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Volume 25, Number 2 Winter 2012-13
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/t680086376kk/
This issue contains:
Real Robinson Crusoe
Michael Gavin
What is the ontological status of fiction? Do fictional people exist? In Serious Reflections during the Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), Robinson Crusoe struggles with this very question. Defending his claim to exist in the face of accusations that his entire story was fanciful, Crusoe concedes that his life did not happen in any conventional sense; nonetheless, he asks readers to think of his life as real. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, empirical philosophy recognized a perilous disconnect between knowledge and the actual existence of things in the world. Informed by recent work on the metaphysics of fictional entities, this article reads Crusoe’s ontological self-defence in the context of John Locke’s attempt, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), to prove that knowledge was real despite being mediated entirely by our ideas. “Fiction” provides an inaccurate framework for understanding the books we call eighteenth-century novels because the concept entails ontological commitments at odds with the kind of knowledge these stories represent.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/574jt33g41153t85/?p=11fc0ccb62264f7fa2811472ae2b97d5&pi=0
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.2.301
“Zealous for Their Own Way of Worship”: Defoe, Monarchy, and Religious Toleration during the War of the Quadruple Alliance
Morgan Strawn
Daniel Defoe divides his historical novel Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) into two parts. The first follows King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the Thirty Years War (1618–48); the second examines Charles i and the Bishops’ Wars (1639–40). This diptych portrait of kingship highlights the advantages and limits of the monarch’s ability to promote religious toleration, resonating with contemporary political developments. During the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–20), Britain partnered with Catholic countries in order to preserve the Continental balance of power. The representation of Gustavus Adolphus’s ecumenical leadership in Memoirs of a Cavalier reflects Defoe’s newfound appreciation for such interfaith co-operation. While eighteenth-century conflict revealed the benefits of co-operating with Catholic foreigners, it also revealed the dangers of weakening religious establishments at home. When Spain attempted to disrupt the British war effort by sponsoring an uprising of Episcopalian Highlanders, many blamed that disturbance on laws that weakened the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. For British readers in 1720, the re-enactment of the Bishops’ Wars was a timely reminder of the dangers that arose when king and kirk quarrelled.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/524746kt53584283/?p=11fc0ccb62264f7fa2811472ae2b97d5&pi=1
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.2.327
Waste Management: Tobias Smollett and Remediation
Annika Mann
The uncertain position of Tobias Smollett in studies of the novel must be reconsidered when his final texts, The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), are examined in terms of the consumer revolution and in light of contemporary scientific advances in the study of “mediums.” Smollett, with an anxious eye towards the acceleration of print production and consumption during his lifetime, and keenly aware of a medical discourse that increasingly emphasized the human body as porous and involuntarily affected by its environment, turns in his final texts to remediation in an attempt to make print visible as a uniquely transformative medium. Smollett’s later career illuminates a different configuration than that normally presented in current studies of the novel in the eighteenth century: one in which texts appear not as consumer products but as omnipresent mediums, and where reading has become an involuntary bodily function rather than a voluntary act. This configuration looks forward to the contested status of print at the outset of the Romantic period.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/533434k21t653t46/?p=11fc0ccb62264f7fa2811472ae2b97d5&pi=2
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.2.359
Rétif, Sade, and the Origins of Pornography: Le Pornographe as Anti-Text of La Philosophie dans le boudoir
Amy S. Wyngaard
Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne’s 1769 Le Pornographe—the work from which the term pornography is derived—is not in itself pornographic, and scholars working on the history of pornography emphasize the work’s lack of substantive links to the modern pornographic genre. In this article, I will elucidate the role that Le Pornographe played in the development of pornography—and in particular in Sade’s literary production—by proposing a reading of Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) as a parody and perversion of Rétif’s text. Sade’s dramatic dialogue, which presents a perverted family tale, subverts the sentimental model that Rétif’s text explicitly elaborates. The Revolutionary pamphlet that it frames, which presents plans to establish houses of prostitution for men and women, appropriates and distorts elements of the reform treatise in Le Pornographe, as Rétif himself perceived. By reading the two texts in concert, I show not only how Sade may have been less revolutionary than reactionary in his writing, but also how Rétif’s work can be inserted into the history of pornography as a pivotal text.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/5g672663053286v0/?p=11fc0ccb62264f7fa2811472ae2b97d5&pi=3
Communal Sexuality: Mutual Pleasure in Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir
Kate Parker
Sade’s La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) envisions mutual pleasure as the most elusive and transcendent experience available to libertines, achievable only by submitting oneself wholly to the expansive, unpredictable group dynamics of orgy. In this model of intense communal pleasure, I contend, Sade evinces a keen interest in the literature and modes of sensibility—particularly in how the orgy emulates its representations of shared and mutual communities of feeling. By further incorporating the fraught politics of looking and feeling epitomized by this literary tradition, Sade constructs through the orgy a (limited) liberatory sexual politics and a narrative of progressive sexual community, both of which are defined and shaped by the female body in particular, as it is this body that registers the group sentimental response. The male libertine’s obsessive focus on the sentimental female body thus draws him into the collective pleasures of the orgy and reveals, in unexpected ways, a communal—as opposed to complementary or oppositional—politics of pleasure in Sade’s work.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/58026235lw016118/?p=11fc0ccb62264f7fa2811472ae2b97d5&pi=4
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.2.407
Barbauld’s Richardson and the Canonization of Personal Character
Sören Hammerschmidt
In The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (1804), Anna Barbauld assured readers that the novelist’s personal character (as displayed in his letters) corresponded to his authorial moral character (as inferred through his novels) in order to present him as an appropriate father of the modern British novel—a process I call the canonization of personal character. Barbauld’s editorial work presented Richardson as a benevolent patriarchal figure whose moral authority over the domestic life of his extended family guaranteed the morality of his novels and personal character alike. As my study of Richardson’s correspondence with Sarah Wescomb shows, Barbauld’s interventions muted challenges to Richardson’s authority on questions of paternal control and filial obedience. Life writing, textual criticism, and literary history intertwined so intimately in Barbauld’s treatment that they mutually constituted and sustained each other. Her contributions to the elevation and institution of novels as national genre in the Correspondence and The British Novelists (1810) should therefore be read alongside her canonization of Richardson as the first properly moral, modern novelist.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/586ln17242320m56/?p=11fc0ccb62264f7fa2811472ae2b97d5&pi=5
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.2.431
Reviews/Comptes Rendus
Laura Engel, Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making, reviewed by Jennie Batchelor
Shelley King and Yaël Schlick, Refiguring the Coquette: Essays on Culture and Coquetry, reviewed by Ann Shteir
Claude Rawson, Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift, reviewed by Aaron Santesso
Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson, Enlightened War: German Theories and Cultures of Warfare from Frederick the Great to Clausewitz, reviewed by Viktoria Harms
Jacques Cormier, L’Atelier de Robert Challe (1659–1721), reviewed by Patrick Coleman
Jean-François Perrin, Politique du renonçant: Le dernier Rousseau des “Dialogues” aux “Rêveries”, reviewed by Guillemette Johnston
Christopher D. Johnson, New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction: “Hearts Resolved and Hands Prepared”: Essays in Honor of Jerry C. Beasley, reviewed by Heather Ladd
Michael Hoskin, Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline Herschel, reviewed by Randall Brooks
Tiffany Potter, Ponteach, or the Savages of America: A Tragedy by Robert Rogers, reviewed by Robbie Richardson
Loic Thommeret, Aza ou le Nègre, Critique littéraire par Marie-Hélène Huet
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/5225j2w08473t340/?p=11fc0ccb62264f7fa2811472ae2b97d5&pi=6
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.25.2.455
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