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The Eighteenth Century
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.137

Number of Followers: 39

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ISSN (Print) 0193-5380 - ISSN (Online) 1935-0201
Published by U of Pennsylvania

[13 journals]

Variant Rebellions: Psychic Compromise in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack
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  Abstract: By the end of the eighteenth century, there were already a variety of plays featuring Black characters on the London stage. John Hawkesworth's Oroonoko (1759) and George Colman's Inkle and Yarico (1789) jostled for a place in the theatrical repertoire with James Cobb's Paul and Virginia (1800) and Frederick Reynolds's Laugh When You Can (1799). Isaac Bickerstaffe's The Padlock (1768) was performed alongside more traditional plays like Edward Young's The Revenge (1721) and William Shakespeare's Othello (1603). In addition to these established performances of Blackness, a whole host of new characters like Three-Fingered Jack, Mackandal, Hassan, Selico, and Gambia stepped onto the stage in all their melodramatic and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
From Writing Lives to Scaling Lives in Joseph Priestley's Chart of
Biography
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  Abstract: This essay takes Joseph Priestley's choice to represent historical lives on a timeline as a basis for examining what it means to represent a life in data, or to create a data subject. Priestley's Chart of Biography (1764)—a graphical representation of the lives of historical figures on a timeline—marks a key moment at which the epistemological challenges of eighteenth-century life writing materialize in Priestley's effort to represent lives "without the intervention of words," as he puts it.1 That is, Priestley's reconceptualization of biography—from writing a life to scaling lives—was an important development in both the history of the data subject and the history of life writing. While the Chart has garnered much ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Animality, Hybridity, and the Grammar of the Body in Late
Eighteenth-Century Visual Satire
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  Abstract: During the "golden age" of British visual satire, from the 1770s to the 1830s, graphic artists loved turning politics and politicians into monsters. Some of these monsters gave form to perceived social dangers, such as George Cruikshank's part-feline, part-serpentine Revolution.1 More commonly, powerful politicians and world leaders were turned into hybrid beasts, with the commonest victims being Napoleon, prominent statesmen, and those who satisfied an easy pun, such as Charles James Fox and Sir John Key (coined "Don-Key" after being elected Lord Mayor of London in 1830).2 Some recall literary and cultural antecedents, ranging from Aesop's fables to Greek mythology to devil iconography; others were the fanciful ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Working with Fluids in Mary Collier's "The Woman's Labour"
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  Abstract: Mary Collier makes the nature of work and how it is gendered the subject of her first collection of poetry: The Woman's Labour (1739). The titular poem defines gendered labor and describes its standard settings—in the bedroom, in the kitchen, and, most notably, at the washtub. The origin story for the poem also locates a working woman, Collier herself, in a bedroom and specifically at a bedside. This bedroom was of a gentlewoman "in a fit of illness" whom Collier wrote verse for "as I waited on" her.1 In addition to addressing this "gentlewoman," the poem addresses itself as an "answer" to another laborer, Stephen Duck, and his 1730 poem "The Thresher's Labour."2 Duck's description of agricultural work disparages ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
"A Posture ridiculous"; or, Aphra Behn and the Politics of Pratfalls
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  Abstract: It would also be a long time before a woman would be free . . . to find death grotesque and funny.In Aphra Behn's fiction The History of the Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker (1689), the protagonist finds herself in an unfortunate situation: she has accidentally married two men. To solve this problem, she suffocates her first husband with a pillow and surreptitiously sews his collar to the second husband's tunic. When the second husband drops the corpse into the local river to help cover up the murder, he too is pulled into the water and drowns. This whole sequence of events— and the way in which it is presented to the reader—is so ridiculous that it seems the stuff of farce instead of tragedy. But how could one ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Enlightenolatry from Peter Gay to Steven Pinker: Mass Marketing
Enlightenment and the Thick Eighteenth Century
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  Abstract: Why should eighteenth-century studies have emerged in the U.S. as a coherent field of inquiry in the 1960s' Particularly, why should the study of eighteenth-century culture have come to the fore at that time, taking a then novel interdisciplinary approach that cohered around a handful of core concerns' Among the most consequential was the Enlightenment, considered as a many-faceted cosmopolitan European movement of reform and critique that was credited with (or, depending on your perspective, blamed for) giving birth to twentieth-century liberal capitalist democracy. On the continent, historians had been contesting the character and legacy of the Enlightenment since the end of World War II, and American scholars ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Masculinity and Gatekeeping in Depictions of the Restoration Coffeehouse
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  Abstract: Writing a satirical portrait of a London coffeehouse in 1673, an anonymous pamphleteer describes it as a "Roomful of Fops . . . spend[ing] above two hours in searching the Map for Aristocracy and Democracy."1 This succinct description contains the many elements of critique lodged against early coffeehouses during the Restoration period: the effeminized masculinity inherent in the figure of the fop; ignorance that masqueraded as learning; and the political, potentially seditious discourse—signaled by the terms "aristocracy" and "democracy"—that the coffeehouses were rumored to foment. The belief that coffee drinking engendered dangerous political speculation is described by Thomas Sydserfe in his play, Tarugo's ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Eliza Haywood and the Epistemological Frustrations of Embodiment
