Volume 26, Number 2, Winter 2013-14
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/j3411220vu10/
This issue contains:
Ideal Friendship and the Paradoxes of Narration in Sarah Fielding’s David Simple
Bryan Mangano
Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple and David Simple, Volume the Last engage with the social category of real friendship not only in representations of character ties, but also in the development of a third-person narrator that works to embody ideal amity through a triangulation of the reader’s attitude towards characters. In contrasting instances of true and false friendship, the novels generate a radical scepticism that the narrator must deflect by managing access to characters in a manner that stimulates the reader’s faith in their affections. The narrator’s performance of friendship towards character and reader generates contradictions around the epistemology of knowing other minds, the ethics of friendly intimacy, and power relations between writer and audience. In this article, I argue that Fielding’s technique suggests the broader significance of ideal friendship as a privileged moral concept for the history of eighteenth-century fiction. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.26.2.165
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/17328l36h064t655/?p=d5d7d52d8a27405eb3e4dbb0eb6e8791&pi=0
De l’amour électif comme réel absolu: Mémoire et passion dans La Nouvelle Héloïse de J.-J. Rousseau
Jean-François Perrin
Dans La Nouvelle Héloïse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, roman qui fut ressenti par toute son époque comme résolument moderne, l’ancien idéalisme romanesque issu de L’Astrée se trouve à la fois dépassé et relancé à travers une puissante réactivation de la dialectique platonicienne de l’amour. L’approche sensationniste des rapports entre sensibilité et conscience passionnée, alors courante dans la fiction libertine, y est combattue par la mise en scène très concertée du primat du sentiment sur la sensation et de l’accent sur la représentation, et par la démonstration de ce que l’intériorité passionnée de l’âme sensible est bien pour elle toute la réalité: les suites problématiques des expériences de M. de Wolmar avec l’imaginaire mémoriel des héros illustrent ce qu’on risque, par conséquent, à manipuler les êtres en négligeant la spiritualité de leurs affects (et révèlent au passage la familiarité méconnue de Rousseau avec l’enseignement classique des Arts de la mémoire). On constate enfin la puissante capacité d’exploration artistique du temps subjectif qu’a permise, bien avant Les Confessions, une assomption à la fois méditée et vécue de la thèse lockienne sur le fondement mémoriel de l’identité personnelle. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.26.2.189
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/h1548518j8078373/?p=d5d7d52d8a27405eb3e4dbb0eb6e8791&pi=1
Matthew J. Rigilano
The structure of feminine subjectivity in Sophia Lee’s The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times (1783) is frequently reduced to a discursive construction or a maternal substance. When critical attention is focused on Lee’s unique handling of visual and textual “absorption”—a concept I borrow from Michael Fried—it is clear that historicist and Gothic logics of subjectivity fall short of describing what the novel actually achieves. I link Lee’s textual innovations to Jacques Lacan’s theories of the gaze and of feminine desire. Just as Lacan emphasized the literal aspect of the signifier, Lee attempts to literalize the historical and subjective dramas with which she engages in the novel. Her literalizations exceed the standard alignment of the feminine with non-meaning or nature (an alignment that supports the assumption of masculine meaningfulness) as Lee’s literality pertains to the letter itself. To be absorbed by the literal: it is this unique scenario that necessitates a rethinking of the basic problematic of sentimental reading practices in the eighteenth century. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.26.2.209
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/91981413665k4129/?p=d5d7d52d8a27405eb3e4dbb0eb6e8791&pi=2
Anachronistic Aesthetics: Maria Edgeworth and the “Uses” of History
Mary Mullen
