Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Volume 25, Number 1, Fall 2012
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Exoticism and Cosmopolitanism
Edited by Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins
This special issue will include an introduction written by distinguished
scholar Dr. Zuroski Jenkins and a response essay from Dr. Srinivas
Aravamudan, professor of English at Duke University. The collected essays by
established and emerging international scholars offer original ways of
thinking about the relationship between the exotic and the cosmopolitan in
eighteenth-century literature and culture. Thinking beyond post-colonial
analyses of exoticism that emphasize dialectic relationships between Western
selves and non-Western "others," the issue presents a variety of instances
in eighteenth-century European culture that incorporate hybrid,
orientalized, and other ostensibly "global" forms that productively
destabilize national identities. These essays demonstrate not only that
"fiction" took many forms - theatrical, material, narrative - but also that
it generated multiple models of agency in the context of expanded world
commerce and nascent imperialism.
This issue contains:
Introduction: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism, and Fiction’s Aesthetics of
Diversity
Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.1.1
The Queen of Sorrow and the Knight of the Indies: Cosmopolitan Possibilities
in The Recess and The New Cosmetic
Laura J. Rosenthal
Historians have documented the rise of English nationalism in the eighteenth
century. Two eighteenth-century authors, Sophia Lee and Samuel Jackson
Pratt, turn to the Gothic as a specific way in which to explore what gets
left out and left behind during the rise of nationalism. Lee’s Gothic novel
The Recess tells the counterfactual story of the two secret daughters of
Mary, Queen of Scots, in a way that imagines alternatives to the aggressive
nationalism that her fictional Elizabeth comes to represent. Lee’s lingering
on the extreme suffering of her heroines aligns her novel aesthetically with
other artists and writers who challenged imperial expansion through an
emphasis on the anguish obscured by other aesthetic choices. A fan of Gothic
fiction and a Gothic novelist himself, Pratt offers a farcical version of
similar dynamics through the juxtaposition of Gothic tropes with colonial
slavery. In his play The New Cosmetic, an ointment holds the promise of
changing skin colour, but only after excruciating pain.
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.1.9
Cosmopolitanism and the Radical Politics of Exile in Charlotte Smith’s
Desmond
Fuson Wang
Considering Charlotte Smith’s novel Desmond (1792) within the framework of
Immanuel Kant’s concept of cosmopolitanism proves to be distinctly
productive. For most readers, the novel clearly dramatizes radical sentiment
in the Jacobin tradition. The character of Bethel, however, represents an
unlikely cosmopolitan foil for Desmond’s more conventional brand of
radicalism. Specifically, Bethel’s slow conversion to French Revolutionary
principles serves to expand and even challenge the insular, congealed
ideology of Desmond’s Francophile circle of young reformers. Instead of
locating an embodied cosmopolitanism in the novel’s concluding marriages,
Bethel’s exclusion from the novel’s happy ending signals Smith’s endorsement
of a more mature cosmopolitanism that extends a narrowly nationalistic sense
of community into a properly inclusive system of what Kant called
“cosmopolitan right.” By subtly drawing attention away from her novel’s
central couples—the radical pairing of Desmond and Geraldine and the mixed
union of Montfleuri and Fanny—and towards old Bethel, Smith emerges less
naively partisan and more politically nuanced than most critics have allowed
in this early novel.
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.1.37
Cosmopolitans, Slaves, and the Global Market in Voltaire’s Candide, ou
l’optimisme
Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt
The cosmopolitan and the slave are the offspring of a global world governed
by exchangeability and transportability. In Voltaire’s most famous work,
Candide, ou l’optimisme (1759), these two juxtaposed characters represent
radically different results of globalization. A historical reading that
explores the context of colonialism, war, and the increasing world trade of
the eighteenth century reveals how migration defines the identities of the
cosmopolitan and the slave, and the ways in which both characters challenge
a traditional notion of belonging. While the cosmopolitan moves freely, the
slave is unfree and only moved by others. Focusing on Candide’s encounter
with a Negro slave in Surinam, I discuss how the tale deals with the legal
and philosophical problems raised by the transatlantic slave trade, and
question why Voltaire treats North African slavery differently. Following
from these discussions, I examine the attitude towards European colonialism
shown by Voltaire’s cosmopolitans, arguing that these characters reject the
global market on the basis of an ethics of human rights.
