Abstract: A review of Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature , edited by Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin, a collection of seventeen essays focusing on the cultural history and impact of small objects, or things, and their outsized but often overlooked significance in the personal, political, economic, cultural, and scientific shifts occurring in Europe during the eighteenth century.
Abstract: A review of Melissa Bailes's Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750–1830 .
Abstract: We are entangled with insects in extraordinary ways. They facilitate much critical thinking. Yet the facts of insect existence challenge human cognition. Critical Insect Studies arises to address the human/insect assemblage, with work under this rubric already underway. At the same time, our current understanding of insects owes much to nascent eighteenth-century scientific practice.
Abstract: A review of Catherine Ingrassia's Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660–1750 (2022), which examines how literary representations of domestic captivity shaped cultural understandings of confinement, restraint, and subjection both at home and abroad.
Abstract: A review of Rebekah Mitsein's African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment (2023).
Abstract: A review of Lisa O'Connell's The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (2019).
Abstract: A review of Andrew Newman's Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities (2019), a study of books, literacy, and intertextuality in American captivity narratives.
Abstract: In his nine-book poem Night Thoughts , Edward Young seeks out a "view from nowhere" from which to appraise the world as a whole and especially the terrestrial globe. I argue that Young does so as a means of both contemplating the parameters of human thought and recalibrating readerly attention. I pursue a series of close readings of instances of global vision in the poem, proposing that these moments involve a process of pause, disorientation, and attentional recalibration. Throughout, I theorize the relationship of these parts to the poem's whole, arguing that the spatiotemporal scalar shift afforded by the view from nowhere intensifies and condenses the nowhere (or no-when) of night-time and crucially punctuates and regulates the simultaneously tortuous and teleological framework of the poem. In a second section, I propose that Young's global poetics found renewed articulation in the work of William Blake, arguing that Blake found in Young's globes a crucial imaginative resource and some key coordinates for his own more overtly critical but still agonistic conception of the view from nowhere. This study thereby nuances a still-prevalent characterization of the globe as a consistently triumphalist, completist, and stable unit of knowledge production in eighteenth-century Britain.
Abstract: Drawing on studies that posit a meaningful overlap between the theories and histories of translation and the early novel, this article argues that long eighteenth-century theories of translation helped the concept of fictionality consolidate for readers. During this period, translators framed their practice through the Pythagorean notion of the transmigration of souls and, in doing so, gesture toward an idea of imitation as an openly acknowledged re-creation of the original. This article examines how this particular framing of imitation also appeared in the distinct, but related, discourse of fiction using Daniel Defoe's A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy in Paris (1718) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) as examples. Defoe's texts help to demonstrate how references to translation help writers begin to gesture toward a realism that is marked by a narrative's capacity to feel real at the same time that it begins to gesture toward its status as fiction.
Abstract: Suicides, both real and fictional, have been the object of much criticism in studies of eighteenth-century literature and culture, but the notes of suicidal women have received insufficient critical attention. This essay takes the women's suicide notes that were published in the anglophone press as its key objects of study and sets them alongside the fictional suicidal situations in Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa to identify what allowed women in the era to break through the barriers preventing public notice and achieve notice in the press when, as other studies have shown, the publication of men's suicide notes in the period was much more common.
Abstract: What does it mean for The Rape of the Lock to make a joke out of a woman's traumatic encounter with assault, and what does it mean for one to laugh at such a joke? The question as to whether The Rape of the Lock mockingly trivializes Belinda's painful experiences is often conflated with another question as to whether the poem portrays Belinda sympathetically or not. The assumption therein is that a sincerely sympathetic representation of trauma would represent it at the scale appropriate to it. But this view neglects how trauma is trauma precisely for having no scale appropriate to it, being extreme beyond scale and disruptive of one's sense of scale. Furthermore, it overlooks one mode of representation in which the tragic is regularly trivialized without it being necessarily unsympathetic: that of dark humor, particularly when exercised as a strategy for enduring trauma. That sympathy for Belinda's trauma is possible not in spite of but because of the humor in The Rape of the Lock , then, is the main contention of this essay. Where its dark humor involves perversions of scale of the tragic and trivial, the poem's structure becomes analogous to how trauma is constituted by similar scalar perversions, how its effects thereafter are to deprive the traumatized mind of any sense of scale, and how the mental fortitude that must be called upon to endure all this must then be itself extreme beyond scale. Drawing on psychological studies and critical theories on trauma, stress, and humor, this essay argues that Pope's jocular confounding of scales of the tragic and the trivial in The Rape of the Lock enacts a strategy of survival and resilience for women forced to endure the stressful and traumatizing extremes of scale inherent to female existence under eighteenth-century patriarchal norms.