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  Abstract: Figuring a feedback loop among reading, bodies, and texts, Eliza Haywood's amatory fictions ostensibly depict the ways in which the pleasures of the body can be set in motion by reading and writing. Attempting to better understand the nature of such purportedly titillating content, the critical tradition has offered varied accounts of precisely what cultural work Haywood's amatory fictions perform. While such readings are considerably more varied and sophisticated than can adequately be discussed in a brief summary, I focus in this paper on one common approach to reading Haywood, an approach that suggests that Haywood's amatory fictions produce both pleasure and subjects that use pleasure in some way. In criticism ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Imperial Wars and the British Occupation of Havana
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  Abstract: Elena A. Schneider's book The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (North Carolina, 2018) is a well-crafted and -documented account of a nearly forgotten episode in Cuba's history, revealing the struggle between two imperial forces that controlled the Atlantic hemisphere and the Caribbean in the eighteenth century. The British occupation of the city of Havana was an imperial venture that yielded great human loss and was designed to debilitate and humiliate the Spanish crown while also reducing its influence in the Western Hemisphere. During the colonial period, Cuba was a nerve center for commerce, including the production and exchange of goods, as well as the trading of slaves. Cuba ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Speaking Freely, Writing Poetically: Law and Literature in
Eighteenth-Century Free Speech Debates
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  Abstract: In July 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Harper's Magazine published "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate." Quickly known on Twitter as "The Letter," the letter argued that progressive campaigns against racism, sexism, and transphobia—known by the shorthand "cancel culture"—represented "a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity."1 The more than 150 signatories, who ranged from Francis Fukuyama and Stephen Pinker to Noam Chomsky and Gloria Steinem (by way of some primarily known in this arena for their anti-trans writings, such as J. K. Rowling), worried that the firings and/or ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Hermeneutics, the Hebrew Bible, and the Cosmopolitan Reader
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  Abstract: In Secularism and Hermeneutics (Pennsylvania, 2019), Yael Almog locates biblical interpretation in the German Enlightenment, through the Hebrew Bible, at the center of the generative hermeneutic practices that shaped modern aesthetic, interpretive, and literary practices. These hermeneutic practices, she argues, produced the notion of a universal community of biblical readers and, by extension, an alternative version of the Enlightenment in which toleration is not just a Protestant concept but also a function of the German/Jewish exchanges. Those exchanges are exemplified in Johann Gottfried von Herder's interest in translation and reading practices that were "porous to different religious ideologies" (12). Almog ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Feeling Profit at the Cusp of Modern Capitalism
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  Abstract: Economists as different as Juliet Schor and Joseph Stiglitz have been challenging the consensus that growth is the best measure for well-being and that markets are the best sites for community building.1 Such profit-skepticism seems to me timely, and perhaps it should carry special appeal for literary historians. In The Problem of Profit: Finance and Feeling in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Virginia, 2019), Michael Genovese does not quite inaugurate a collaboration between literary studies and such economic scholarship, but he does considerably trouble our definitions of profit. Approaching profit not as a ready-made tool for assessing success but as a concept itself under construction in the eighteenth ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Animality and the Poetics of Personhood
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  Abstract: It remains surprising that literary historians could ever have characterized the eighteenth century as a period sufficiently confident in the category of the human that such an identity should secure a regime of knowledge or normative vision of collective life. Consider a claim that appears early in Paul Fussell's The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965): "The humanist believes that man is absolutely unique as a species. This is the belief from which all the others seem to depend."1 Scholars working on the eighteenth century have, in recent decades, decisively overturned this account of an untroubled Enlightenment humanism. Any definition of the human, we now recognize, was intensely contested in the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Post-Saidian Studies of Eighteenth-Century European Literature and Culture
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  Abstract: Samara Anne Cahill, in her recent state-of-the field essay, diagnoses the primary challenge for literary and cultural studies of eighteenth-century Anglo-Muslim relations as "the difficulty of disentangling historical fact from the accretions of Eurocentric fantasy."1 She locates this difficulty, first and foremost, in "the preeminence of the Ottoman Empire over other Muslim states in the 18th century English imaginary" as inflected by "England's unique religiopolitical pressures after the Revolution of 1688–1689."2 As a way out of this difficulty, she calls for more interdisciplinary and multilingual scholarship to shift eighteenth-century studies towards "a strategic post-Saidian theoretical framework."3 By ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Critical Conversations: Scholarship in a Time of Crisis
