making of the Modern Child is its wealth of textual examples and the dexterity with which O'Malley interprets and interlaces them. Not only is he familiar with the treasures of the Osborne Collection of the Toronto Public Library, the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto, and the Opie and Johnson Collections at the Bodleian, but he also distinguishes this ideologically precise account of [End Page 281] class relations, medical management, pedagogical discipline, and gender roles from the earlier descriptive narratives and Whig histories of F.J. Harvey Darton, Percy Muir, Geoffrey Summerfield, and Mary Jackson. More interested in tracing the rhizomes of ideological groundwork than sniffing approvingly a few spectacular plants, O'Malley declares his intellectual allegiances to Raymond Williams and Alan Richardson. Because of this subterranean investigation his study offers several illuminating insights. John Newbery's success as a pioneering publisher of books for children is largely due to the adroit way he appropriated and muted potentially subversive plebeian elements from chapbooks for his publications. Less scrupulous and more entrepreneurial was John Marshall, who, in addition to marketing the acceptable pedagogy of Mary Ann Kilner's Memoirs of a Peg-Top (1785) and Lady Eleanor Fenn's The Art of Teaching in Sport (1785), managed to hoodwink some middle-class buyers by collecting chapbook and fairy-tale stories under the title Nurse Dandlem's Little Repository of Great Instruction for all who Would be Good and Noble (1784). Along with such easily recognized 'conservative' reformers as Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More, more 'radical' writers and theorists (Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine Macaulay, Maria Edgeworth, and Anna Barbauld, among them) warned against the pernicious and demoralizing effects of children's close contact with domestic servants. Formulaic, didactic, and controlled by a middle-class authorship, eighteenth-century literature for children sought to regulate and control its readership, inculcating the values and social returns of hard, honest work as opposed to chance windfalls, characterizing animals as more appropriate recipients of middle-class bounty than the destitute, and indicating that upward mobility for servants was exceptional and unlikely. The sobering factuality of this study means that, while we might detect some residual features of eighteenth-century precepts in contemporary practice, we can also be grateful for huge differences. For all of its frustrations and competing theories of learning, today's classroom is far removed from the experiments in mass, industrial, monitorial education undertaken by Andrew Bell in Madras and Joseph Lancaster in Southwark. Although, in The Governess, Sarah Fielding's peacemaker Jenny Peace is clearly being trained for the female duties of mother and pacifier, and in Richard Johnson's Juvenile Trials, for Robbing Orchards, Telling Fibs, and Other Heinous Offences, Master Meanwell, who hands down judgments, is being schooled in the masculine discourse of decision making, we can realize that those gendered roles and categories are much more interchangeable and osmotic in most contemporary cultures. O'Malley's focus on the emergence of the child as a subject, albeit one defined within a state of deficiency and described by a surplus of negatives, and his alert reading of political, scientific, medical, and literary texts combines to produce a nuanced, complex exploration. The breadth of [End Page 282] textual sources is certainly impressive and valuable. However, despite his antipathy towards Hannah More and his agreement with Alan Richardson's criticism of Mitzi Myers's argument about the unacknowledged allegiances linking More and Wollstonecraft, O'Malley might have considered More's strong-minded Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education as, among...

Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay by John Richardson

MLR, IOI.2, 2006 521 within a tradition of 'impossible locations and imaginary geography' (p. I96). The fact that 'real' locations in Shakespeare's plays are often, as Laroque points out, paired with an imaginary twin-such as Athens and the wood in the Dream, or the Court and the Forest of Arden in As You Like It-reminds us that we should not be too literal-minded in our attempts to pin down Shakespeare's geography. In this way, one could argue that the tensions at play in this volume stem from Shakespeare himself, and perhaps the book would have been yet more successful had this been acknowledged more fully. Nevertheless, this is an informative and scholarly study that is admirably open and exploratory in its approach, and which takes the reader on a thought-provoking tour of the literary and political worlds of early modern Europe. UNIVERSITYOFREADING RICHARD MEEK Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay. By JOHNRICHARDSON. (Rout ledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature, 2) London and New York: Routledge. 2004. Xi+ 187 PP. ?58. ISBN 0-415-31286-8. When patriotic Britons sang in the 1740S that they never would be slaves, they were thinking less of Africans working on plantations than of subservience to a despotic France. John Richardson begins his study by outlining the several literal and meta phorical senses of theword 'slave', including the one most familiar from Pope's usage: a political lackey, a corrupt, abject tool of power. Richardson argues that the Treaty of Utrecht, and its adjunct clause granting Britain the right to trade inAfrican slaves to the New World (the Asiento de negros), had far-reaching consequences for the Scrib lerians, who were closely associated with Robert Harley and Henry St John, Tory architects of the peace. He establishes that knowledge of the realities of the slave trade was available, that it was possible to express resistance to it, and that many literary texts displayed a conflicted awareness of it-abhorrence of the idea tempered by euphemistic avoidance of the subject, or a compensatory sense that slavery was somehow an internal condition. He gives interesting detail on the compromised po sitions of Scriblerian authors during peace negotiations and the subsequent defences of it in Swift's History of the Last Four Years of Queen Anne and Pope's Windsor Forest, indeed a troubled text in this reading. There follow individual chapters on the three main authors which suggest a link between Utrecht and later satirical positions. Pope's conception of personal identity (to be a 'slave' is to lack internal consistency of character) is tracked through the Horatian poems; Gay's plays reveal aspects of both sympathy and contempt for slaves; Swift's treatment of the starving Irish and the bestial Yahoos derives in part from his powerfully riven awareness of slavery. Finally, Richardson argues that despite the complexity of imaginative manceuvre in these Scriblerian texts, we have amoral duty tomark down these authors as complicit in the abomination that was transatlantic slavery. Richardson's close readings are carefully focused and subtly thought out. But he underestimates the extent to which a 'manageable' attitude towards slavery was already established inEnglish literature (at least as early as Behn's Oroonoko), not to mention the classical literature on which 'Augustan' values depend. The link between Utrecht and later Scriblerian satire is certainly not as foundational as Richardson appears towant it to be. For satirists, the South Sea Company was more important for its spectacular crash in 1720, with the attendant rise ofWalpole's regime, than for its character as a slave-trading operation. Richardson cannot cite much about slavery from either version of The Dunciad, preferring instead to insist, sometimes with insufficient cogency, that the references to slavery in the Essay onMan are coloured by the specific presence of African slavery, despite their ostensibly 'political' import. 522 Reviews He concentrates on Gay's Polly, set in theWest Indies, at the expense of the more Scriblerian Beggar's Opera, though he does attempt to readMacheath's collection of 'doxies', via orientalist conceptions of the harem, as slave-related, a process far too attenuated to command assent. There is simply too much else...

Goethe und der Pietismus (review)

Hans-Georg Kemper and Hans Schneider, eds., und der Pietismus. Tubingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001.viii + 278pp. This carefully edited volume grew out of a symposium held 25-27 March 1999, on the occasion of an exhibit at the Franckesche Stiftungen in Halle from 9 May to 3 October, 1999, entitled Separatisten, Pietisten, Hermhuter: und die Stillen im Lande; the catalogue has also been published (Halle, 1999). It is another in the series of solid research contributions emerging from the nexus of the Franckesche Stiftungen and the Interdisziplinares Zentrum fur Pietismusforschung at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. Long relegated to the sidelines, the investigation of as a powerful intellectual movement is transforming our view of the German Enlightenment and eighteenth-century literature. A few years ago I might have begun this review by observing that it is difficult for us sceptical post-moderns to imagine how seriously people once took their religious beliefs. Many observers would have agreed with sociologist Peter Berger's observation that secularization was the order of the day: Probably for the first time in history, the religious legitimations of the world have lost their plausibility not only for a few intellectuals and other marginal individuals but for broad masses of entire societies (The Sacred Canopy [1969]: 125). But these days it is all too evident that material progress and the spread of toleration have increased rather than diminished the appeal of religious faith, especially in the intense version known in the eighteenth century as enthusiasm. Now the topic Goethe and Pietism no longer appears quirky or irrelevant to mainstream concerns; once again we appreciate how complex and insistent the pressure from devout faith can be upon the advocates of the reign of reason. Paul Raabe's pronouncement, quoted in the preface, that had been wohl zu keiner Stunde rings true. But the editors immediately and rightly observe that and Pietists were never far away from throughout his life. Not least of the valuable services rendered by the contributors is to show how varied and pervasive Pietist influences were upon him. Some of the information is familiar, such as the connection via Goethe's mother to Susanna Katharina von Klettenberg. Yet even here Burkhard Dohm provides new perspectives on the Radikalpietistin und 'schone seele.' Paul Peucker on the Diaspora of the Herrnhuter in Frankfurt/Main and Thilo Daniel on Johann Michael von Loen's turbulent relationship to Zinzendorf show how closely connected the family was to Pietist communities and networks. Inevitably, there are some redundancies among the essays, especially where Goethe's depiction in Dichtung und Wahrheit of his relationship to is concerned. …

Literature of the Sturm und Drang by David Hill (review)