Abstract: A review of David Mark Diamond's Reading Character After Calvin: Secularization, Empire, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel , which links Calvinism's understanding of character and character assessment to the imperial logic of an emergent secularism understood, here, as religion's reformation in a pluralist society.
Abstract: Traditional readings of Jane Austen's Emma dismiss Miss Bates as an idle progenitor of gossip whose tittle-tattle overruns a frustratingly large portion of the novel. However, this article argues that Miss Bates acts as Highbury's community historian whose own past serves as the prehistory conditioning the ethos and actions of the other characters. Over the course of the novel, primarily at Box Hill, Emma deliberates her acceptance of the type of history that Miss Bates represents: one constituted by the emotions, routines, and commonplace activities seemingly at odds with more overt historical data immanent to public records. Her relationship to Miss Bates intersects with issues of historical transmission, historical time, and historical consciousness, warranting careful critical examination.
Abstract: This essay argues that Anne-Louis Girodet's mythological paintings, specifically his Endymion and Pygmalion and Galatea , do not position the spectator as the subject of rational vision. With light and shadow transforming the paintings into more troubling scenes with blurry objects, illegible backgrounds, and corporeal confusion, the spectator cannot be understood as the subject of rational vision. Formal scrutiny informed by Condillacian sensationalism enables us to consider Girodet's mythological paintings as agentive objects that ignited disorienting spectatorial encounters for Girodet himself, his contemporaneous audiences, and even us. Ultimately, this essay considers how Girodet's mythological paintings failed to bind the spectator to the eye of discarnate reason when they were made and pass this failure to present day viewers.
Abstract: This essay offers a new perspective on the correspondence of James Boswell (1740–95) and William Johnson Temple (1739–96). While twentieth-century critics deprecated Boswell's letters, placing his real literary accomplishment in the journals and published biographies, I argue that we can find value in the letters of both men not as finished individual artworks but as the fabric of a continuous lifelong network of communication, carried out through the technology of the mid-to-late-eighteenth-century British postal system. By paying close attention to the two men's experience of pen and ink, of waiting for the post to arrive, of misdirected mail and the uncertainty that inhered in the whole system, we can see how the mail made them who they were. Both Temple's passive-aggressive dependence and Boswell's self-dramatizing insecurity, playing out in all aspects of their lives, are inseparable from the conditions of postal communication. Letters, as we now see them, were a process, not a product, and in the letters of Temple and Boswell we can see the relationships of two lifetimes shaped by the medium in which they took place.
Abstract: Obituary specialists have identified the Gentleman's Magazine (GM) as the first publication to use the term "obituary" to headline its death notices section (in 1780). Simultaneously, eighteenth centuryists have widely acknowledged Ignatius Sancho's as the first death notice of an African Briton (also in 1780). This essay connects these two firsts by presenting the death notice of Sancho in the GM as one of many "death writing" texts over decades that GM editor, proprietor, and printer John Nichols printed regarding Sancho to capitalize on the power of his life after death. The article presents a new literary category, "death writing," to denote the necropolitical function of certain death-centered forms of life writing including the GM 's "Obituary of Considerable Persons" section, posthumous letter collections such as the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African , book reviews and marketing of that collection in the Gentleman's Magazine , and compendiums and indexes of lives such as the Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century —all printed by Nichols. The essay argues that Nichols used Sancho as an exemplar to exhibit the GM 's signature brand of the self-made (gentle)man to assist the GM 's extreme longevity (a two-hundred-year print run, 1731–1922). To uphold the "grocer and oilman" aspects of Sancho's identity, the death writing on him ignores other aspects of his "character," including his family, a patriarchal practice that has obscured his wife, Anne Sancho, and the entire Sancho family from the historical record including their lack of entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , an index of lives that is heavily based on Nichols's GM and Literary Anecdotes . In conclusion, by critically examining Nichols's death writing system, arguably the most powerful in the Atlantic world, this essay sheds light on how his literary legacy continues to exert influence over who has lived and died to literary posterity since the eighteenth century.
Abstract: A review of Carrie D. Shanafelt's Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste (2021), a book examining Jeremy Bentham's writings on sexual nonconformity and their impact on the Enlightenment legacy of "common sense."
