Eighteenth-Century literature and culture

Exploring Enlightenment attitudes toward things and their relation to human subjects, this collection offers a geographically wide-ranging perspective on what the eighteenth century looked like beyond British or British-colonial borders. To highlight trends, fashions, and cultural imports of truly global significance, the contributors draw their case studies from Western Europe, Russia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. This survey underscores the multifarious ways in which new theoretical approaches, such as thing theory or material and visual culture studies, revise our understanding of the people and objects that inhabit the phenomenological spaces of the eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on a particular geographical area, or on the global as a juxtaposition of regions with a distinctive cultural footprint, this collection draws attention to the unforeseen relational maps drawn by things in their global peregrinations, celebrating the logic of serendipity that transforms the object into some-thing else when it is placed in a new locale.

The paper is dedicated to a historiographical analysis of the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Primer by Fedor (Theodore) Polikarpov published at the Moscow Print Yard in 1701.The unique character of the publication lies in the fact that for the first time in the historyof the Moscow book-printing culture there was an attempt to introduce the basics of notonly one language but of three languages at the same time: Slavic, Greek and Latin. Animportant part of the study was to expose the sources of the Primer, and with this end inview, explored were not only earlier Primers but also the manuscript of the trilingual Primerwritten by Fedor Polikarpov. As of today, we discovered about 70 copies of the Primer invarious libraries. As a result of the study of these copies, a conclusion was drawn that bythe time of the release of the Primer, the learning of foreign languages had already graduallybeen entering into the lives of some part of society and a sufficiently trained reading publichad already been formed.

The establishment of a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth century and an expansion of the sphere of colonial influence in the eighteenth century made South Africa the only part of sub-Saharan Africa where Europeans could travel with relative ease deep into the interior. As a result individuals with scientific interests in Africa came to the Cape. This book examines writings and drawings of scientifically educated travellers, particularly in the field of ethnography, against the background of commercial and administrative discourses on the Cape. It is argued that the scientific travellers benefited more from their relationship with the colonial order than the other way around.

Reviews: British Journal for the History of Science (Saul Dubow, History Dept., University of Sussex), Internationale Neerlandistiek (Samira Sassi, Dutch Dept., University of Oldenburg), Isis (Alette Fleischer, Department of History of Science & Technology, University of Twente), Centaurus: Journal for the European Society for the History of Science (James E. McClellan III, Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey), Werkwinkel (Ryszard Bartnik, Dept. of English, University of Poznan), South African Historical Journal (Wayne Dooling, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), Mitteilungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Missiongeschichte (Ulrich van der Heyden), Humboldt Universität, Berichte für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (S. Müller-Wille, University of Exeter); Etudes littéraires africaines (Nicholas Brucker, Université de Lorraine), Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient (Nigel Penn, University of Cape Town).

Two-slot seminar at the International Society for the Study of English (ISECS) 14th International Congress for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Rotterdam (Netherlands), 27-31 July 2015. Co-organiser: Suzanne Pucci (University of Kentucky, US). The Seminar is now scheduled for 28 July.

This panel will be looking from the standpoint of several complementary literary and cultural traditions (English, French, Russian, Italian) at forms of counter-domesticity that arose and developed alongside what social, cultural and sexual historians of the eighteenth century have long defined ‘the domesticated nuclear family’, marked by the imprint of Rousseauian ‘family values’ and characterised by affection and romance in marriage. As a matter of fact unorthodox or hybrid family arrangements and subversive kinship structures –variously perceived (and often stigmatised) as unnatural, oppressive, abusive, mercenary, queer, illicit, illegal, even taboo- attest a (counter-)history of familial structures, exchanges and negotiations that awaits to be explored further. Did the revolution intrude into family life even before the Revolution? This panel argues for a clearer and more comprehensive understanding of the concepts of ‘family’, ‘the private sphere’ and ‘domesticity’ in the age of the Enlightenment, a (re)vision that may challenge the mythology of eighteenth-century domesticity and reinstate in the critical radar what has traditionally been relegated to peripheral or spectralised narratives. Although submitted as a complete panel, the Chairs would still be happy to consider suitable submissions that may offer further original avenues of enquiry germane to the overall topic of the panel.