MLR, 101.1, 2006 277 Butler's terminology, it appears to be men, rather than women, who are the 'bodies that matter' in these texts. They were largely intended fora male readership, and they set out, through negative and positive examples, how men ought to behave, and how men should make women behave. Female deviancy arises to disrupt the social order as a result of male failure or folly. It is as though the women are feared, but also in? fantilized: reduced to the perpetual state of a child, who, without careful supervision, is always on the verge of causing chaos. Selwyn College, Cambridge Charlotte Woodford Literature of the Sturm und Drang. Ed. by David Hill. (Camden House History of German Literature, 6) Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2003. xii + 377 pp. $85; ?60. ISBN 1-57113-174-4. This lively and informative collection of essays is not an introductory volume provid? ing a series of exemplary readings of key texts, as one might easily imagine from its title. Rather the reader is presented with a variety of approaches to the interpretation of the Sturm und Drang that, taken together, reveal its internal contradictions and its complex relation to the most powerful literary,cultural, and intellectual trends ofthe eighteenth century. In an extended introduction David Hill sets the context for the following chapters by surveying the writers' work and introducing some dominant themes and central critical questions. Bruce Duncan writes on the passions as exemplified in Sturm und Drang works as a reflection of developments in later eighteenth-century psychology. Wulf Koepke steers the reader carefully through the complexitiesof Herder's position in the Sturm und Drang, while Howard Gaskill writes cogently and engagingly about Ossian, Herder, and the idea of folk song. Francis Lamport provides a magisterial survey of Sturm und Drang drama, which is supplemented by Michael Patterson's consideration of the problematic area of the relation of that drama to contempo? rary theatre practice. David Hill discriminatingly investigates the limitations of the rhetoric of freedom, while Daniel Wilson focuses specifically on the vexed question of Goethe's early political imagination. Karin Wurst explores the discourse of love within changing expectations of marriage and the family.Susanne Kord looks at three women playwrights and suggests how their work offersa contemporary commentary on some of the attitudes and values of a highly male-dominated movement. Alan Leidner looks at Schiller's early plays as a distinctive postscript to a movement torn between a desire forautonomy and a desire forprogress and reform. Margaret Stoljar investigates with justifiable caution the applicability of the label 'Sturm und Drang' to the realm of music. Gerhard Sauder rounds offthe volume with an analysis of the changing perceptions of literary critics regarding the position of the Sturm und Drang within established narratives of the development of eighteenth-century literature. From this brief overview of content it is apparent that certain enduring themes (for example, self-expression and freedom) and critical questions (political implications and limitations, periodization, Sturm und Drang in relation to the Enlightenment) are illuminated from differentangles. Continuities with the Enlightenment are stressed and the wider European context of discussions about the future of drama, the na? ture of literary creativity, and the development of culture is acknowledged. Some discussions yield less than their chapter titles lead one to expect; the chapter on stage practice might, for example, have been more illuminating if the Sturm und Drang plays had been set within a more detailed account of contemporary theatre and with more precise reference to the repertoire, including opera, which is aptly mentioned in the chapter on music. The predominantly thematic approach means that the analysis 278 Reviews of certain key texts?Werther, forexample?will seem too brief to some readers. And it is a pity that the altogether justifiable emphasis on drama means that Goethe's Sturm und Drang lyrics are given only incidental coverage. This volume nevertheless contains some lively and engaging writing that incorporates the latest research and conveys some of the complexities of evaluating this highly influential corpus of liter? ary and critical work. University of Exeter Lesley Sharpe 'Das furchtbar-schoneGorgonenhaupt des Klassischen': Deutsche Antikenbilder {1755? 1875). By Lorella Bosco...

Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic by Julie Kipp (review)

MLR, 100.4, 2005 1097 major Scottish poets of the earlier twentieth century, Sydney Goodsir Smith's 1952 collection Robert Fergusson 1750-1774: Essays by Various Hands (London: Nelson) remains indispensable. However, since 'Heaven-Taught Fergusson' is the only booksized essay collection since then, it is a valuable attempt to reintroduce Fergusson to our contemporaries. General assessments of eighteenth-century literature need to include him more centrally. Moreover, the book is worth having just for the informa? tion Janet Sorenson provides about the word 'wow' (p. 117). University of Glasgow Alan Riach Romanticism, Maternity, and theBody Politic. By Julie Kipp. (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. xiii + 237pp. ?40; $60. ISBN 0-521-81455-3. This study explores a range of representations of maternity in the Romantic period, representations linked by their engagement with a paradox which, according to Kipp, lies at the heart ofRomantic-era motherhood, whereby mothers were encouraged both to follow their affectionate 'natures' and to subordinate their affections to the best interests of the child and the state. Thus, she suggests, maternity was structured as an almost untenable subject-position: mothers were 'dangerously good' ifthey loved their children indiscriminately yet 'naturally bad' if they did not love them enough. The boundaries between 'good' and 'bad' motherhood threatened to dissolve under the pressure of a doubly contradictory construction of motherhood: not only must the ideal mother identify closely with her child and also promote his or her develop? ment as an autonomous subject; she must negotiate too her own confinement to the domestic sphere and a compromised civic identity No wonder that mothers might become too closely involved with their children to act objectively and that maternal love might become 'a savage impulse'. As Kipp demonstrates, many post-Enlightenment literarytexts invoke the motherchild bond, earlier utilized by Kant, Rousseau, and Hume as a figure forwider social relations, as a means of naturalizing or critiquing other forms of social interaction. The figureof the Irish wet-nurse in Maria Edgeworth's Ennui is a telling example. As Kipp demonstrates, Ellinor's divided position as both natural and foster mother en? ables Edgeworth to explore the conflicted subjectivity of the Irish people, dependent politically and economically on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy (of which Edgeworth was herself a part). Moreover, Ellinor's indiscriminate feeding of her natural and foster child, and her success in substituting one for the other, suggest the fragilityand permeability of the boundaries between the Irish and Anglo-Irish peoples. Similarly, in The Heart of Midlothian the representation of distracted or infanticidal mothers allows Scott to explore the dangerous nature of passionate local (Scottish) attachments , which threatened the stability of what was, in his view, the progressive and enlightened Act of Union. This suggestive study also explores images of motherhood in the novels of Matthew Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft and in the poetry of Charlotte Smith and Percy Shelley. Yet the question which it does not quite ask or answer is why maternity was figured in such strikingly ambivalent terms in the literature of the period. In this re? spect Kipp's study might have benefited from closer attention to the socio-economic and medical contexts of motherhood in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. This was a period of significant change in class structure and in patterns of inheritance. A powerful middle class favoured more equitable systems of inheri? tance than the landed gentry,but was equally anxious to make absolute distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children. In recognizing only church marriages, 1098 Reviews Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753 not only firmed up the concept of legi? timacy but tied it more closely to the middle classes. Informal betrothal customs lost much of their coercive power, illegitimacy rates rose among the poor, and con? cerns about infanticide and abortion led to the criminalizing of abortion in 1803. Reproduction, like production, was thus increasingly regulated by the nation state, with sanctions against 'improper' motherhood increasing the risks of maternity. The rise of obstetric medicine created additional pressures. In order to account for the physiological changes which took place in pregnancy, influential accoucheurs such as Thomas Denman developed existing...