Abstract: Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko (1688) has occupied a peculiar literary historical position for much of its existence, hovering uneasily between fact and fiction, and apology and defense. But among the wide variety of interpretations to which it has been subjected, the tradition that weighs most heavily on Oroonoko is the one that foregrounds its author's putative loyalty to the Stuarts in order to read Oroonoko as a tragic allegory of dynastic betrayal grounded in its author's eye-witness recollections of the seven months she appears to have spent in Suriname. But the critical shibboleth that Oroonoko is an allegorical defense of Stuart kingship or even monarchy falters in the face of a critical detail without which the novel's very plot comes unhinged: Oroonoko puts into the hands of its enslaved African characters the moral authority of "just rebellion"—an ad hoc political doctrine and practice that emerged during the 1640s and 1650s. Derived from the tyrant/slave dyad that had dominated England's political imaginations during the civil wars and Interregnum, dissidents who opposed both monarchical and parliamentary authoritarianism had justified the civil wars by arguing that tyranny, by definition, enslaved people and thereby created a moral imperative for rebellion. Drawing on this tradition, Oroonoko rejects the claim that sovereignty, especially when it collapses into injustice, is entitled to the political obedience of those it governs. But what makes Oroonoko 's rejection of colonial tyranny so compelling is its canny ability to ground that rejection in what is best described as a heterodox archive—a body of evidence that both contests the critical orthodoxy of the novella's support for the Stuarts and, more importantly, resists the political justification of colonial autocracy rooted in the belief England was entitled to dominate those African and Indigenous communities it encountered as a "natural" consequence of its political and cultural "superiority." Using a hermeneutics of collectivity, Oroonoko draws on the interfaces in the often hostile colonial record—print publications, laws, and letters—to engage with questions of tyranny, slavery, rebellion, indigeneity, heritability, and political rights in such a way that the novella itself holds open an imaginative, epistemological, and moral space wherein those lost to the grotesque and violent exercise of colonial power might be triumphantly reclaimed as part of a community both witnessed and memorialized.
Abstract: In 1792, the Swiss naturalist François Hubert published a proposal for a new system for hiving honeybees in his New Observations on the Natural History of Bees , which led to improvements in both the observation and the exploitation of bees. What Hubert named “ruche en livre” [book hive] transformed the dome-shaped hive and provided new access into an enigmatic and mystifying multitude of nonhuman beings. Starting from Huber’s cultural and scientific background and visual impairment, this essay examines the ramifications of its invention, which transformed the bees from fabulous animals into test animals. It explores an inevitable friction inherent to the hybridity of the book hive—a book can never fully represent a hive, and a hive can never become a book—opening up questions about the prosthetic role of Huber’s new hive and its epistemology. Although “reading” a beehive might have matched the ideology and scientific tenets of the Enlightenment, how does one position oneself as a visually impaired scientist in a century in which, according to Michel Foucault, natural history was “nothing more than the nomination of the visible”? The essay invites us to regard the book hive not simply as an observatorium and the juxtaposition of “beekeeping” and “bookkeeping” not just as a witticism. When complemented with devices such as a microscope, glassed apiaries, and, more importantly, a tireless assistant who voluntarily undertook the most painful operations, Huber’s device emerges as part of a more significant shift that reoriented epistemological and ontological questions related to both humans and nonhumans.
Abstract: Tunga penetrans —most frequently referred to as a “chego” in the archive—was a source of anxiety for eighteenth-century colonizers. Difficult to see without a microscope, this tiny arthropod burrowed into unprotected feet to lay its eggs. Its infection caused pain, lameness, and even death among its sufferers, usually enslaved workers. Plantation owners agonized over pest eradication methods, trying to mitigate this threat to their labor force, and natural historians attempted to circumscribe the flea through both metropolitan and colonial knowledge production. Both groups, however, had little success. Placing Mark Catesby’s Natural History (1729–47) alongside the works of Hans Sloane, Richard Ligon, and other Caribbean writers, I explore how the chego subverted various methods of management from empiricist observation to plantation organization. First, this paper traces proposed and failed attempts to make the chego legible to the British imperial eye. I track how the tools used to make the chego visible—the microscope, paper, and the skin itself—were meant to confine this parasite within various and often conflicting visual epistemologies, which ultimately destabilized the chego’s form and emphasized its illegibility. The paper then analyzes the importance of enslaved Indigenous and African workers to the production of knowledge about the chego. White writers surveyed and cataloged Indigenous medical treatments and Black enslaved workers’ embodied experiences. In their attempts to reconstitute these knowledges as their own, enslavers and naturalists denied the material realities of the chego flea through fictions of racial hygiene. In reasserting these African and Indigenous sources of knowledge about the chego, this paper elucidates how colonial entomology was challenged and reformulated in the Caribbean.
