This article asks why Jaucourt chose (uniquely) to cite the fictional character Zilia as an authority in several articles he wrote for the Encyclopédie, while not citing Graffigny, the author of the novel in which Zilia appears, at all. The author considers citation strategies used by Jaucourt and others in the Encyclopédie, as well as feminist scholarship on women writers and on Graffigny in particular.
Compared in her own life to Frances Burney, the novelist Elizabeth Blower has virtually disappeared from literary history. Despite this neglect, Blower's four novels reflect this writer's experiments with new literary forms during a flourishing and transformative period in the novel's evolution. Changes in this decade include the shift from epistolary to free indirect narration, the rising popularity of the gothic, and attacks on excessive sentimentality. All these developments can be traced through Blower's eight-year career as a novelist. Dissatisfied with fashionable sentimentality, Blower searched for a new kind of tragic novel, finally achieving this goal in Features from Life (1788), a detailed psychological portrait of a crumbling marriage told in a style that foreshadows Austen's. Worthy of rediscovery, Blower exemplifies the phenomenon of a fine and original writer obscured by the shadows of more canonical figures.
This article asks why Jaucourt chose (uniquely) to cite the fictional character Zilia as an authority in several articles he wrote for the Encyclopedie, while not citing Graffigny, the author of the novel in which Zilia appears, at all. The author considers citation strategies used by Jaucourt and others in the Encyclopedie, as well as feminist scholarship on women writers and on Graffigny in particular.
In this essay, I analyze the form of the epistolary novel The Woman of Colour, A Tale (1808), tracing protagonist Olivia Fairfield's future not towards narrative resolution but through the formal possibilities of epistolarity itself. Attending to the novel's editorial intrusions alongside Olivia's epistolary practice, I argue that Olivia's selective disclosure, narrative control, and acts of withholding resist editorial authority and imagine a future beyond marriage, inheritance, and white control. Situating the novel within Black feminist theories of futurity, loss, and abolition time, I argue that Olivia's epistolary practice maintains a mode of opacity and privacy through which Olivia lives in and with loss, registering loss as part of Black quotidian life lived largely in refusal rather than redemption. I end by reading Olivia's decision to return to Jamaica with Dido as an unresolved futurity shaped by legal ambiguity, risk, and the ongoing work of abolition.
This essay uses contemporary feminist theories and methods to analyze the complex dynamics among women characters in Daniel Defoe's Roxana (1724). It analyzes the unique perspectives and agency of women servants in Defoe's novel, decentering the title heroine to show the choreography of women in a mobile urban landscape. Defoe mobilizes this choreography through descriptions of London space. Perhaps counterintuitively for Defoe studies and novel studies, this essay suggests that these representations challenge capitalist individualist notions of gendered power.
This article examines satire's role in representing and shaping emergent diplomatic relations between the British and Chinese empires in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Romantic-era satires typically stereotype the Chinese imperial court to bolster Britons' national self-image and to critique (and attend to) British foibles, particularly within Parliament and the monarchy. Thus, derogatory representations of China serve twofold to augment Britain by either affirming cultural superiority or constructively criticizing government policies. The satiric verses of John Wolcot (pseudonym Peter Pindar) are unique, offering more sympathetic representations of China reminiscent of early to mid-eighteenth-century laudatory perceptions of the Qing Empire as the embodiment of cultural sophistication, as well as political and economic stability. Pindar specifically satirizes Britain's aspirational moments of diplomatic exchange with the Chinese. Using Pindar's verse, this article illustrates Romantic satire's potential to challenge Britain's imperial aspirations by highlighting diplomatic insufficiencies and depicting an alternative global order.
This article traces how Restoration playwright Aphra Behn dramatized a Pamunkey matriarch, Cockacoeske, into a nascent example of the "Indian princess" archetype in her posthumous play The Widow Ranter; or, The History of Bacon in Virginia (1690), entangling the character with a burgeoning logic of imperial feminism and helping to solidify the popular character on English stages in Europe and North America for centuries to come. Behn's play, a dramatization of Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion of 1676-77 in the English colony of Virginia, reimagines Bacon as a classical hero and Cockacoeske, called Semernia in the play, as his tragic paramour. By recentring Cockacoeske and Indigenous peoples in the events of the Rebellion, this article seeks to re-matriate Cockacoeske's voice from Behn's play and to highlight the way English theatrical tropes, particularly the Indian princess, concealed the profound anti-colonial resistance of Indigenous women.
This essay argues that Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator (1744-46) models dialogic exchange through its representation of a collaborative process of production and engagement with readers' responses, and that attending to exchanges in the periodical about dress and the clothing industry, in particular, reveals how the periodical creates an interpretive model for the protagonist's engagement with the clothing industry in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751). The author demonstrates that applying the periodical's interpretive model to the novel provides an alternative to a straightforward reading of the novel, producing a counter-reading that critiques not only the narrator's maxims but standard representations of women's attention to dress more broadly. Understanding The Female Spectator as a model for reading Betsy Thoughtless illuminates the relationship between formal innovation and changing reading practices in an expanding literary marketplace and contributes to the bourgeoning critical discussion of eighteenth-century consumerism.
In this article, the author reflects on his personal and intellectual formation as a Hong Kong–born Chinese American scholar studying the British eighteenth century to grapple with the long-standing essentialist dismissal of scholarship by/about minoritized scholars as “mesearch.” The author considers how his own vexed experiences of racialization have shaped his scholarly practices, interests, and critical objects that have explicitly departed from his racial and ethnic identities. By examining the contested histories surrounding Hong Kong, he contemplates how his birthplace has impacted his own contested sense of self as a multiply marginalized scholar. This article asks who gets to be exempt from these questions of “mesearch” and its legitimacy in the academy, when all meaningful scholarly work has always been “mesearch.”
Stuart Hall’s memoir, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (2017) and Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano. An African. Written by Himself (1789), both construct their authors as “familiar strangers” who, as Hall describes, find themselves “on the hinge between the colonial and post-colonial worlds”. Hall and Equiano both claim their origins and disrupt these, deliberately engaging the complexities of where identity is located, and how it feels to speak about who one is and where one is from, when these are based on dislocations and the history of the Middle Passage. Placing Equiano and Hall together, I offer an “on the hinge” reading practice from the space of Black Atlantic as fundamentally decolonial, one that unmakes white supremacy and its regimes from the inside out.
Retif's rendering of the speech of working-class women in Les Contemporaines du commun offers unique access to a world neglected by many of the author's own contemporaries. However, in the two chapters titled "Les jolies crieuses," the authenticity of this approach is mediated not only by Retif's personal preoccupations but by a long tradition of other artistic representations of urban food hawkers in collections of words and images known as Les Cris de Paris. In providing a transcription of the crieuses' speech in these chapters, Retif seems to offer an accurate documentation of what he hears, but in further characterizing them as seductive sirens, he actively aestheticizes and objectifies these hard-working women. At the same time, however, in allowing them agency to narrate their own lifestories, Retif invites his heroines to reconstitute themselves as subjects, showing these supposedly simple women to be capable of complex, creative uses of language.