Inspiration and Delight: Integrating a Scholarly Study of Children's Literature into the Eighteenth-Century Literature Class

Review Article| October 01 2005 Inspiration and Delight: Integrating a Scholarly Study of Children's Literature into the Eighteenth-Century Literature Class Leslie Ritchie Leslie Ritchie Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2005) 5 (3): 510–517. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-3-510 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Leslie Ritchie; Inspiration and Delight: Integrating a Scholarly Study of Children's Literature into the Eighteenth-Century Literature Class. Pedagogy 1 October 2005; 5 (3): 510–517. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-3-510 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2005 Duke University Press2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Roundtable: The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century You do not currently have access to this content.

Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism and the Novel after the French Revolution by Lisa Wood (review)

79? Reviews neither saint nor sinner, just gloriously and fallibly human. Taylor is a sharp and generous reader of Wollstonecraft's character, of her writings, and of her times. The two main sections of the book draw on a wide range of Wollstonecraft's writ? ings, and most chapters centre around one work which most convincingly embodies a set of particular issues, but one never feels that a particular model of thought is rigidly imposed on a text. In 'Imagining Women' Wollstonecraft's larger ideological context is explained, while 'Feminism and Revolution' focuses more narrowly on the context of utopian radicalism. The firstsection starts,predictably enough, with a dis? cussion of Wollstonecraft's literary and philosophical endeavours in the professional world of print in eighteenth-century London. Chapter 2, 'The Chimera of Woman? hood', re-examines Wollstonecraft's familiar debate with her two main adversaries, Burke and Rousseau. The next chapter, 'For the Love of God', is probably Taylor's most original contribution to Wollstonecraft scholarship. Taylor makes a convincing argument for the crucial importance of religion in Wollstonecraft's ideas about eros and creativity.Wollstonecraft's posthumous career is traced in an epilogue. The second section explores in six chapters Wollstonecraft's role as a revolutionary propagandist and her engagement with various radicalisms, with a keen perspective on the tensions between French and British versions of revolutionary radicalism. The final chapter, like the closing chapter on religion in the firstsection, is another highlight, lucid in argument and very engagingly written. It addresses The Wrongs of Woman; or,Maria as a representation of future feminist possibilities, complicated by a strong analysis of the working-class Jemima, 'Wollstonecraft's angriest literary creation' (p. 241). This magisterial study is the carefully crafted result of two decades of work; it demonstrates an excellent command of Wollstonecraft's oeuvre, and it is formidably informed about competing intellectual and ideological systems in the eighteenth cen? tury. Taylor's work is living proof that research which is carefully developed over the years, as opposed to the hurriedly rewritten dissertation-book produced against tenure and research assessment deadlines, is just so much better. Victoria University of Wellington Heidi Thomson Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism and the Novel after the French Revolu? tion. By Lisa Wood. (Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture) Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 189 pp. ?32. ISBN 0-8387-5527-5. In Modes ofDiscipline Lisa Wood argues persuasively fora scholarly focus on the no? vels of so-called English conservative women writers ofthe decades following 1789, chiefly Mary Brunton, Laetitia Maria Hawkins, Elizabeth Hamilton, Hannah More, and Jane West. Although, as Wood points out, critics tend to privilege the 'radical' English writers ofthe 1790s such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, those writ? ers she terms 'loyal conformists' greatly 'outnumbered revolutionaries and radicals' (p. 31). Wood examines the attempts by More and West to promote the virtues of female domesticity and piety in order to support a wider thesis that the reactionary backlash had far-reaching connotations forthe form and content of literature in Eng? lish. Wood argues with impressive lucidity and focus, and her stringent approach renders what is, at times, difficultliterary theory superbly clear. Modes of Discipline is particularly original on More, and the light it sheds on more minor writers such as Jane Porter is most welcome. The author's conviction that such writers are cru? cial figures in the history of literature corresponds to increasing effortsto evaluate MLRy 100.3, 2005 791 English literature of the Revolutionary period outside the precincts of the useful, although occasionally limiting, tag of 'Romantic'. As Wood notes, with characteristic assurance, the 'values of Romanticism?individualism, solitude, passion, imagina? tion, nonconformity?tend to conflict with prevalent ideologies of femininity of the period, or the material circumstances of women's lives'. From the pursuit of such principles, women writers are 'almost necessarily excluded' (p. 20). Wood pays particular attention to the narrative voice that her writers adopt in their novels, and, although sensitive to the nuances inherent in political terminology, largely defines a conservative approach as one that supports anti-radicalism and endorses 'containing female activity within a redefined domestic...

The Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theater by Katherine West Scheil (review)

MLR, 100.3, 2005 767 The Taste ofthe Town: Shakespearian Comedy and theEarly Eighteenth-Century The? ater. By Katherine West Scheil. (Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture) Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: As? sociated University Presses. 2003. 333 pp. ?44. ISBN 0-8387-5537-2. The Taste of the Town charts the adaptation and reception of Shakespearian come? dies from the Restoration to the Licensing Act of 1737. Katherine West Scheil's detailed study demonstrates that all the adaptations from the period?whether they introduced music, dance, or visual spectacle to the Shakespearian original, whether they generated topical humour or provided a star vehicle?shared the fundamental objective of entertaining a paying audience. The formulae foradapting Shakespeare's comedies were determined in the Restora? tion. Dramatists recognized that they were most likely to satisfy their capricious au? diences' desire for 'novelty' ifthey embellished the originals with theatrical spectacle. Subsequent adapters adopted the same basic approach, with minor dramatic inno? vations being prompted by changes in theatrical conditions, such as the arrival of a star performer, a change of venue, or heightened competition between theatres. As West Scheil shows, Shakespeare's comedies were treated as raw material during the period. Adapters appropriated complete narratives or comic subplots, characters or diverse fragments of speeches, in their attempts to create commercially viable entertainment . Such was the profit imperative that dramatists' aesthetic principles were frequently sacrificed at the altar of public taste. The author illustrates this neatly in her examination of John Dennis's 1702 adaptation of Merry Wives. Dennis, a literary critic renowned forhis love of Shakespeare, his admiration of neo-classical principles, his loathing of ltalian opera, and his despair at popular cultural taste, nevertheless resorted to slapstick humour, bawdy farce, and a musical masque when he adapted Shakespearian comedy. This monograph provides a useful counterbalance to the cultural histories of Shake? speare's eighteenth-century afterlifethatwere published in the early 1990s, by demon? strating that comedies played little part in the poet's early canonization. West Scheil argues that the process of constructing England's national poet built upon his reputa? tion as the author ofthe major tragedies and a handful ofhistory plays. As Shakespeare was not esteemed as an author of comedies, the adapters discussed in the book rarely acknowledged their source because his name was not a selling point?if it had been, dramatists in such a fiercely competitive system would certainly have capitalized on the association. However, the salutary reminder that Shakespeare's cultural prestige initially rested upon his authorship of an elite subset of his works is followed by West Scheil's less persuasive claim that the modes of adapting his plays diverged according to genre. In the brief section of her introduction where the author discusses the adaptation of histories and tragedies, she appears to accept that they were refined, modernized, or brought into line with political and critical fashions, to contribute to the project of the playwright's cultural elevation. While adapters of highly esteemed Shakespearian plays capitalized on the author's growing national reputation, they were also highly alert to changes in the theatrical climate, writing plays that utilized the available personnel and venue, in accord with theatregoers' tastes. Adaptations of tragedies and histories drew upon visual and musical spectacle just as heavily as their generic poor cousins. West Scheil's suggestion that comedies were distinctive forbeing adapted in accordance with economic concerns and theatrical practicalities is erroneous. Moreover, the author's determination to demonstrate that each comic adaptation was commercially contingent and a direct product of its theatrical conditions of production results in a stylistic stutter. West Scheil reiterates her argument with such frequency that the reader begins to have some sympathy with the novelty- 768 Reviews hungry theatregoers of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, if the author's claims for the unique treatment of Shakespearian comedies are treated with caution, this monograph provides a valuable detailed study of a range of texts that have received little serious scholarly attention. Oxford Brookes University Rebecca Rogers Shakespeare Minus 'Theory'. By Tom McAlindon. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. 2004. xii +210 pp. ?45. ISBN 0-7546-3981-9. Bawdy and Soul: A Revaluation of...

