Abstract: This essay explores what difference it makes that late seventeenth-century Japanese prose fiction, including the work of Ihara Saikaku, was far more frequently and extensively illustrated than its European counterparts. Part of the explanation for this may simply be economic and technological, but a more interesting answer lies in Japanese books' commitment to a far more visual (and often far less moralized) aesthetic, one that encourages a surprised and delighted savoring of the world (a stance intriguingly modeled for us, both visually and textually, by a passing woodcutter in Saikaku's Kōshoku gonin onna [ Five Women Who Loved Love ]). This intensely visual aesthetic, in turn, solicits a rather different kind of narrative engagement than that invited by most European fiction of the period: one far less interested in individuals qua individuals, far less obsessed with interiority, and far more willing to acknowledge the place that pleasure can and ought to have in our lives. All of which is to say that Saikaku's work and other ukiyo-zōshi [books of the floating world] can usefully contribute to the ongoing project of provincializing Europe (and the equally urgent project in literary studies of provincializing Defoe and perhaps the Anglophone novel more generally).
Abstract: In this essay, we examine how the popular genres of the fairy tale and the merveilleux influenced Françoise de Graffigny's writing of Lettres d'une Péruvienne ( Letters from a Peruvian Woman ). We demonstrate how the author incorporates elements of the wonderous in her descriptions and themes, especially in Letter 35. In a comparison of the fairy tale that Graffigny herself wrote, La Princesse Azerolle, ou l'excès de la constance ( Princess Azerolle, or the Excess of Constancy ), to her famous novel, we uncover the thematic elements that appear in both. Finally, we speculate as to why scholars have overlooked the inspiration of the fairy tale in favor of the novel's Enlightenment associations.
Abstract: In 1709, the French painter Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron (1648–1711) designed a print after an engraved carnelian held in Louis XIV's collection and known as "Michelangelo's Seal" for its supposed previous owner. Soon after its 1710 release in Paris, this print prompted a quarrel between Chéron and antiquarian scholars who condemned her unfaithful reproduction of the prized gem, a judgment later reiterated by the connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette in his Traité des pierres gravées (1750). While previous studies of "Michelangelo's Seal" have discussed the negative reception encountered by Chéron's print, this essay examines how she formulated the image in the first place. Following recent interest in the role of prints in shaping early modern forms of intermediality, the essay treats the 1709 print as a résumé of Chéron's prior achievements in painting and poetry. I adopt a Benjaminian hermeneutic of translation to analyze the artist's visual strategies and engagement with two of the meanings ascribed to engraved gems in her time: their monumentality as cultural remnants of antiquity and their use as seal-stones. I argue that Chéron tailored her translation of "Michelangelo's Seal" according to her skills and status as an active member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture since 1672. Moreover, in the process, she subverted not only the intended status of female members of that institution, but also broader, gendered norms of artistic creativity.
Abstract: Giustina Renier Michiel, one of the most prolific female authors of early nineteenth-century Italy, is often remembered and celebrated as a Venetian patriot. During her lifetime, however, her literary identity was neither singular nor completely cohesive. Indeed, reading her manuscript writing alongside her more famous publications (including her history of Venetian festivals) illustrates the delicate balance Italian authors needed to maintain in order to ensure their continued literary success in a period marked by multiple and rapid regime changes. While obliged to work within the power structures established by their new political overlords, they nonetheless needed to remain sensitive to the tastes of Italian readers, who were subjected to the political occupation of their territory. Renier Michiel's experience demonstrates how it was possible to balance patriotism, political deference, and professional self-promotion with the goal of establishing a lasting cultural legacy.
Abstract: This essay argues that Moll Flanders learns through experience to prefer entering into written, rather than verbal, marriage contracts, regardless of either type of contract's enforceability. It draws upon contract theories that emphasize relationship building as opposed to establishing the groundwork for future litigation to explain why Moll prefers written to verbal contracts. I also analyze several episodes in Moll Flanders in order to demonstrate that Moll learns through experience that written contracts are a pragmatic means of asserting herself, building relationships, and articulating the terms of her relationships. Writing slows down the contracting process and compels Moll's partners to listen to her, process her words, and respond to them thoughtfully and deliberately. The more prolonged the contractual process, the longer the contracting parties can occupy a shared imaginary space of equality, negotiation, and self-creation. This argument also illuminates Pamela's annotations of Mr. B's proposal to become his mistress in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). I conclude that in both novels, written contracts are a feminist strategy used by female protagonists to assert their wishes despite their legal disempowerment.
Abstract: This introduction offers Ihara Saikaku's work as a prime example of the need to globalize eighteenth-century studies and briefly sketches some of the challenges of such a task, focusing particularly on how emerging frameworks of world literature engage existing literary categories, particularly realism. Though reading Saikaku's work as realist makes sense in many ways and facilitates his inclusion into existing paradigms of the field, it also risks flattening his work or only engaging aspects of it that would accord with those categories.
Abstract: David Garrick's most frequently performed role was that of Ranger in Benjamin Hoadly's The Suspicious Husband (1747). Once in exceptional demand on the stage and in print, this play is now an obscure curiosity, seldom read, even less often performed. This essay sets out to revitalize attention to The Suspicious Husband by pursuing two interrelated arguments. First, that Hoadly's play is a sophisticated comedy that not only entertains, but also offers crucial information about the theatrical politics of its time. Second, that Ranger embodies a midpoint between audacity and moral rectitude that helps illuminate the mid-eighteenth century as an important moment of transition in the history of taste and morals. Presented as a failed libertine in training, whose exploits amount to mere boasting, but who does not reform in the end, Ranger can be seen as a figure who took in the best-liked qualities of the stage rake and then transformed them into a defanged variant of the type. Moreover, although The Suspicious Husband has been characterized as "apolitical," I argue that Ranger is actually offering a quiet, yet potent political statement. In presenting the rake as a charming, but ultimately powerless character, the play belittled the Jacobite threat that had been neutralized less than a year earlier. The Suspicious Husband thus exemplifies how mid-century drama engaged in politics without seeming to do so by resorting to the same ambivalent joviality with which it tackled romance and sex.
Abstract: Ihara Saikaku first achieved celebrity in his native city of Osaka as a prolific, if not always consistent, composer and critic of haikai no renga (linked-verse poetry). Later, his ukiyo-zōshi prose narratives set in the "floating world" of Japan's licensed pleasure quarters and chōninmono accounts of everyday urban life were bestsellers that lifted him to stardom. His collaboration with the most famous ukiyo-e artists of his day, Hishikawa Moronobu and Yoshida Hanbei, cemented his position as one of the most important authors of the Genroku era, one of the most prolific periods in Japanese literary history. Yet Saikaku's path to fame was by no means assured, and the course of his early career was shaped by his reactions to censorship, piracy, and market demands. This essay describes pivotal episodes that determined the course of his work during the crucial years of 1684–86, including his famous linked-verse marathon performance in front of Osaka's Sumiyoshi shrine, the pirated Edo edition of his The Life of an Amorous Man , and his ongoing responses to the Tokugawa shoguns' censorship as reflected in his books Five Women Who Loved Love and Twenty Cases of Filial Impiety in Japan .