Scholars often understand Maria Edgeworth as a belated Enlightenment writer in a Romantic age because she seeks to organize both her fiction and the history it represents so that they can be put to use. In this article, however, I argue that Maria Edgeworth’s Irish writing legitimates lived relationships between past and present that her politics wished to eradicate. Although she attempts to periodize within her fiction to shape a useful history—separating past and present in order to bring about an imagined future—her anachronistic aesthetics unsettle her historical periods and show the political value of discordance, contingency, and historical misuse. Focusing especially on An Essay on Irish Bulls and Castle Rackrent, I consider how Edgeworth’s anachronisms imagine political possibilities that do not simply support either union with England or Irish nationalism. The heterogeneity created by portable aesthetic forms—whether literary language that transcends its historical context or forms of metalepsis that propel readers forward and backward in time—foster transhistorical relationships that expand our understanding of the present and imagine a more open future. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.26.2.233
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/27xp0771l7w92527/?p=d5d7d52d8a27405eb3e4dbb0eb6e8791&pi=3
Natasha Tessone
This essay explores the question of commercialism in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816), particularly as it reflects Enlightenment debates about the place of ethics in a modern commercial society. I examine the challenge—and, for Enlightenment thinkers, the urgency—of living morally in a commercialized, modern Britain, where communal ties were replaced by self-interest and monetary gain. In The Antiquary, Scott follows the thinking of Adam Smith and David Hume, who strove to define an aggregate of self-interested men as a principled community with well-developed social and ethical norms that would allow for what Smith called a “happy commerce” of socialization. Set during the French Revolution, the community anxiously anticipating a supposed French invasion cannot afford to give in to self-interested impulses that threaten to pull its members away from a unified polity. Rather than valorizing the feudal community and its social relationships, Scott historicizes the moment when sentiment as an affective communal glue is remediated from its feudal model into a force of sociability that would fit a society governed by a system of moral economy that is contingent upon the rules of contemporary, post-feudal commercial order. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.26.2.261
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/a7r267002462220m/?p=d5d7d52d8a27405eb3e4dbb0eb6e8791&pi=4
Kathleen E. Urda
This article revisits the question of why Jane Austen refuses to portray any theatrical performances within Mansfield Park (1814), even though much of the plot concerns a group of young people attempting to put on a play. While scholars have generally abandoned the idea that this choice reveals Austen’s puritanical distaste for the theatre, it remains unusual in the context of other roughly contemporary novels that also involve the theatre or theatricals. Looking at examples of such theatrical novels shows that their staging of performances tends to disrupt the idea of character as stable identity, in much the same way that Lisa Freeman has suggested theatre itself did at the time. Though her use of interiority has been much discussed as the tool Austen employs to construct a sense of essential identity for her characters, her decision to forego the direct representation of various theatrical moments while focusing readers’ attention on their consequences is another way Austen convinces us that the novel is able to distinguish “real” character from the performance of it. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.26.2.281
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/r643851534k7nwh4/?p=d5d7d52d8a27405eb3e4dbb0eb6e8791&pi=5
Book Reviews/Critiques de livres
Kathleen Lubey, Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660–1760, Reviewed by George E. Haggerty
John C. O’Neal, The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment, Reviewed by James A. Steintrager
Roger D. Lund, Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England, Reviewed by Darryl P. Domingo
Lyndon J. Dominique, Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1759–1808, Reviewed by Roxann Wheeler
Jason Solinger, Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern Masculinity, 1660–1815, Reviewed by Shawn Lisa Maurer
Karen Valihora, Austen’s Oughts: Judgment after Locke and Shaftesbury, Reviewed by Hina Nazar
Francesca Saggini, trans. Laura Kopp, Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theatre Arts, Reviewed by Stewart Cooke
Manushag N. Powell, Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals, Reviewed by Chantel Lavoie
éd. Jan Herman, Kris Peeters et Paul Pelckmans, Dupaty et l’Italie des voyageurs sensibles, Reviewed by Friedrich Wolfzettel
Alexandre Radichtchev, ed. Rodolphe Baudin, Le Voyage de Petersbourg à Moscou (1790), Reviewed by Andreas Schönle
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.26.2.303
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/t46436665np21223/?p=d5d7d52d8a27405eb3e4dbb0eb6e8791&pi=6
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