Bøker i Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850-serien

Mary Delany's phrase ';the matrimonial trap' illuminates the apprehension with which genteel women of the eighteenth century viewed marriage. These women were generally required to marry in order to secure their futures, yet hindered from freely choosing a husband. They faced marriage anxiously because they lacked the power either to avoid it or to define it for themselves. For some women, the written word became a means by which to exercise the power that they otherwise lacked. Through their writing, they made the inevitable acceptable while registering their dissatisfaction with their circumstances. Rhetoric, exercised both in public and in private, allowed these women to define their identities as individuals and as wives, to lay out and test the boundaries of more egalitarian spousal relationships, and to criticize the traditional marriage system as their culture had defined it.

Sensibility, or the capacity to feel, played a vital role in philosophical reflection about the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the arts in eighteenth-century France. Yet scholars have privileged the Marquis de Sade's vindication of physiological sensibility as the logical conclusion of Enlightenment over Germaine de Stal's exploration of moral sensibility's potential for reform and renewal that paved the way for Romanticism. This volume of essays showcases Stal's contribution to the ';affective revolution' in Europe, investigating the personal and political circumstances that informed her theory of the passions and the social and aesthetic innovations to which it gave rise. Contributors move seamlessly between her political, philosophical, and fictional works, attentive to the relationship between emotion and cognition and aware of the coherence of her thought on an individual, national, and international scale. They first examine the significance Stal attributed to pity, happiness, melancholy, and enthusiasm in The Influence of the Passions as she witnessed revolutionary strife and envisioned the new republic. They then explore her development of a cosmopolitan aesthetic, in such works as On Literature, Corinne, or Italy, On Germany, and The Spirit of Translation, that transcended traditional generic, national, and linguistic boundaries. Finally, they turn to her contributions to the visual and musical arts as she deftly negotiated the transition from a Neoclassical to a Romantic aesthetic. Stal's Philosophy of the Passions concludes that, rather than founding a republic based on the rights of man, Stal's reflection fostered international communities of women (artists, models, and collectors; authors, performers, and spectators), enabling them to participate in the re-articulation of sociocultural values in the wake of the French Revolution.Contributors: Tili Boon Cuille, Catherine Dubeau, Nanette Le Coat, Christine Dunn Henderson, Karen de Bruin, M. Ione Crummy, Jennifer Law-Sullivan, Lauren Fortner Ravalico, C. C. Wharram, Kari Lokke, Susan Tenenbaum, Mary D. Sheriff, Heather Belnap Jensen, Fabienne Moore, Julia Effertz

Ravishment of Reason examines the heroic dramas written for the restored English theatres in the later seventeenth century, reading them as complex and sophisticated responses to a crisis of public life in the wake of the mid-century regicide and revolution. The unique form of the Restoration heroic play, with its scenes of imperial conquest peopled by hesitating and indecisive heroes, interrogates traditional oppositions of agency and passivity, autonomy and servility, that structure conventional narratives of political service and public virtue, exploring, in the process, new and often unsettling models of order and governance. Situating the dramas of Dryden, Behn, Boyle, Lee, and Crowne in their historical and intellectual context of civil war and the destabilizing theories of government that came in its wake, Brandon Chua offers an account of a culture's attempts to reconcile civic purpose with political stability after an age of revolutionary change.