It is a commonplace of literary history that satire vanishes in the middle of the eighteenth century. It is clear, however, that written and especially visual satire witness massive growth in the final decades of the century and throughout the Romantic era. My goal is to explain this simultaneous contraction and expansion of the satiric marketplace. Rather than dying, I argue, satire begins to migrate to visual media, and especially caricature, after mid-century. The reason for this migration is the shifting procedural norms of libel law itself. Over the first half of the century, the courts developed procedures for delimiting verbal ambiguity in trials for libel that made the publication of written satire perilous. These same procedures were largely useless, however, in the prosecution of visual materials, which made at best sparing use of words—they were, as I put it, “deverbalized”—and therefore not subject to the same rulings and interpretive procedures.

For the full article, please go to https://muse.jhu.edu/article/688757/summary or email the author at andrew.bricker@ugent.be

The International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) is pleased to announce the 2018 International Seminar for Early Career Eighteenth-Century Scholars. Colleagues from all fields of eighteenth-century studies are invited to submit abstracts for this one-week event. Formerly called the East-West Seminar, the International Seminar for Early Career Eighteenth-Century Scholars brings together young researchers from a number of countries each year. The 2018 meeting will take place in Viterbo, Italy and will be organized by Prof. Francesca Saggini and the Dipartimento di studi linguistico-letterari, storico-filosofici e giuridici – DISTU.
The seminar will be held from Monday, September 10 to Friday, September 14, 2018 in Viterbo.

The 2018 ISECS International Seminar for Early Career Scholars will engage discussions on the forms, representations and modalities of silence in the eighteenth century.
Silence, of individuals and cultures, of the physical voice or of the written word and information deleted from the page, has historically taken many forms. It may be reticent, dissembling or imposed by others. Voluntary or coerced, it might be the silence of women, of marginal social and religious groups, of communities that are denied the right to speak. There are other silences as well: the interruption of sound in a musical pause and the silence of religious practices, which speak to, and of, the inner life. All these forms of silence were present in the eighteenth century, as they had been throughout history, but perhaps for the first time, some of them were singled out for special scrutiny. Works on aesthetics, for example, investigated the use of silence and the implicit in rhetorical writing, or dwelled on reverie, and how it might be induced in the reader. In rhetoric, attention was paid to discursive figures and strategies capable of making silence more eloquent than the word. Conduct books devoted many pages to the art of conversation, emphasising the essential role of silence to ensure the correctness of social interactions, especially for women, but also for politicians. Censorship – whether institutional or self-imposed – also produces silences, as do the more or less conscious failures of memory found in life writing and in historical discourse: one need only think of the revisions required to write the history of colonialism, wars or slavery. Eighteenth-century historiography attempted to remove some of the silences it found in history, often filling in the lacunae through conjecture. Silence is also represented in the visual arts and, signally, in the novel, which devised new narrative techniques for the purpose, whether to evoke the silences in characters’ conversations, and the contexts and landscapes in which silence reigns (a hallmark of the picturesque, for example), or to leave the reader in suspense by strategically withholding information. And then there is the theatre, where after the triumph of pantomime and the illegitimate spectacles that deployed a hybridized combination of body, speech, stage machinery and lighting effects, the century comes to a close with the rise of melodrama, which replaced the spoken word with music and revolutionised the notion of acting as the art of speech, while giving new prominence to silent characters and heroes. Finally, there is the silence that becomes firmly and widely established in the eighteenth century through the practice of reading narrative texts for oneself, replacing the social activity of reading aloud for a group of listeners with a solitary, interiorized experience. On these and other silences, on silence in all its forms and meanings in the eighteenth century, the seminar calls for contributions. The theme of the conference, “Silence in eighteenth-century arts, history and philosophy,” must thus be understood in the broadest terms possible to include:


- anonymity
- silence, reflection, meditation
- social silence, silence and social interaction
- negation: denials, disclaimers, disavowals
- silence and secrets
- censorship and self-censorship
- ellipses, omissions, blank pages, hyphens, asterisks – the typographical and linguistic modes of silence
- ghost chapters (deleted, lost, rewritten)
- silenced characters, characters that disappear
- quiet spaces: the loci of silence
- reading and silence
- silence as resistance and rebellion
- scripting silence and muteness
- the performativity of silence
- silence and the canon
- silence and history
- silence in relation to cultural memory studies
- silence and/as remembrance

The seminar is limited to 15 participants. The proposals (approx. 3 pages, double-spaced, max 1,000 words) should be based on an original research project (e.g. a doctoral dissertation) which addresses one of the aspects mentioned above. Because this is a seminar rather than a conference, each participant will be given approximately one hour to present the texts and questions that will then form the basis of a group discussion led in turn by one of the participants. Preference will be given to scholars who are at the beginning of their academic career (ABD; PhD or equivalent for less than six years, including ECRs). The official languages of the seminar are English, Italian, French. Translations of abstracts and various seminar materials not in English will be made available to participants.

Applications should include the following information: a brief curriculum vitae with date of PhD (or equivalent); a list of principal publications and scholarly presentations; a brief description of the proposed paper (approx. 3 pages, double-spaced, max 1,000 words); and one letter of recommendation. Colleagues are invited to submit proposals by January 31, 2018. Please send abstracts by e-mail to Francesca Saggini: fsaggini@unitus.it, ccing into the conversation Alberta Boschi alberta.boschi@gmail.com . If your email programme supports the delivery receipt option we encourage you to request delivery receipt. We will attempt to notify all correspondents before February 28, 2018 regarding the status of their submission

Focusing on Joseph Addison’s influential Spectator papers, this essay examines the emergence of modern aesthetic theory in the context of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century science.  Rather than arising as compensatory form of spirituality in a newly disenchanted world, as is often thought, aesthetics came into being at a time when science understood itself to be doing theological work, uncovering (however provisionally, however incompletely) the divine order of things.  These scientific investigations contributed to a vibrant and sophisticated discourse of world contemplation, which, I argue, provided the inspiration and intellectual underpinnings for modern aesthetic theory.  First, the new science reinvigorated the classical idea that humans are born to contemplate the cosmos—a project it recast in its own mechanical and physico-theological terms—making a cogent case for the value of world gazing and supplying Addison with a fundamental orientation toward the world: the world is an exquisitely constructed machine, divine in origin, that not only invites and rewards but even demands our reverential attention.  Early aesthetics and early science diverged not over metaphysics but over how each contemplated this self-same world, which brings us to science’s second crucial contribution to modern aesthetics.  Keen to establish itself, the new science highlighted what was distinctive about its mode of contemplation: rather than simply marveling at God’s creation, it pried beyond nature’s surface to understand its inner workings.  Addison, fully persuaded by natural philosophy’s distinction between the micromechanical reality of things and their phenomenal appearances, framed aesthetic experience wholly in terms of the latter.  Aesthetics, in other words would concern itself not with things themselves but with the looks of things.  What Gadamer decried as Kant’s “radical subjectivization” of aesthetics thus didn’t need to wait for Kant.  It was one of the founding moves of modern aesthetics, what distinguished aesthetic from scientific world contemplation from the very start.

Du croquis à la peinture à l’huile, restées à l’état original ou diffusées par l’intermédiaire de la gravure, seules ou en conjonction avec le récit viatique, les images du voyage en Orient véhiculent une image riche en contrastes et souvent ambivalente. Au siècle des Lumières, de l’Acropole et des Pyramides d’Égypte aux vestiges de l’Empire byzantin et aux prestiges de la Cour ottomane, il s’agit d’autant d’images apparemment disparates, mais qui proposent un regard nouveau sur l’Orient méditerranéen. Source d’inspiration et de réflexion pour les artistes et les architectes, les images viatiques, qui alimentèrent les débats artistiques de l’époque, sont un ensemble précieux et irremplaçable pour le géographe, l’historien, l’ethnologue et le littéraire. Dans une approche thématique de l’Orient méditerranéen, cet ouvrage traite successivement du paysage, de l’histoire naturelle, des vestiges antiques, de l’architecture moderne et des populations. Il s’attarde, en outre, sur les analogies, les divergences et la complémentarité des images viatiques françaises avec celles d’autres voyageurs notamment britanniques. Si l’iconographie viatique du XVIIIe siècle a repris et développé des stéréotypes existants, elle fut le témoignage d’un orientalisme précoce, original, coloré d’anciennes rêveries sur l’Orient des merveilles renouvelées par la civilisation ottomane et procurant aux restes de la Belle Antiquité le vernis de la nostalgie.