Consuming Africa: Geography and Identity in Olaudah Equiano's "Interesting Narrative"

AT THE END OF THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH Equiano (1789), Olaudah Equiano comments that Africans occupy not only coasts but the of (1) In eighteenth century, was already a common geographical and topographical term for deep interior spaces. In Johnson's Dictionary, second definition of word is inner part of any thing, and Johnson cites as an example Shakespeare's bowels of ungrateful Rome in Coriolanus. (2) Johnson's first definition, though, deals directly with viscera, particularly lower alimentary canal (the botulus or sausage of word's Latin origins): Intestines; and organs within body. In practice, eighteenth-century writers sometimes combined two definitions, figuring physical spaces in terms of a human anatomy that included circulatory vessels and organs: veins, arteries, hearts and like. Such is case in Joseph Addison's Remarks on Several Parts of Italy. When a religious hermit found water emerging from mountain rock, Addison writes, following veins, he ... made himself two or three fountains in of mountain. (3) As this essay shows, throughout Interesting Narrative Equiano also conflates human body and physical space, and connection is more than incidental linguistic play. In observing that Africans are in the of Africa, Equiano indicates that a space defined by physical and boundaries of such geographical entities as can consume and digest bodies and subjectivities of a people. (4) He indicates as well that other physical and spaces--the nations of Europe, for instance-also might consume and digest Africa. These other spaces, Equiano suggests, can benefit by bringing and Africans into circulation within their own bodily systems (234). Such a cannibalistic process--a process of ingestion and ultimately of incorporation and circulation--is central to production of geographical and identity, according to Interesting Narrative. More generally this essay argues that Equiano's model of corporeal consumption is consistent with logic of an emerging consumer society. As Colin Campbell and others have shown, European nations at end of eighteenth century experienced a radical in modes of consumption: a consumer revolution. (5) Late eighteenth-century literature often addresses this transformation and its implications, revealing what Timothy Morton recently has called the birth of consumer subjectivity. (6) Equiano demonstrates that his own self-reflective consumer subjectivity is one that has resulted from cannibalism. By exposing how incorporated nation has a corpus composed of consumed bodies and subjectivities of its population, Equiano's Narrative participates radically in consumer revolution and in struggle to understand geographical identity. (7) Critical accounts of The Interesting Narrative often debate whether Equiano has a West African, a British-American, or a hybrid identity. (8) Recent research by Vincent Carretta suggesting that Equiano may have been a native of South Carolina rather than Africa (as he claims in Narrative) further complicates debate, though while this research requires a full rethinking of previous positions in identity debates, I hope to show that it presents serious problems mostly for interpretations that essentialize geographical identity in a way that Narrative actively resists. (9) The model of consumption that I propose originates in, but departs from, arguments for hybridity. Following Helen Thomas' suggestion that the moment preceding can never be recovered, I wish to show that Equiano as Narrative figures him--that is, as a man writing about African origins long after he has had cultural contact with Europe--is already part of circulatory system of European consumerism (inasmuch as he is speaking from within European culture even when he speaks of a time before he had knowledge of that culture); and yet I also wish to show that his irrecoverable origin or heritage in nonetheless actively constitutes his identity. …