This study examines how debates about history during the French Revolution informed and changed the nature of the British novel between 1790 and 1814. During these years, intersections between history, political ideology, and fiction, as well as the various meanings of the term ';history' itself, were multiple and far reaching. Morgan Rooney elucidates these subtleties clearly and convincingly. While political writers of the 1790s Burke, Price, Mackintosh, Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and others debate the historical meaning of the Glorious Revolution as a prelude to broader ideological arguments about the significance of the past for the present and future, novelists engage with this discourse by representing moments of the past or otherwise vying to enlist the authority of history to further a reformist or loyalist agenda. Anti-Jacobin novelists such as Charles Walker, Robert Bisset, and Jane West draw on Burkean historical discourse to characterize the reform movement as ignorant of the complex operations of historical accretion. For their part, reform-minded novelists such as Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Maria Edgeworth travesty Burke's tropes and arguments so as to undermine and then redefine the category of history. As the Revolution crisis recedes, new novel forms such as Edgeworth's regional novel, Lady Morgan's national tale, and Jane Porter's early historical fiction emerge, but historical representationlargely the legacy of the 1790s' novelremains an increasingly pronounced feature of the genre. Whereas the representation of history in the novel, Rooney argues, is initially used strategically by novelists involved in the Revolution debate, it is appropriated in the early nineteenth century by authors such as Edgeworth, Morgan, and Porter for other, often related ideological purposes before ultimately developing into a stable, non-partisan, aestheticized feature of the form as practised by Walter Scott. The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 17901814 demonstrates that the transformation of the novel at this fascinating juncture of British political and literary history contributes to the emergence of the historical novel as it was first realized in Scott's Waverley (1814).

In Poetic Sisters, Deborah Kennedy explores the personal and literary connections among five early eighteenth-century women poets: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; Elizabeth Singer Rowe; Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford; Sarah Dixon; and Mary Jones. Richly illustrated and elegantly written, this book brings the eighteenth century to life, presenting a diverse range of material from serious religious poems to amusing verses on domestic life. The work of Anne Finch, author of ';A Nocturnal Reverie,' provides the cornerstone for this well informed study. But it was Elizabeth Rowe who achieved international fame for her popular religious writings. Both women influenced the Countess of Hertford, who wrote about the beauty of nature, centuries before modern Earth Day celebrations. Sarah Dixon, a middle-class writer from Kent, had a strong moral outlook and stood up for those whose voices needed to be heard, including her own. Finally, Mary Jones, who lived in Oxford, was praised for both her genius and her sense of humor. Poetic Sisters presents a fascinating female literary network, revealing the bonds of a shared vocation that unites these writers. It also traces their literary afterlife from the eighteenth century to the present day, with references to contemporary culture, demonstrating how their work resonates with new generations of readers.

Reading 1759 investigates the literary culture of a remarkable year in British and French writing, and ideas. Examining key works by Johnson, Voltaire, Sterne, Adam Smith, Sarah Fielding, and Christopher Smart, the volume presents a wide-ranging account of the year's work in literature and the key issues that preoccupied writers at this time.

Revealing Bodies turns to the eighteenth century to ask a question with continuing relevance: what kinds of knowledge condition our understanding of our own bodies? Focusing on the tension between particularity and generality that inheres in intellectual discourse about the body, Revealing Bodies explores the disconnection between the body understood as a general form available to knowledge and the body experienced as particularly ones own. Erin Goss locates this division in contemporary bodily exhibits, such as Gunther von Hagens Body Worlds, and in eighteenth-century anatomical discourse. Her readings of the corporeal aesthetics of Edmund Burkes Philosophical Enquiry, William Blakes cosmological depiction of the bodys origin in such works as The [First] Book of Urizen, and Mary Tighes reflection on the relation between love and the soul in Psyche; or, The Legend of Love demonstrate that the idea of the body that grounds knowledge in an understanding of anatomy emerges not as fact but as fiction. Ultimately, Revealing Bodies describes how thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and bodily exhibitions in the twentieth and twenty-first call upon allegorized figurations of the body to conceal the absence of any other available means to understand that which is uniquely our own: our existence as bodies in the world.

Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness explores the novel's participation in eighteenth-century ';inquiries after happiness,' an ancient ethical project that acquired new urgency with the rise of subjective models of wellbeing in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. Combining archival research on treatises on happiness with illuminating readings of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin and Mary Hays, Brian Michael Norton's innovative study asks us to see the novel itself as a key instrument of Enlightenment ethics. His central argument is that the novel form provided a uniquely valuable tool for thinking about the nature and challenges of modern happiness: whereas treatises sought to theorize the conditions that made happiness possible in general, eighteenth-century fiction excelled at interrogating the problem on the level of the particular, in the details of a single individual's psychology and unique circumstances. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness demonstrates further that through their fine-tuned attention to subjectivity and social context these writers called into question some cherished and time-honored assumptions about the good life: happiness is in one's power; virtue is the exclusive path to happiness; only vice can make us miserable. This elegant and richly interdisciplinary book offers a new understanding of the cultural work the eighteenth-century novel performed as well as an original interpretation of the Enlightenment's ethical legacy.