La publication par John Locke de son célèbre Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) puis de Some Toughts Concerning Education (1694) a marqué un véritable tournant dans le discours européen sur l’éducation. Ces deux ouvrages consacrent la défaite définitive de l’innéisme cartésien et leibnizien au profit d’un empirisme pédagogique qui fait de l’esprit de l’enfant une tabula rasa que les pédagogues auront pour tâche d’alimenter. Plus tard, en proposant, dans Émile, ou de l’éducation (1762), une éducation plus proche de « la Nature », Jean-Jacques Rousseau a posé un autre jalon majeur au sein du discours éducatif et a fait de nombreux disciples, tant professionnels qu’amateurs. Malgré cela, on le verra, le discours utilitariste d’adaptation de l’individu à la société a néanmoins continué à avoir, tout au long du siècle, de nombreux adeptes, notamment au sein des milieux bourgeois. C’est essentiellement au sein de ce cadre théorique contrasté que se développent les essais ici réunis. Du traité général d’éducation au simple journal tenu par un père à propos de l’éducation de son rejeton et de la vie de collège au préceptorat princier, ce sont les aspects théoriques et pratiques essentiels de l’éducation au XVIIIe siècle qui sont successivement évoqués.

"Passions, Emotions and Cognition in the Long Eighteenth-Century Literature in England", 4th number of journal "English Literature: Theories, Interpretations, Contexts" .
Open access.
URL  https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/en/edizioni/riviste/english-literature/2017/1/

Articles by: Michael McKeon ("Aesthetic Cognition "), Margaret A. Doody ("The Actor, the Mirror, the Soul and the Sylph "), Regina M. Dal Santo ("The Rhetoric of Passions in John Tillotson's Sermons"), Judith Hawley ("Scriblerian Cognition"), Katarzyna Kozak ("The Hurry and Uproar of Their Passions: Images of the Early 18th-Century Whig"), Riccardo Capoferro ("Fears, Apprehensions and Conjecture "), Lucia Quinault ("Poetry and Emotion in the Abergavenny Scandal of 1729")

George Colman’s Polly Honeycombe (1760), a ‘Dramatick Novel’, both illuminates and complicates current debate about eighteenth-century audiences’ emotional investment with theatre and novels. The farce describes sentimental literature as inviting readers to publically ‘act’ their emotional responses through legible impressions, or imprints on the body. The technology of print was crucial to conceptions of affective experience in the mid-eighteenth century. Hence, the eighteenth-century ‘self’ can be envisaged in terms of printed surfaces, externalised and performed. This is apparent in two sections of Polly Honeycombe: Polly’s theatrical reading of a sentimental novel and the circulating library catalogue in the preface to the play’s printed edition, which describes the novel reader as a page imprinted by novel titles.

The paper analyses and links up themes of the thought of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) about the category of Person (which
Herder considers not suitable if one wants give a definition of God and of Man) and about the analogous concepts of personality and
personification (which are here presented in their both anthropological and gnoseological relevance, for example in comparison with
the mythic language), developing a connection between Spinoza’s philosophy and critic to the transcendentalism. The author argues
that the theoretical critical core of these themes is twofold: one the side the objection to the dualistic, abstract and idealistic
conceptions of Individual and, on the other side, the objection to the idea that human beings have merely a biological nature. Under
these objections Herder can propose the idea that human beings are cultural beings.

