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Eighteenth Century Fiction - Volume 27, Number 1, Fall 2014
This issue contains:
English Republicanism and Global Slavery in Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines
Bethany Williamson
Recent scholarship on Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668) has foregrounded the text’s engagement with seventeenth-century republicanism or with early modern discourses of colonialism and race. In this article, I argue that The Isle of Pines links politics and race through the figure of Philippa and illustrates how republican ideals become intertwined with an exclusionary racial logic. Specifically, I contextualize the English Pines’ dystopic island and interactions with the visiting Dutch merchants within an Asia-centric commercial network that depends on a global system of slavery. My approach, which resituates The Isle of Pines in its Indian Ocean framework, enables a fuller understanding of how English republicans recognized and displaced the human costs of mercantilism in their efforts to develop a viable political model for the age of expansion and empire. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.27.1.1
Wit at War: The Poetry of John Wilmot and the Trauma of War
Cynthia Richards
To read Rochester’s poetry as reflecting the trauma of war troubles the dominant narrative of his literary legacy. That the persona of those poems often presents a “fragmented self” and the world described is a chaotic, deeply disordered one are givens. To read these poems in the context of trauma studies can compromise two current truisms about his work: its honesty and its wit. For, if trauma narratives are largely significant for their “slippages,” for what they leave “unexpressed,” Rochester’s work, by contrast, is celebrated for its willingness to name what others refuse to. Rochester’s famed obscenity points to his courage to speak the unspeakable, to say what others can and will not. Rochester’s reliance on wit means his poetry operates according to principles of association rather than the troubling disassociation connected to trauma. Reading Rochester’s poetry as reflecting the trauma of war then complicates its status as poetry that critiques its culture—that names its excesses—rather than poetry which is so compromised by those atrocities as unwittingly to hide them. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.27.1.25
Machines in Love: Bodies, Souls, and Sexes in the Age of La Mettrie
Hal Gladfelder
The writings of renegade philosophe Julien Offray de La Mettrie were denounced in his lifetime not only by political authorities but by his fellow philosophes, Denis Diderot and Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. Yet his work broke with orthodox views of the body, eros, and human nature with such force as to provoke those thinkers, and such authors as John Cleland and Sade, to interrogate the limits of the human and the disruptive effects of desire. Focusing on his incendiary philosophical satire L’Homme machine and the erotic reverie La Volupté, this article examines La Mettrie’s theory of the imagination as a material function of the body-as-machine, which can unsettle distinctions between human and animal, female and male, self and other. For La Mettrie, as for Diderot, Cleland, and Sade, metamorphosis gives narrative articulation to the principle of the underlying unity of material substance, even as it embodies the lability and impermanence of all identities. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.27.1.55
Metrology: The Body as Measure in Les Liaisons dangereuses
David McCallam
This cultural-historical reading of Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) situates it in the context of the 1780s engagement with weights and measures reform in France. The protagonists of the novel resort to a language of weights and measures in order to appraise their world which is fraught with material, sexual and ideological signification. Contemporary discussions of weights and measures often incriminated the seigneurial regime as principal abuser of the system, invoking in the process philosophical connotations of “the just measure” or socially responsible moderation and equity. As well, the human body remained at this time the principal benchmark for constituting the systems of measurement with which the French of the 1780s gauged and appraised their physical and imaginative environments. Hence, Choderlos de Laclos’s famous letter-novel of 1782 provides a telling case study allowing us to determine how far the uniquely resonant universe of contemporary fiction reflects and inflects the metrological concerns of its society as well as potentially suggesting ways in which people still measure and weigh the world atavistically, according to pre-metric and pre-decimal, corporeal means. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.27.1.83
Jane Austen and “Banal Shakespeare”
Megan Taylor
While critics have long acknowledged Jane Austen’s literary debt to William Shakespeare, little attention has been paid to her infrequent use of direct quotations from his work. Perhaps because these instances of quotation are so rare, most critics who take note of them classify them as purely ironic: Austen quotes the Bard as a means by which to satirize the eighteenth-century vogue for Shakespeare epigrams, mocking other writers who ineptly or inaptly cite well-worn passages in a transparent bid for artistic legitimacy. While true to a certain extent, this conclusion does not do justice to Austen’s admiration of Shakespeare nor to the range of her sophisticated irony. Opening up such a critical standpoint in this article, I closely examine instances of direct quotations from Shakespeare in Austen’s novels and argue that Austen does not simply mock those writers who misuse Shakespeare; her quotations also reinvigorate his most clichéd aphorisms and demonstrate both their continuing relevance and her own keen understanding of their complex original contexts. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.27.1.105
Literary Gossip: Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon and the roman à clef
Lauren McCoy
In this article, I argue for a reconsideration of the roman à clef, using Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon (1816) as a case study. I challenge the conventional narrative of the rise of the novel that labels the roman à clef as a vestigial form with no place in relation to the dominant realist novel. In making this argument, I establish a social reading practice, singular to romans à clef, using archival materials to illustrate the ways in which Regency readers circulated keys and gossip about Glenarvon and Lamb’s life as a part of their response to the novel. Such a reading practice opens up possibilities for a marginalized writer, especially a marginalized female writer like Lamb, to disseminate gossip about herself as a way to enter a literary marketplace. DOI: 10.3138/ecf.27.1.127
Book Reviews/Critiques de livres
April London, The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, reviewed by Megan A. Woodworth
ed. Michael Bell, The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists, reviewed by Megan A. Woodworth
ed. John Richetti, The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, reviewed by Megan A. Woodworth
Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600–1800, reviewed by Megan A. Woodworth
ed. Elizabeth C. Mansfield and Kelly Malone, Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century, SVEC 2013:02, reviewed by Geoffrey Sill
Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in England 1658–1770, reviewed by Geoffrey Sill
Kelly McGuire, Dying to Be English: Suicide Narratives and National Identity, 1721–1814, reviewed by Nicole Reynolds
Wolfram Schmidgen, Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England, reviewed by Katherine M. Quinsey
Megan A. Woodworth, Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and the Gentlemen’s Liberation Movement: Independence, War, Masculinity, and the Novel, 1778–1818, reviewed by Robert W. Jones
Andrew Swift and Kirsten Elliott, Literary Walks in Bath: Eleven Excursions in the Company of Eminent Authors, reviewed by John Eglin
Philippe Barr, Rétif de La Bretonne spectateur nocturne: Une esthétique de la pauvreté, reviewed by Françoise Le Borgne
Kathryn R. King, A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood, reviewed by Juliette Merritt
Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism, reviewed by Chi-ming Yang
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.26.1.151
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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. www.utpjournals.com/ecf
Eighteenth Century Fiction is available online at:
Project MUSE - http://bit.ly/ecf_pm
ECF Online - http://bit.ly/ecf_online
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 are encouraged [log in to unmask]. As ECF evaluates manuscripts anonymously, the author's name ought not to appear on the article itself.
Posted by T Hawkins, UTP Journals