Eighteenth-Century Fiction Volume 23, Number 1 /2010 is now available at http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/j13107804081/.
This issue contains:
Kathryn L. Steele
This article reconsiders interpretive struggle as a paradigm for Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and, in particular, for understanding the novel's eighteenth-century readers. Taking Clarissa as an exemplary character implies a reading strategy that understands female silence as modesty, piety, and passive obedience—an obedience to the idea of authority that nonetheless questions its abuse. I compare modern and eighteenth-century responses, using approaches to the rape as a way to identify significant differences in strategies of interpretation. I also find traces of one of these alternate strategies of interpretation in the use and circulation of religious texts. I argue that religious reading, with concurrent forms of silent response, is an influential implied reading strategy even as this alternate framework of interpretation is difficult, if not impossible, to perceive. Suggesting that we might re-evaluate our readings of Clarissa to consider her as a religious example, this essay meditates on the problem of shifting interpretive protocols.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/fw6659080460r557/?p=8a34fe359e46452a9728ac98d4926ce4&pi=0
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.1.1
“With My Hair in Crystal”: Mourning Clarissa
Kathleen M. Oliver
This essay explores the fetishism of mourning and mourning jewellery as fetish in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Following some historical background on mourning jewellery fashioned with human hair and a definition of fetishism as it relates to mourning jewellery, I discuss Clarissa herself as fetish. I also examine Clarissa's bequests of mourning jewellery by exploring how these fetishized bequests offer psychic compensation to the wearers, allow access to the virtues associated with Clarissa, and assure remembrance of the dead. Finally, I argue for the centrality of mourning to the realization of Richardson's moral, didactic, and aesthetic intent.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/ynn277406316831h/?p=8a34fe359e46452a9728ac98d4926ce4&pi=1
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.1.35
Performing Criticism during Cultural War: The Case of Voltaire's L'Écossaise (1760)
Logan J. Connors
By examining various criticisms of Voltaire's comedy L'Écossaise (1760), I explain how pamphlets and publication strategies altered dramatic performance. Instead of separating non-theatrical writing from dramatic texts, I underline how pamphlets emerged as part of the author's construction of a “theatrical event.” During the cultural battles of the mid-eighteenth century, participants sought to “ready” their public by any discursive means possible. This persuasive activity began before the premiere of plays, which were also attempts to push the spectator into thinking congruently with the author of the work. Drawing on reviews from members of both the philosophe and anti-philosophe camps, I highlight the ambiguity between pamphlet and dramatic text, playwright and polemicist, performance and “set up,” and finally, fiction writer and theatre critic.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/83573447t6171834/?p=8a34fe359e46452a9728ac98d4926ce4&pi=2
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.1.61
On Candide, Catholics, and Freemasonry: How Fiction Disavowed the Loyalty Oaths of 1789–90
Julia V. Douthwaite
In the history of the French Revolution, the 14 July 1790 Festival of the Federation has the distinction of being the only event upon which everyone seems to agree, when people across the country unanimously supported the new nation. This article analyzes three of the best-known fictional accounts embroidered upon the festivities in order to demonstrate that literary analysis does more than generate what Daniel Gordon calls the “glow” of history. Literature allows us to “get it”: to get the jokes, the innuendoes, and the sarcasm relayed by contemporaries on socio-political issues of their day. Historians have detailed the elaborate physical land works and the propaganda campaign that prepared the site and the spectators of the July 1790 ceremonies; but Julie philosophe (1791), La Boussole nationale (1790), and L'Isle des philosophes (1790) depict the gossip and political jockeying that likely went on behind the scenes, and announce bedfellows that are rarely conjoined today: Voltairean wit, Catholicism, and Freemasonry.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/q8m04782312208l0/?p=8a34fe359e46452a9728ac98d4926ce4&pi=3
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.1.81
Rousseau's Crusoe: Or, On Learning to Read as Not Myself
Brian McGrath