Pope to Burney, 1714–1779: Scriblerians to Bluestockings by Moyra Haslett

124 Mr. Rogers’s envelopment of the poem in sources, so that the interpretation itself of a source may approach a property of the poem, reminds me of E. R. Wasserman , whose chapter in the Subtler Language (1959) enjoys repeated endorsement , although Mr. Rogers never endorses its reduction of the poem (and most everything else Pope wrote) to concordia discors. If Pope is a ‘‘Renaissance poet,’’ on the other hand, he does not always seem to know what a symbolism is to do. It is odd that the ‘‘heraldic language ’’ that Mr. Rogers ‘‘translates’’ out of the poem operates as a symbolism if it is ‘‘not so much another level of meaning as an alternative system of signification ’’ redundant of what Pope says ‘‘in the poem by other means.’’ The politics of the poem are still not much beyond Wasserman’s own elaboration of J. R. Moore. ‘‘The whole dialectic of WindsorForest ,’’ as Mr. Rogers has it, ‘‘is organized around the notion of an evil Williamite interregnum jeopardizing true British virtues, as embodied by the Stuart family, and reviving some of the horrors of the interregnum.’’ Mr. Rogers’s emphasis on the artistic tests tolerances between old Turks and young fogies among Scriblerians. No exquisite contradictions in ideology are turned up; no theory intervenes; the word ‘‘Foucault’’does not appear. There is also little attention to genre, the one issue that divides through all critical persuasions. He is suggestive about the artistic, as in accounting for some of the color imagery through locutions of heraldry, and can be no lesssuggestiveinwhatmightleadonly to a resemblance. For instance, he says of the poem ‘‘most of its main descriptive terms can be found on any small-scale map of this district.’’Perhaps not just any map. One of the activities of the retired man is that he ‘‘O’er figur’d Worlds now travels with his Eye,’’ and traveling in a map, regarding theimageastheareaitself depicted there, is a topos since Ariosto. So what could be the implications of such a resemblance of appellativesfromafamily of early maps, of a use of a map space in the sequence of description or narration in the poem (as occurs with the maps of Poly-Olbion)? There is much to go on from with Mr. Rogers’s positioning of the poeminanimperialsensibilitythatwould ironically set aside the policy of another aging queen. Richard Eversole University of Kansas MOYRA HASLETT. Pope to Burney,1714– 1779: Scriblerians to Bluestockings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. xviii ⫹ 240. $75; $24.95 (paper). To unify the 65 years covered in Pope to Burney, Ms. Haslett invokes the‘‘dominant idea’’ of conversation, which she earnestly asserts is ‘‘not in any sense a single label.’’ With Jürgen Habermas as both hero and villain of the piece, Ms. Haslett treads the familiar ground of public and private spheres. She treads surefootedly , however, and she does venture forth to emphasize the role of women writers. She considers literal conversations —beginning with a history of literary clubs and coteries—and figurative dialogues—including real and fictional epistolary exchanges, as well as ‘‘print conversations’’ surrounding Grub Street practices—which bring a wide array of texts into her purview. Ranging through periodicals, poetry, correspondence, and the appropriation of these by the novel, she conveys the dynamic evolution of eighteenth-century literature and a sense of conversation between and among writ- 125 ers and readers. Her main targets are Habermas and Ian Watt, and she iterates, with minor elaboration, the feminist and Marxist cases against both. She argues that privacy is publicly performed, and thus complicates the division of spheres and the traditional placement of women. Ms. Haslett’s attention to women writers is valuable. By examining how women shaped public discourse by both their absence and their presence, she conveys a more vibrant picture of eighteenthcentury life, literary and otherwise, than conventional representations have sometimes done. In addition toherinterpolated readings of Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), Leapor’s poetry, and others, an entire chapter is devoted to ‘‘Female Communities.’’In this, she discusses Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749), Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), and Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), as examples of...

Lieve wellust!

Dutch eighteenth-century erotic literature has so far not been the object of extensive study, this in stark contrast to contemporary erotic literature in other countries. Although nowadays nobody contests the idea that novels concerning physical love were widely pub-lished in the eighteenth-century, the focus has never been on the contemporary (literary) cri-tique. Rather than to compare eighteenth-century Dutch erotic literature to its French and English relatives, one should try to register what was being written about physical love in the Republic in order to understand how it functioned in Dutch novels. Text editions, bib-liographies and surveys regarding the topic could prove to be useful instruments in deter-mining the role erotic novels played in the eighteenth-century literary and moral discourse.

Review: The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture

Review: The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture

Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution by Deborah Kennedy, and: Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance. Frances Burney to Jane Austen by Susan C. Greenfield (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 747 deliberately acting ambiguously (with respect to women, forexample) to keep gossip circulating. Whatever Swift was, or was not, he was not so simple as this reductive premiss makes him out to be. Nor was he more successful than any other complex writer at predicting how his meanings would be construed by others. That no writer can control their own reception is in fact the clear message of the second half of this book, which studies the way in which a succession of Swift's early biographers created his image in respect of his relationships with women, his supposed insanity, his reputation as a comic humourist, and finallyhis patriotism. One does not need to be convinced by the biographical study to find a great deal to enjoy in this book and to learn from it, however. The Jonathan Swift who emerges from Kelly's study is a farcry from the stuffyicon of Augustan' literature that consi? dering him too closely in his English context is sometimes in danger of creating. Her study of the eccentricities of Swift's reception occasionally becomes itself eccentric, as when she reproduces a list of twenty-two ingredients to make a man into a myth taken from a book by Lord Raglan, and earnestly debates how many ofthose Swift (or the Swift story) possesses. (The firsttwo are 'The hero's mother is a royal virgin' and 'his father is a king'?not entirely promising.) Such ideas will nevertheless interest undergraduates, who after reading Kelly's book will be in a position to go on and produce the version of Swift most convincing to themselves in the full awareness that there have been so many others. The book's proof-reading standards are not as high as they should be: variously 'Hester' and 'Esther' Vanhomrigh; 'Baucis and Philomen' throughout; Maecenus; History of the Last Four Years of the Queen; Anthony and Cleopatra; momentomori; Middleton Murry variously as 'Murray' and the correct 'Murry'; Lord Bathhurst. . . and others. Notwithstanding such occasional irritations, this is a stimulating and refreshing book. University of Nottingham Brean S. Hammond Helen Maria Williams and theAge ofRevolution. By Deborah Kennedy. (Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture) Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 276 pp. ?40. ISBN 0-8387-5511-9. Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance. Frances Burney to Jane Austen. By Susan C. Greenfield. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 2002. 227 pp. $34-95- ISBN 0-8143-2992-6. Although very different in scope and approach, Deborah Kennedy's and Susan C. Greenfield's works offerthe reader a thorough panoramic view of the concerns shared by a variety ofwomen writers in the Romantic period, and the differentways in which they rendered them into literature. Their works differin that their respective focus is, in the case of the firstbook under review, a critical study of one writer, Helen Maria Williams, and in the second, an analysis on the topic of family romance in specific novels by six female writers: Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongsof Woman; or,Maria (1798), Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), Amelia Alderson Opie's Adeline Mowbray (1804), and Jane Austen's Emma (1816). Apart from being almost contemporaries, the connec? tions among these women writers were manifold: they could be non-existent (with Jane Austen, for instance); or a matter of coincidence (as occurred in the case of Helen Maria Williams, who?surprisingly enough fora future republican?may have sought 'a position at court like Frances Burney's' (Helen, p. 33); or of mutual admiration and ideological community?as in the case of Helen Maria Williams and Mary 748 Reviews Wollstonecraft (Helen, pp. 76, 88, 165); or even the mere rejection of a fellow woman writer,as Edgeworth herself expressed: 'Miss Williams we did not chuse to go to see though many English do. She is not in any of the societies we are in but sees a vast deal of company. My father I believe will pay her a visit just before we go and he will do the same by Mme de Genlis forsimilar...

