Bøker i Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth Century Literature and Culture-serien

Revolutionary Subjects in the English "Jacobin" Novel engages ongoing debates on subject formation and rights discourse through the so-called "English Jacobin" novels. Wallace argues that subversive narrative strategies in fiction undercut and question the sovereign subject modeled as the ideal republican radical subject and describe a discourse that is not always in line with the work's overt "moral."

The focus of Fictive Domains is the period 1717-1770, during which nostalgia was just beginning to emerge as a cultural concept. Using psychoanalytic, feminist, and materialist theories, this book examines representations of bodies and landscapes in the cultural production of the early- to mid-eighteenth century.

Romantic Empiricism is a timely collection of essays by established and emerging scholars that represents a paradigm shift for the study of British Romanticism. The volume challenges the received view that German Idealist philosophy constitutes the main intellectual reference point for British Romantic writers, arguing instead that the tradition of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, largely overlooked by literary scholars, is a significant influence on Romantic thought.

The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture investigates the preoccupation with idleness that haunts the British eighteenth century. Sarah Jordan argues that as Great Britain began to define itself as a nation during this period, one important quality it claimed for itself was industriousness. But this claim was undermined and complicated by, among other factors, the importance of leisure to the upholding of class status, thus making idleness a subject of intense anxiety. One result of this anxiety was an increased surveillance of the supposed idleness of marginalized and less powerful members of society: the working classes, the nonwhite races, and women. In a widely researched and elegantly argued book, Jordan analyzes how idleness is figured in eighteenth-century literature and culture, including both traditional forms of literature and a wide variety of other cultural discourses. At the center of this account, Jordan investigates the lives and works of Johnson, Cowper, Thomson, and many other, lesser known writers. She incorporates their obsession with idleness into a new and lucid theorization of the professionalization of writing and the place of idleness and industry in the larger cultural formation that was eighteenth-century British identity.

This book re-examines the literary significance of poet and translator William Cowper (1731-1800).

Engendering Legitimacy is a study of the intersecting of law, land, property, and gender in the prose fiction of Mary Davys, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and Jonathan Swift. The law of property in early modern England established relations for men and women that artificially constructed, altered, and ended their connections with the material world, and the land they lived upon. The cultural role of land and law in a changing economy embracing new forms of property became a founding preoccupation around which grew the imaginative prose fiction that would develop into the English novel. Susan Glover contends that questions of political and legal legitimacy raised by the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 were transposed to the domestic and literary spheres of the early 1700s. Well researched and compellingly argued, Engendering Legitimacy examines the ways by which experimentation in prose fiction begins to re-vision the period's enmeshing of law, land, property, and political power, as the four writers imagine new grounds for authorial and political legitimacy.

This collection of essays by distinguished scholars from various disciplines addresses the central question: 'Was Enlightenment a force for emancipation?' Their responses, working from within, and frequently across the disciplinary lines of history, political science, economics, music, literature, aesthetics, art history, and film, reveal unsuspected connections and divergences even between well-known figures and texts. In their turn, the essays suggest the need for further inquiry in areas that turn out to be very far from closed. The volume considers major writings in unusual juxtaposition; highlights new figures of importance; and demonstrates familiar texts to embody strange implications.

Fair Philosopher, the first sustained scholarly study of The Female Spectator, brings together an impressive collection of new and established Haywood scholars who challenge much of the received opinion about this groundbreaking journal. Several of the essays show that Haywood's periodical was far more political than is generally thought, that its connections to her career as a novelist are more intimate than has been recognized, and that The Spectator was a target as well as a model. This collection argues that Haywood's periodical deserves far more critical attention than it has received so far and suggests new lines of development for future Haywood scholarship.

Pagodas in Play examines the representation of China in nine Italian operas of the eighteenth century. It focuses specifically on libretti, analyzing them as texts produced in a variety of interpenetrating cultural contexts: the general European fascination with the Middle Kingdom; developments in Italian literary, theatrical, and operatic realms; Enlightenment ideologies; and the heterogeneity of the Italian states.

Why were Scottish writers able to dominate the field of periodical literature throughout the nineteenth century? Barton Swaim's Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere, 1802-1834 attempts an answer to that question by examining the period when the Scots' dominance was at its height: the three decades after the founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802. In this carefully researched and thoughtful study, Swaim discusses the ways in which four writers in the vanguard of Scottish periodical-writing - Francis Jeffrey, John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart, and Thomas Carlyle - exemplify the historical and cultural dynamics that occasioned Scottish dominance of what Jurgen Habermas would later call the public sphere.

Emphasizing the interdisciplinary range of this recurring motif, Ellen Brinks traces "distressed masculinity" in canonical instances of gothic imagination - Byron's Oriental Tales and Coleridge's Christabel - but also in works such as Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Keats's Hyperion fragments, and Freud's letters and scientific writings.

A Mother's Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France chronicles the emegence of an idealized mother figure whose reforming zeal sought to make French society more just. Lesley H. Walker contends that this attempt during the eighteenth century to 'rewrite' social relations in terms of greater social equality represents an important but overlooked strand of Enlightenment thought. During this period, popular domestic novels, the ever-raging debates about women's social roles, and highly sought-after genre paintings produced a remarkable image of motherhood. Through a focus on feminine virtue, Walker studies female writers and artists to argue that these women theorize the domestic sphere as a site of significant social and ethical productivity.

This book addresses the place of women writers in anthologies and other literary collections in eighteenth-century England. It explores and contextualizes the ways in which two different kinds of printed materialΓÇöpoetic miscellanies and biographical collectionsΓÇöcomplemented one another in defining expectations about the woman writer. Far more than the single-authored text, it was the collection in one form or another that invested poems and their authors with authority. By attending to this fascinating cultural context, Chantel Lavoie explores how women poets were placed posthumously in the world of eighteenth-century English letters. Investigating the lives and works of four well-known poetsΓÇöKatherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, and Elizabeth RoweΓÇöLavoie illuminates the ways in which celebrated women were collected alongside their poetry, the effect of collocation on individual reputations, and the intersection between bibliography and biography as female poets themselves became curiosities. In so doing, Collecting Women contributes to the understanding of the intersection of cultural history, canon formation, and literary collecting in eighteenth-century England.