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.1.61
Tears in Tehran/Laughter in London: James Morier, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan,
and the Geopolitics of Emotion
Daniel O’Quinn
Throughout the eighteenth century, diplomatic relations were frequently
supplemented by the deployment of entertainment, specifically the theatre,
as a potential site where negotiation could be furthered, altered, or
impeded. Both the British embassy to Tehran in 1809 and the Persian embassy
to London in 1809–10 involved acts of shared theatrical consumption. James
Morier, the secretary to Harford Jones, published detailed descriptions of
Ta’ziyeh performances in Tehran in A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and
Asia Minor (1812). And the journal of his counterpart, Mirza Abul Hassan
Khan, engages with the many operas and plays he attended during his sojourn
in London. Both envoys recognize and contain the allegorical scenarios being
staged in the scene of diplomacy. In each case, Morier and Abul Hassan are
troubled by the reception of these affect-laden performances, and the ways
in which they distinguish themselves from the audience around them reveal
the limits of intercultural exchange at this moment in the Napoleonic wars.
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.1.85
Toying with China: Cosmopolitanism and Chinoiserie in Russian Garden Design
and Building Projects under Catherine the Great
Jennifer Milam
An emerging cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century bolstered the search
for the foundations of a shared humanity across the boundaries of different
cultures, which was one of the central aspects of Enlightenment thought.
Similar ideas and principles transformed the traditions of European garden
design in the second half of the eighteenth century with William Chambers’s
writings on Chinese gardens suggesting aesthetic values that both paralleled
and rivalled those found in the English gardens of his contemporaries. In
1771, Catherine the Great translated Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings
(1757) into Russian, which led to the creation of the largest complex of
chinoiserie in any eighteenth-century European garden. Taking as my focus
the gardens of Tsarskoye Selo, I explore the tensions between
cosmopolitanism, exoticism, and imperialism in Russian garden design under
Catherine the Great.
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Culture in Miniature: Toy Dogs and Object Life
Chi-ming Yang
In the commodity culture of eighteenth-century England, miniature dogs and
porcelain shared the classification of imported “toys” and “curios.” The pug
and the King Charles spaniel were both East Asian breeds of dog brought to
England and domesticated, becoming favoured symbols of national culture;
they were then rendered into porcelain miniatures that were regularly
commissioned and reproduced in China and sent back to England. Techniques of
miniaturization in the plastic as well as the biological arts were developed
in tandem, and the interrelated identities of these “Oriental” animals and
objects reveal the miniature to be a cross-cultural phenomenon tied to new
technologies of modelling life. Dog breeding, as porcelain sculpture, was an
exercise in importing, shaping, and innovating the commodity form. The toy
dog, a small but far from trivial commodity, mediated relations of racial,
sexual, and species difference and helped establish a luxury market for the
pet as a racialized fetish object that continues to this day.
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The Solitary Animal: Professional Authorship and Persona in Goldsmith’s The
Citizen of the World
Megan Kitching
Employing the persona of a Chinese philosopher, Oliver Goldsmith in The
Citizen of the World (1762) examines the changing roles of the professional
author and critic in the literary marketplace. Through other, various
outsider personae, Goldsmith questions whether popular literature can
establish cultural and moral authority over an expanding readership. In
adapting the genre of oriental correspondence to periodical journalism,
particularly the commercial newspaper the Public Ledger where the “Chinese
letters” originally appeared, Goldsmith ironically critiques the utility and
authenticity of such fictions. Although the Chinese philosopher represents
cosmopolitan and enlightened tradition, he fails as a potential arbiter of
polite taste. He also fails to reconcile the writer’s obligations to
instruct and amuse. The professional author in The Citizen of the World is
increasingly marginalized, facing a widening gulf between his material and
his desired audience, a forerunner of the sentimentalized persona that would
establish Goldsmith’s posthumous reputation.
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.1.175
Penelope Aubin and Narratives of Empire
Edward J. Kozaczka
In Count de Vinevil and Lucinda, Penelope Aubin maps queer experiences among
women onto her consideration of nascent British imperialism in order to
protest and expose the limits of expansionist conservative discourses.
Treating Aubin’s texts as an occasion for reimagining literature’s role in
producing alternative modes of imperial and libidinal desire, I claim that,
like many Tory women writers of her time, Aubin’s convoluted narrative
structure purposefully matches the complications of sociopolitical reality.
Aubin moves from a critique of patriarchal mercantilism in Vinevil to what I
call a queer critique of triumphalist epistemologies and imperialism in
Lucinda. Far from being small steps on the way to the modern novel, Aubin’s
experimental writings represent brave attempts to redefine
eighteenth-century womanhood and shape more inclusive British worlds.
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.1.199
Response: Exoticism beyond Cosmopolitanism?
Srinivas Aravamudan
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.1.227
Reviews/Comptes Rendus
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DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.1.243
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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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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.
The Chicago Manual of Style is used for most points in ECF. Articles
submitted should be double-spaced, including quotations. Email submissions
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evaluates manuscripts anonymously, the author's name ought not to appear on
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For more information, please visit Eighteenth Century Fiction Online at
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