A philosophical reading of Émile, ou de l'éducation privileges Jean-Jacques Rousseau's pedagogic advice, while a literary reading privileges the narrative aspects: either Émile is a treatise on education that relies on fiction in order to clearly assert its position, or it is a novel with Émile as its title character that happens to offer practical advice on education. To read it as both would be to reconcile the literary and philosophical aspects of Rousseau's thought; however, as the “or” that divides its title suggests, this work confronts readers with the potential irreconcilability of literary and philosophical discourses. The difficulty of reconciling these competing discourses, and consequently the challenge of reading Émile, is most notable at the moment when Émile, himself, must come to read the only book he will ever need to read, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. This one book, suggests Rousseau, will teach him to read all others, but within Émile the reader discovers the possibility that one only ever learns to read as someone other than oneself.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/97j0u86551q88653/?p=8a34fe359e46452a9728ac98d4926ce4&pi=4
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.1.119
Luke R.J. Maynard
This essay addresses the authorship and complicated history of “Sir Bertrand: A Fragment,” the seminal Gothic short story often attributed to Anna Laetitia Barbauld. I acknowledge the existence of a completed “B-Text” of that fragment, which survives in an obscure anthology titled Gothic Stories (1797). The existence of a cohesive conclusion to this text, a work normally discussed only as “a fragment” and correspondingly tied to theoretical discussions of the Gothic as a genre of fragmentation, underscores the need for a critical re-evaluation of “Sir Bertrand” as both fragment and completed tale, and a new understanding of its role in the development of Gothic and supernatural fiction. I confront the problem of authorship and analyze the literary descent of both texts, and then I interrogate the “lost” conclusion not only to determine its impact on the tale's narrative style and genre, but also to retrace its newly revealed historical roots in order to uncover a potential historical source for the rediscovered B-text.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/r01642v868218472/?p=8a34fe359e46452a9728ac98d4926ce4&pi=5
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.1.141
Charlie Bondhus
In William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, the English Squire Falkland's decision to construct his identity in conformity with Italian honour codes not only debases his Englishness but also drives him to persecute his secretary Caleb Williams, who possesses a damning secret that could ruin the Squire's distinguished reputation. The embattled Caleb, who prides himself on his autonomy and English identity, is forced to disguise himself first as an Irish beggar and later as a Jewish peddler, facades that render him, like Falkland, an ethnically anomalous Englishman. The middle-class Caleb's ethnic destabilization at Falkland's hands suggests that Godwin, like many of his more conservative peers, is claiming that the continentally inflected malfeasance of the aristocracy corrupts the bourgeoisie in such a way that the very terms and privileges of Englishness are contested. In this way, Godwin's ostensible purpose of promoting a liberal model of human rights ultimately comes at the cost of reifying xenophobic fears about Italians, Jews, and the Irish.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/a7703013567n6722/?p=8a34fe359e46452a9728ac98d4926ce4&pi=6
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.1.163
Editing Eve: Rewriting the Fall in Austen's Persuasion and Inchbald's A Simple Story
John Morillo
Within the last two decades of the eighteenth century, Elizabeth Inchbald and Jane Austen both responded to the need to critique and rewrite the biblical story of the Fall and the stature of Eve in Christian Britain as a way to turn the romance novel towards feminist social criticism. In A Simple Story (1791) and Persuasion (1817) the Catholic Inchbald and the Anglican Austen, respectively, turn the novel into a forum for feminism and towards a recognizably Romantic method of inquiry. Each edits Eve, in characters such as Miss Milner, Lady Matilda, Louisa Musgrove, and Anne Elliot, in order to anatomize the fate of women in the fallen world. For each, the novel must rewrite the fall of woman if it is to rise above certain eighteenth-century limits and thereby modernize itself. Although they engage with the same Christian tradition, Austen more profoundly explores its ethical consequences, while Inchbald vividly dramatizes its psycho-sexual dynamic.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/t64819725730770g/?p=8a34fe359e46452a9728ac98d4926ce4&pi=7
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.1.195
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/k420328650480404/?p=8a34fe359e46452a9728ac98d4926ce4&pi=8
DOI: 10.3138/ecf.23.1.225
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.
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.
For more information, please visit Eighteenth Century Fiction Online at http://www.utpjournals.com/ecf
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