Sexual encoding in eighteenth-century literature and art

Sexual encoding in eighteenth-century literature and art

Historicizing Communities of Reading in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Report from the Classroom

This essay offers a case study that examines how the history of reading can provide an ideal entrée to doing historicist work in the eighteenth-century literature classroom. Seeking to connect recent scholarly innovations in book history with classroom practice, the author discusses how teaching a set of texts by William Cobbett and Hannah More illuminates both the debate about lower-class literacy in late eighteenth-century Britain and the contemporary student's practice of reading. Manifestly, the texts raise the question of what "literacy" meant in late eighteenth-century Britain, and what the political implications might be if lower-class readers were taught not merely to read, but also to write. But because these texts are less than canonical, they also raise the question of why the debate over lower-class literacy does not constitute part of the literary canon today—a question that helps students to think not just about standards of canonicity, but also about the relationship between those standards and the kinds of reading practices that are privileged in our literature classrooms.

A SLENDER GIRL AND A THIN PLOT: STARVATION AND SPECTACLE IN PERSUASION

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Bonnie Blackwell is an associate professor of English at TCU, where she teaches eighteenth-century literature, critical theory, women's studies, and film. She has published in journals such as ELH Genders, and Women's Writing; her essays focusing on film have appeared in Camera Obscura and College Literature She is currently completing a book on Swift and Modest Proposals. Notes 1 Deborah Kaplan finds “harlequinization” marring the film versions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, by which she means that “like the mass-market romance, the focus is on a hero and heroine's courtship at the expense of other characters and other experiences, which are sketchily represented” (178). Andrew Higson's “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” while not a reading of the Jane Austen boom, makes many salient points about “the nostalgic gaze” of Merchant Ivory productions which applies to the films I'm examining here. In particular, I have been persuaded by Higson's diagnosis that the films' use of “commodification, exhibition and display” creates a sort of “heritage space, rather than narrative space: that is, a space for the display of heritage properties rather than for the enactment of dramas” (109, 112, 117). 2 In a lecture at Chawton in July 2003, Andrew Higson disputed the common application of the term “failure” to Persuasion. He pointed out that it was made quite economically for BBC television and then released theatrically in the United States. The film had already recouped its production costs with advertising at the time it was aired in Britain, so its admittedly modest box office take represented a profit many times over its original cost. The standard definition of a box-office failure is that the film does not recover its cost at the box-office and may take some time in the rental, VHS and DVD sales markets to break even, a definition that clearly does not fit Persuasion. However, neither its critical reception nor its box-office take could compete with the warm critical and financial reception of the other Jane Austen adaptations, up until Patricia Rozema's widely reviled Mansfield Park (1999). 3 In a popular account called The Golden Cage, Hilda Bruch describes anorexics as locked in a “struggle against feeling enslaved, exploited, and not permitted to lead a life of their own. They would rather starve than continue a life of accommodation. In this blind search for a sense of identity and selfhood they will not accept anything that their parents, or the world around them, has to offer…In genuine or primary anorexia nervosa, the main theme is a struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence and effectiveness” (qtd. in Bell 17). 4 “Popular since the Renaissance, a syllabub is a drink made of hot, but not curdled, milk or cream mixed with brandy, table wine, port, sherry, hard cider, or beer and sugar, beaten to a froth with whipped cream floated on top” (Trager 162). 5 Cf. The description of Jane Fairfax: “Her height was pretty, just such as almost everybody would think tall, and nobody could think very tall; her figure particularly graceful; her size a most becoming medium, between fat and thin, though a slight appearance of ill-health seemed to point out the likeliest evil of the two” (Emma 149).

Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Beyond the Law by Hal Gladfelder

Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Beyond the Law by Hal Gladfelder