Eighteenth-Century Fiction Volume 23, Number 1 /2010 is now available at
<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/j13107804081/>
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/j13107804081/.
This issue contains:
<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/fw6659080460r557/> Clarissa's
Silence
Kathryn L. Steele
This article reconsiders interpretive struggle as a paradigm for Samuel
Richardson's Clarissa and, in particular, for understanding the novel's
eighteenth-century readers. Taking Clarissa as an exemplary character
implies a reading strategy that understands female silence as modesty,
piety, and passive obedience—an obedience to the idea of authority that
nonetheless questions its abuse. I compare modern and eighteenth-century
responses, using approaches to the rape as a way to identify significant
differences in strategies of interpretation. I also find traces of one of
these alternate strategies of interpretation in the use and circulation of
religious texts. I argue that religious reading, with concurrent forms of
silent response, is an influential implied reading strategy even as this
alternate framework of interpretation is difficult, if not impossible, to
perceive. Suggesting that we might re-evaluate our readings of Clarissa to
consider her as a religious example, this essay meditates on the problem of
shifting interpretive protocols.
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DOI: <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/fw6659080460r557/>
10.3138/ecf.23.1.1
<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/ynn277406316831h/> “With My Hair
in Crystal”: Mourning Clarissa
Kathleen M. Oliver
This essay explores the fetishism of mourning and mourning jewellery as
fetish in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Following some historical background
on mourning jewellery fashioned with human hair and a definition of
fetishism as it relates to mourning jewellery, I discuss Clarissa herself as
fetish. I also examine Clarissa's bequests of mourning jewellery by
exploring how these fetishized bequests offer psychic compensation to the
wearers, allow access to the virtues associated with Clarissa, and assure
remembrance of the dead. Finally, I argue for the centrality of mourning to
the realization of Richardson's moral, didactic, and aesthetic intent.
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DOI: <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/ynn277406316831h/>
10.3138/ecf.23.1.35
<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/83573447t6171834/> Performing
Criticism during Cultural War: The Case of Voltaire's L'Écossaise (1760)
Logan J. Connors
By examining various criticisms of Voltaire's comedy L'Écossaise (1760), I
explain how pamphlets and publication strategies altered dramatic
performance. Instead of separating non-theatrical writing from dramatic
texts, I underline how pamphlets emerged as part of the author's
construction of a “theatrical event.” During the cultural battles of the
mid-eighteenth century, participants sought to “ready” their public by any
discursive means possible. This persuasive activity began before the
premiere of plays, which were also attempts to push the spectator into
thinking congruently with the author of the work. Drawing on reviews from
members of both the philosophe and anti-philosophe camps, I highlight the
ambiguity between pamphlet and dramatic text, playwright and polemicist,
performance and “set up,” and finally, fiction writer and theatre critic.
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DOI: <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/83573447t6171834/>
10.3138/ecf.23.1.61
<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/q8m04782312208l0/> On Candide,
Catholics, and Freemasonry: How Fiction Disavowed the Loyalty Oaths of
1789–90
Julia V. Douthwaite
In the history of the French Revolution, the 14 July 1790 Festival of the
Federation has the distinction of being the only event upon which everyone
seems to agree, when people across the country unanimously supported the new
nation. This article analyzes three of the best-known fictional accounts
embroidered upon the festivities in order to demonstrate that literary
analysis does more than generate what Daniel Gordon calls the “glow” of
history. Literature allows us to “get it”: to get the jokes, the innuendoes,
and the sarcasm relayed by contemporaries on socio-political issues of their
day. Historians have detailed the elaborate physical land works and the
propaganda campaign that prepared the site and the spectators of the July
1790 ceremonies; but Julie philosophe (1791), La Boussole nationale (1790),
and L'Isle des philosophes (1790) depict the gossip and political jockeying
that likely went on behind the scenes, and announce bedfellows that are
rarely conjoined today: Voltairean wit, Catholicism, and Freemasonry.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/q8m04782312208l0/?p=8a34fe359e46452
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DOI: <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/q8m04782312208l0/>
10.3138/ecf.23.1.81
<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/97j0u86551q88653/> Rousseau's
Crusoe: Or, On Learning to Read as Not Myself
Brian McGrath
A philosophical reading of Émile, ou de l'éducation privileges Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's pedagogic advice, while a literary reading privileges the
narrative aspects: either Émile is a treatise on education that relies on
fiction in order to clearly assert its position, or it is a novel with Émile
as its title character that happens to offer practical advice on education.