Excitable Imaginations offers a new approach to the history of pornography. Looking beyond a counter-canon of bawdy literature, Kathleen Lubey identifies a vigilant attentiveness to sex across a wide spectrum of literary and philosophical texts in eighteenth-century Britain. Esteemed public modes of writing such as nationalist poetry, moral fiction, and empirical philosophy, as well as scandalous and obscene writing, persistently narrate erotic experiencesdesire, voyeurism, seduction, orgasm. The recurring turn to sexuality in literature and philosophy, she argues, allowed authors to recommend with great urgency how the risque delights of reading might excite the imagination to ever greater degrees of educability on moral and aesthetic matters. Moralists such as Samuel Richardson and Adam Smith, like their licentious counterparts Rochester, Haywood, and Cleland, purposefully evoke salacious fantasy so that their audiences will recognize reading as an intellectual act that is premised on visceral pleasure. Eroticism in texts like Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, in Lubey's reading, did not compete with instructive literary aims, but rather was essential to the construction of the self-governing Enlightenment subject.

In Print Technology in Scotland and America Louis Kirk McAuley investigates the mediation of popular-political culture in Scotland and America, from the transatlantic religious revivals known as the Great Awakening to the U.S. presidential election of 1800. By focusing on Scotland and Americaand, in particular, the tension between unity and fragmentation that characterizes eighteenth-century Scottish and American literature and culturePrint Technology aims to increase our understanding of how tensions within these corresponding political and cultural arenas altered the meaning of print as an instrument of empire and nation building. McAuley reveals how seemingly disparate events, including journalism and literary forgery, were instrumental and innovative deployments of print not as a liberation technology (as Habermas's analysis of prints structural transformation of the public sphere suggests), but as a mediator of political tensions.

Examines Anglophone writers who repurposed William Wordsworth's poetry. By reading Wordsworth in dialogue with J. M. Coetzee, Lydia Maria Child, and Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine Bergren revitalizes our understanding of Wordsworth's career and its place in the canon.

Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France analyzes the work of several literary critics in France and England, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, who were inspired by the idea that literature especially the literary sublime might offer us the deepest kind of knowledge. Dominique Bouhours, Nicolas Boileau, Rene Rapin, John Dennis, and the abbe Dubos believed that literature could deliver truths that transcend our world and were analogous or even equal to the truths of divine revelation. Ann Delehanty argues that this shift towards the transcendental realm pushed the definition of the literary work away from describing its objective properties and towards its effects on the mind of the reader. After placing these ideas about literature in the context of the religious and philosophical thinking of Blaise Pascal, Delehanty traces the evolution of a debate about literature in the writings of the critics in question. They embraced theories of sentiment and the passions as the epistemological means of identifying and knowing the transcendental aspects of a literary work that eventually came to be known as aesthetics. By tracing the historical evolution of the relationship between transcendentalism and aesthetics in French and English neoclassical thought, Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France provides new and engaging insights into an important moment in our literary history.

In looking closely at Horace Walpole's Correspondence, George E. Haggerty shows how these letters, when taken in aggregate, offer an astonishingly vivid account of the vagaries of eighteenth-century masculinity. Walpole talks about himself obsessively: his wants, his needs, his desires; hies physical and mental pain; his artistic appreciation and his critical responses. It is impossible to read these letters and not come away with a vivid impression of a complex personality from another age. Haggerty examines the ways in which Walpole presents himself as an eighteenth-century gentleman, and considers his personal relationships, his needs and aspirations, his emotionalism and his rationality - in short, his construction of himself - in order to see what it tells us about the age in general and more specifically, about masculinity in an era of social flux. This study of Walpole and his epistolary relations offers a unique window into both the history of masculinity in the eighteenth century and the codification of friendship as the preeminent value in western culture. Recent studies have tried to rewrite Walpole in a twenty-first century mold while this work looks at the writer and the ways in which he constructs himself and his relations, not in hopes of uncovering a lurid secret, but rather in pursuit of the figure that he created and that has fascinated generations of readers and writers since the eighteenth century.

Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy examines the extraordinary focus on coy women in late seventeenth-century English comedy. Plays by Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, Behn, Shadwell, Congreve, Trotter, Southerne, Vanbrugh, and Pixas well as much modern scholarship about themtaint almost all feminine modesty with intimations of duplicity and illicit desire that must be contained. Forceful responses by men, therefore, are implicitly exonerated, encouraged, and eroticized. In short, characters become ';women' by performing coyness, only to be mocked and punished for it. Peggy Thompson explores the disturbing dynamic of feminine coyness and masculine control as it interacts with reaffirmations of church and king, anxiety over new wealth, and emerging interests in liberty, novelty, and marriage in late seventeenth-century England. Despite the diversity of these contexts, the plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency. This is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.

The book offers new perspectives on works that were central to the visual and literary culture of the Anglo-American world-ephemeral print-but which have received little scholarly attention in the past.

This collection reinvigorates Sheridan studies by presenting his spectacular life and extraordinary works in the intricate political, social, and cultural context of Georgian London. The author of The Rivals, The Duenna, The School for Scandal, and the The Critic was also an innovative theatrical manager, a flashy profligate, and the mainstay of political opposition in the decisive decades of the late eighteen and early nineteenth centuries.

This book explores the ways in which five female radical novelists of the 1790sElizabeth Inchbald, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraftattempt to use the components of private life to work toward widespread social reform. These writers depict the conjugal family as the site for a potential reformation of the prejudices and flaws of the biological family. The biological family in the radical novels of female writers is fraught with problems: greed and selfishness pervert the relationships between siblings, and neglect and ignorance characterize the parenting received by the heroines. Additionally, the radical novelists, responding to representations of biological families as inherently restrictive for unmarried women, develop the notion of marriage to a certain type of man as a social duty. Marriage between two properly sensible people who have both cultivated their reason and understanding and who can live together as equals, sharing domestic responsibilities, is shown to be an ideal with the power to create social change. Positioning their depictions of marriage in opposition to earlier feminist depictions of female utopian societies, the female radical novelists of the 1790s strive to depict relationships between men and women that are characterized by cooperation, individual autonomy, and equality. What is most important about these depictions is their ultimate failure. Most of the female radical novelists find such marriages nearly impossible to conceptualize. Marriage, for many of the female radical novelists, was an institution they perceived as inextricably related to (male) concerns about property and inescapably patriarchal under the marriage laws of late eighteenth-century British society. Unions between two worthy individuals outside the boundaries of marriage are shown in the female radical novels to be equally problematic: sex inevitably is the basis for such unions, yet sex leaves women vulnerable to exploitation by men. Rather than the triumph, therefore, of what comes to be in these novels the male-associated values of property and power through marriage, the female radical novels end by suggesting an alternative community, one that will shelter those members of society who are most frequently exploited in male attempts to accumulate this property and power: women, servants, and children.

Tobias Smollett (1721-71) is best known today as a novelist. In the eighteenth-century, he was principally regarded as a historian and critic. In this book, Richard J. Jones explores the diversity of Smollett's journalistic and literary writings. In doing so, he establishes new connections between Smollett's work and contemporary writers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Smollett is presented, much like the philosopher David Hume, as a Scot in London, writing history and critical essays. The book takes as its focal point Smollett's visit to Nice, between 1763 and 1765, and the account he wrote of it in Travels through France and Italy (1766). This account is usually seen as a 'travel narrative'. However, Jones argues that it should more properly be read as 'pocket encyclopedia' in the tradition of Voltaire. Jones offers a productive juxtaposition of authors, texts, and contexts for readers interested in questions of genre, Enlightenment thought, and the cosmopolitan nature of eighteenth-century culture.

Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal,1600-1800 explores the oppositions created by the official exclusion of banned sexual practices and the resistance to that exclusion through widespread acceptance of those outlawed practices at an interpersonal level.