The overarching goal of this article is to present a methodology for attributing publications with false and misleading imprints to their unnamed printers. The answer to this problem—how to link publications featuring inaccurate imprints back to those who actually printed them—lies in the use of ornament catalogues. In short, knowing a printer’s ornament stock over a period of time would allow us to attribute works featuring false and misleading imprints from the same period to his or her printing house. Doing so would also allow us to pinpoint sometimes provisionally but often definitively one actor or unit in the life cycle of a publication—in this instance, the printing house from which it originated. In this article I focus specifically on the range of plausible-sounding but entirely made-up printers’ and booksellers’ names regularly found on false imprints throughout the eighteenth century. In particular, I hone in on the wholly fictional “A. Moore,” Using extant ornament catalogues, I have managed to attribute dozens of these A. Moore-imprinted publications to their respective printers. In addition, I present a theory of ornament usage that emerged as I assembled my corpus of A. Moore-imprinted works. The most intriguing case remains the recurring use of a headpiece and factotum combination in A. Moore-imprinted publications from the 1720s and 1730s that were in fact printed by the printer-bookseller Thomas Read. The regularity with which these two ornaments were used in tandem in A. Moore-imprinted publications, however, also suggests something much more interesting. In short, it seems Read (and perhaps others individually) reserved a small collection of ornaments for legally perilous publications. Read did so, theoretically, because he realized that ornaments might be a way for the legal authorities to do the very thing that I propose here as an investigative bibliographical methodology: to trace illicitly published works with false and misleading imprints back to the printers who actually produced them. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 110.2 (June 2016): 181-214.

Notre étude, qui traite des relations personnelles des voyageurs français avec les Orientaux, à travers le prisme de l’imagologie, essaie de mettre en lumière certains des mécanismes de la présentation de l’altérité au siècle des Lumières. Après avoir abordé les relations franco-ottomanes et brossé l’image que les Français avaient pour l’Orient, nous analysons l’image générale et souvent stéréotypée des populations que les voyageurs français du XVIIIe siècle communiquaient. Ensuite, notre article s’attarde sur leur rencontre avec l’Autre, dont ils se servaient comme un moyen de comparaison qui leur permettait d’avoir une meilleure connaissance d’eux-mêmes. Les voyageurs français, utilisant un système d’antithèses, analysaient le milieu social, politique et culturel, sa religion et ses mœurs des habitants des pays visités.  De plus, nous nous référons aux rapports personnels qu’ils entretenaient avec les drogmans  et les dignitaires et nous nous intéressons aux difficultés de communication avec les habitants à cause de la différence de langue et de culture. Malgré les problèmes rencontrés, les voyageurs ont essayé de convaincre leur lectorat de la vérité de leurs propos et de l’originalité de leurs descriptions, qui s’appuyaient sur leur expérience personnelle.

In the Land of Neomania (Jean-Claude Gorjy, ‘Ann’Quin Bredouille)
The article presents selected aspects of a little-known novel by Jean-Claude Gorjy which was published in the first years of the French Revolution (1791-1792). The novel is a political pamphlet and a satire on the realities of ‘New France’ at the beginning of the revolutionary transformations. The main aim of the author is to expose the hypocrisy of the leaders and journalists, the dangers of manipulating public opinion through ‘newspeak’, and the terror brought to everyday lives of ordinary people struggling to survive in the new, absurd world. As a means of survival, people use laughter and mockery. Neomania, a fictitious land whose inhabitants are obsessed with the ‘novelty mania’, provides an opportunity for the revolutionary France to look at itself in the distorting mirror of satire; whereas the author’s ‘dialogue’ with the reader creates a safe space of freedom where laughter liberates from fear.
Key words: satirical novel; pamphlet; the French Revolution; humour

This paper offers a largely unprecedented look at the frontispieces of Sade's La Philosophie and chapter five of Rousseau's Émile in an attempt to consider these texts as a whole—illustrations and all. Though the texts of La Philosophie and Émile are ripe with didactic information on the 'proper' education of young women, the pedagogic messages embedded in their frontispieces remain largely ignored by scholars. I argue that through allegory and parody, both frontispieces use Homeric stories to portray the climax of female sexual education espoused by Rousseau and Sade within their texts: the act of female sexual consent.