To read it as both would be to reconcile the literary and philosophical
aspects of Rousseau's thought; however, as the “or” that divides its title
suggests, this work confronts readers with the potential irreconcilability
of literary and philosophical discourses. The difficulty of reconciling
these competing discourses, and consequently the challenge of reading Émile,
is most notable at the moment when Émile, himself, must come to read the
only book he will ever need to read, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. This
one book, suggests Rousseau, will teach him to read all others, but within
Émile the reader discovers the possibility that one only ever learns to read
as someone other than oneself.
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DOI: <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/97j0u86551q88653/>
10.3138/ecf.23.1.119
<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/r01642v868218472/> A Forgotten
Enchantment: The Silenced Princess, the Andalusian Warlord, and the Rescued
Conclusion of “Sir Bertrand”
Luke R.J. Maynard
This essay addresses the authorship and complicated history of “Sir
Bertrand: A Fragment,” the seminal Gothic short story often attributed to
Anna Laetitia Barbauld. I acknowledge the existence of a completed “B-Text”
of that fragment, which survives in an obscure anthology titled Gothic
Stories (1797). The existence of a cohesive conclusion to this text, a work
normally discussed only as “a fragment” and correspondingly tied to
theoretical discussions of the Gothic as a genre of fragmentation,
underscores the need for a critical re-evaluation of “Sir Bertrand” as both
fragment and completed tale, and a new understanding of its role in the
development of Gothic and supernatural fiction. I confront the problem of
authorship and analyze the literary descent of both texts, and then I
interrogate the “lost” conclusion not only to determine its impact on the
tale's narrative style and genre, but also to retrace its newly revealed
historical roots in order to uncover a potential historical source for the
rediscovered B-text.
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DOI: <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/r01642v868218472/>
10.3138/ecf.23.1.141
<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/a7703013567n6722/> “An
Outlandish, Foreign-Made Englishman”: Aristocratic Oppression and Ethnic
Anomaly in Caleb Williams
Charlie Bondhus
In William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, the English Squire Falkland's
decision to construct his identity in conformity with Italian honour codes
not only debases his Englishness but also drives him to persecute his
secretary Caleb Williams, who possesses a damning secret that could ruin the
Squire's distinguished reputation. The embattled Caleb, who prides himself
on his autonomy and English identity, is forced to disguise himself first as
an Irish beggar and later as a Jewish peddler, facades that render him, like
Falkland, an ethnically anomalous Englishman. The middle-class Caleb's
ethnic destabilization at Falkland's hands suggests that Godwin, like many
of his more conservative peers, is claiming that the continentally inflected
malfeasance of the aristocracy corrupts the bourgeoisie in such a way that
the very terms and privileges of Englishness are contested. In this way,
Godwin's ostensible purpose of promoting a liberal model of human rights
ultimately comes at the cost of reifying xenophobic fears about Italians,
Jews, and the Irish.
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DOI: <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/a7703013567n6722/>
10.3138/ecf.23.1.163
<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/t64819725730770g/> Editing Eve:
Rewriting the Fall in Austen's Persuasion and Inchbald's A Simple Story
John Morillo
Within the last two decades of the eighteenth century, Elizabeth Inchbald
and Jane Austen both responded to the need to critique and rewrite the
biblical story of the Fall and the stature of Eve in Christian Britain as a
way to turn the romance novel towards feminist social criticism. In A Simple
Story (1791) and Persuasion (1817) the Catholic Inchbald and the Anglican
Austen, respectively, turn the novel into a forum for feminism and towards a
recognizably Romantic method of inquiry. Each edits Eve, in characters such
as Miss Milner, Lady Matilda, Louisa Musgrove, and Anne Elliot, in order to
anatomize the fate of women in the fallen world. For each, the novel must
rewrite the fall of woman if it is to rise above certain eighteenth-century
limits and thereby modernize itself. Although they engage with the same
Christian tradition, Austen more profoundly explores its ethical
consequences, while Inchbald vividly dramatizes its psycho-sexual dynamic.
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DOI: <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/t64819725730770g/>
10.3138/ecf.23.1.195
<http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/k420328650480404/>
Reviews/Comptes Rendus
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DOI: <http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/k420328650480404/>
10.3138/ecf.23.1.225
Eighteenth Century Fiction publishes articles in both English and French on
all aspects of imaginative prose in the period 1700–1800, but will also
examine papers on late 17th-century or early 19th-century fiction,
particularly when the works are discussed in connection with the eighteenth
century.
Submissions to Eighteenth Century Fiction
The editors invite contributions on all aspects of imaginative prose in the
period 1700-1800, but are also happy to consider papers on late
seventeenth-century or early nineteenth-century fiction. The languages of
publication are English and French. Articles about the fiction of other
languages are welcomed and comparative studies are particularly encouraged.
The suggested length for manuscripts is 6,000-8,000 words, but longer and
shorter articles have been published in the journal.
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