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  Abstract: This Critical Conversation emerged from an online special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, edited by Emily Hodgson Anderson and Steven Aaron Minas, that was published in summer 2021; see ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Introduction: Scholarship in a Time of Crisis
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  Abstract: "We are curators of public and academic memory, and I am sure that we will continue to celebrate the artistic and cultural achievements of that period, as we will the forms of thought that encouraged progressive—and in some significant cases, revolutionary—social change. That too is our privilege and our responsibility as teachers of the Humanities."1 When Nicole Mansfield Wright asked Suvir Kaul of his vision of ASECS in the future, he emphatically asserted the eighteenth-century scholar's ethical responsibility to not only recognize the period's artifacts as records of empire but also interrogate how these artifacts held both colonial certainties and uncertainties in the constructions of the self, nation ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Revisiting Abolition and the Power of "We"
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  Abstract: One year after writing about Black Lives Matter protests during summer 2020, I find myself reflecting on what it felt like to march through the streets of my city with my hands in the air, as militarized police pointed their guns into the crowd. I first wrote about the experience shortly after it occurred for the "Scholarship in a Time of Crisis" online special issue of ECTI, and I revisit the experience now, wishing that I was no longer writing in a time of crisis—but the crisis continues. The murder of unarmed Black civilians by American police was always a much bigger crisis than anyone could possibly hope to solve with a single summer of protest. Even with a landmark legal victory like the April 2021 conviction ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Reading Utopia in 2022
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  Abstract: If the pandemic has demonstrated anything, it is that we are not all in it together. National responses to the coronavirus have exacerbated existing disparities along lines of gender, socio-economic status, disability, geography, race, and at the intersection of these preexisting inequalities. Higher mortality rates have been experienced by the disabled and in deprived areas, and vaccine apartheid prevents lower-income countries from protecting their citizens.1 Two years since initial lockdowns in March 2020, there are long-term or permanent inequities in access to work, healthcare, and shelter. Women's participation in the workforce has dropped and may not return, millions have lost access to reproductive care ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Is This the End'
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  Abstract: In the final decade of the sixteenth century, Christopher Marlowe premiered a play that from its beginning took up questions of endings and ends. In his first speech, Doctor Faustus exhorts himself to "level at the end of every art" before concluding that he has gone as far as possible in logic and medicine, and that law and divinity hold no attraction. Only necromancy, with its promise "of power, of honour, of omnipotence," offers great enough reward for the "studious artizan."1 From the repetition of the word "end" five times in the monologue's first eighteen lines to the expiration of Faustus's contract and subsequent damnation, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1592) emphasizes the entanglement of the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Gladiator Girls: Transphobia in the Eighteenth Century and Today
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  Abstract: As I began this essay the 2020 Summer Olympics Games were approaching, and I found myself drawn to the image of the female athlete. This is perhaps a strange place to begin an essay about the eighteenth century, considering the Olympics as we know them wouldn't come into existence until the late nineteenth century, but the female athlete more generally—that is, the way she is portrayed and discussed—has a long history, and we might find in the waning years of the 1700s some harbinger of the stories that surround women's athletics today.In The Making of the Modern Self (2004), Dror Wahrman offers a longitudinal study of a single passage from Juvenal's Sixth Satire as it was translated by numerous men over the course ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
"Laying Medicine More Open to Mankind": Public Health and Accessibility
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  Abstract: Almost six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci expressed dismay in an interview with CBS News Radio's Steven Portnoy over the United States's failure "in getting the public as a whole, uniformly to respond in a way that is a sound scientific [response to a] public health and medical situation."1 For Fauci, public health had failed and was continuing to fail the first part of its very own name as a field. But can such public work be done so "whole" and "uniformly," or has COVID-19 revealed the limitations of public health that must negotiate between the scales of the individual and the collective'Be it the politicization of masks or vaccines, inconsistency has characterized much of the public ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00
Notes on Contributors
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  Abstract: KATHLEEN TAMAYO ALVES is Associate Professor and Deputy Chair of English at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York. Her research centers on eighteenth-century literature and culture, medicine, and literary history, and she has recently published in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Aphra Behn Online, and The Rambling. Her book-in-progress, "Body Language: Medicine and the Eighteenth-Century Comic Novel," explores how medicine shaped and is shaped by comic language through fictional dramatizations of female-specific medical phenomena, such as menstruation, hysteria, and pregnancy.MISTY G. ANDERSON is the James R. Cox Professor of English at the University ... Read More
  PubDate: 2023-09-16T00:00:00-05:00