Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Volume 25, Number 4, Summer 2013

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/v555jk237814/

This issue contains: 

Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power
Cynthia Richards       

This article interrogates the function and effect of the penultimate paragraph of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, where Oroonoko is tortured and executed. Reading the scene through the prism of European practices of ritual punishment and judicial torture as well as New World uses of torture, I argue that the scene cannot be read, as many critics have, as one of martyrdom. Rather, the scene emerges as closer in its rhetorical aims to those articulated by Elaine Scarry in her seminal analysis of torture, The Body in Pain (1985). As is the case with judicial and modern torture, Behn deliberately produces a body in pain in order to give legitimacy to the truth of her own narrative. Yet, in opposition to that brutal practice, she simultaneously exposes the fictional nature of her own narrative power. She reminds the reader of the violence inherent in any appropriation of another’s story for one’s own political or literary ends, and in the process paradoxically produces one of the first modern, democratic subjects.DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.4.647

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/b635h381412655t7/?p=2bf3d7d370874f51a41a5b801445506f&pi=0

 
“Black, Patched and Pennyless”: Race and Crime in Burney’s The Wanderer
Tara Czechowski        

In Frances Burney’s The Wanderer; Or, Female Difficulties, an English heiress escapes Revolutionary France disguised as a black woman. While in this disguise, she is accused of theft, beggary, and prostitution, and, despite her innocence, she is ultimately advertised as a criminal even after her black makeup fades. This article historicizes Juliet’s criminalization within metropolitan alarm about the alien black population of former African slaves living in Britain at the close of the eighteenth century. Rather than merely reproducing racialist thought as other critics have claimed, Burney’s novel interrogates the idea of black as criminal by exposing how the fraught, anti-Jacobin rhetoric of Edmund Burke and the class anxieties of the French Revolution contributed to the entrenchment of this early stereotype. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.4.677

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/k2q4v7v826228705/?p=2bf3d7d370874f51a41a5b801445506f&pi=1

           

Dangerous Fortune-telling in Frances Burney’s Camilla
Jennifer Locke           

Frances Burney’s novel Camilla is an experiment in speculation. Charlatans and adepts in Camilla claim to be able to predict the futures of a cast of children, and Burney invites her readers to try, alongside these supposed experts, to predict the futures of these young people, whose economic, health, and educational futures are in flux. By reading Camilla in the context of popular fortune-telling games and probability theory, we can more clearly understand Burney’s use of the novel to critique various forms of projection. I examine in particular Every Lady’s Own Fortune-Teller, a 1791 manual that claimed to offer a new method of using scientific induction to tell individuals’ futures. Burney’s novel shows the danger inherent in this combination of scientific authority and reductive guesswork by demonstrating the varying effects of fortune-telling on two young characters: Camilla and her sister Eugenia. By simultaneously encouraging readers’ curiosity about the characters’ futures and undermining the efficacy and value of projection, Burney trains her readers to read more flexibly and to understand women’s lives in more complex, contingent ways. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.4.701

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/u2801547854775q7/?p=2bf3d7d370874f51a41a5b801445506f&pi=2

           
At Seventeen: Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
Shawn Lisa Maurer    

Examining Jane Austen’s seventeen-year-old protagonist Marianne Dashwood as an adolescent provides new insight into how Austen presents, and how readers have responded to, Marianne’s emotions, behaviours, and eventual marriage to Colonel Brandon. I work against the conventional opposition of sense versus sensibility to posit instead a developmental progression from adolescence to adulthood. In this article, I show how Austen uses the imaginative space of the novel to depict adolescence by allowing her protagonist first to explore and then to grow out of the dangers associated with this stage of life. This thoroughgoing re-evaluation of Marianne’s character challenges the prevailing readings of Sense and Sensibility. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.4.721

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/vl47n8274484485v/?p=2bf3d7d370874f51a41a5b801445506f&pi=3

           
Natural History and Narrative Sympathy: The Children’s Animal Stories of Edward Augustus Kendall (1775/6?–1842)
Jane Spencer 

Edward Augustus Kendall (1775/6?–1842), a late eighteenth-century writer of children’s animal stories, deserves recognition for his sustained attempt to offer an empathetic rendition of imagined animal experience in fiction. His early fiction, including the dog story Keeper’s Travels (1798) and several tales of bird life, contributed to the development of more sympathetic attitudes to non-human animals in the late eighteenth century. Two factors influenced the development of Kendall’s innovative treatment of animal characters. First, the natural history of Buffon and his English translators and followers, in particular William Smellie, informed Kendall’s detailed attention to animal behaviour and to questions of animal mind and sentience. Second, the contemporary development of narrative techniques designed, on the basis of the imaginative sympathy theorized by Adam Smith, to encourage readers to identify with protagonists’ feelings, prompted Kendall to extend such methods to the representation of animal characters. He helped shift animal representation away from fable and satire towards naturalism and empathy. His use of third-person narrative proved most fruitful in this regard, and anticipated later developments in the imaginative apprehension of non-human experience.DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.4.751

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/c4r2176u3q444051/?p=2bf3d7d370874f51a41a5b801445506f&pi=4

           
Reviews/Comptes Rendus
ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, Reviewed by Nicholas Hudson
Sara Salih, Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present, Reviewed by Nicole N. Aljoe
ed. Marius Warholm et Knut Ove Eliassen, Dévier et divertir: Littérature et pensée de xviiie siècle, Reviewed by Pamela Cheek
Deborah Needleman Armintor, The Little Everyman: Stature and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Reviewed by Cameron McFarlane
Aparna Gollapudi, Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1747, Reviewed by Rachel Carnell
Laura Linker, Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670–1730, Reviewed by Rachel Carnell
Jennifer Tsien, The Bad Taste of Others: Judging Literary Value in Eighteenth-Century France, Critique littéraire par Baldine Saint Girons
éd. Christina Ionescu, Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, Critique littéraire par Christophe Martin
éd. Marc Hersant, Marie-Paule Pilorge, Catherine Ramond et François Raviez, Histoire, histoires: Nouvelles approches de Saint-Simon et des récits des xviie–xviiie siècles, Critique littéraire par Guy Rooryck
Tobias Smollett, ed. Frank Felsenstein, Travels through France and Italy, Reviewed by Terence N. Bowers
Claire Gallien, L’Orient anglais: Connaissances et fictions au xviiie siècle, Critique littéraire par Florence D’Souza
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.4.775

http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/d80pn365p03kq550/?p=2bf3d7d370874f51a41a5b801445506f&pi=5

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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.

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