{"title":"Performativity and Spectacle in the Oriental Novel: The Harem as Dramatic Space in Sébastien Brémond's The Happy Slave","authors":"Sonia Villegas-López","doi":"10.1353/rst.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Some fourteen novels of French origin, set in oriental locations, were published in England with great success in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Many of them chose the exotic territories of Tunis, Morocco or Turkey to situate love intrigues that involved people of high rank. In these idealised spaces, love reigns supreme, and the harem becomes the focus of attention, a hybrid place where the public and the domestic collide. In Sébastien Brémond's oriental tale The Happy Slave, the harem is often a source of spectacle, a dynamic space full of performative potential for both sexes, in which bashaws (bassas) exert their absolute authority, and sultanas, though initially objects of male desire, evade their masters' surveillance, and become agents of their own acts of seduction. In Brémond's novel the harem is portrayed in rich detail, and most probably as the result of his own observations, not merely as a prison and a place of seclusion for women, but most significantly as a space of creativity, performance, and transformation. I argue that in this text Brémond's purpose was twofold: on the one hand, he relied on the function of stories as sources of pleasurable entertainment, whilst on the other, he explored the transnational and performative potential of the form of the oriental tale, and by so doing, he shed light on the exchanges between dramatic action and the new realism that prose fiction was adopting in the early days of the novel.","PeriodicalId":110062,"journal":{"name":"Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117010941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Authorship in Female Disguise: Love in Distress; or, The Lucky Discovery. A Novel Written by the Honourable Lady * * *","authors":"María José Coperías-Aguilar","doi":"10.1353/rst.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Love in Distress; or, The Lucky Discovery (1697) is fundamentally concerned with the effects of concealment and revelation. Even though it was published with no authorial attribution, the reader was told that it had been written \"By the honourable Lady * * *,\" thus creating tension between anonymity and disguised female authorship. The sense of concealment created by the use of pseudonyms, initials and references in the prefatory material is echoed by the facts that three of the female characters in the story cross-dress, thus hiding their identity, and that some male characters also use various kinds of disguises. In addition to this, the story is plotted through a series of well-kept secrets that are eventually revealed to create a happy and lucky ending. The tightly built plot, some elements of which are taken from the stage, and the psychological insight it offers into the feelings of some of the characters make this novel a representative and singularly interesting exemplum of the genre in the late seventeenth century.","PeriodicalId":110062,"journal":{"name":"Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125581849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Some Current Publications","authors":"Rose Botaish","doi":"10.1353/rst.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"APHRA BEHN Mathes, Carmen Faye. “Lucretius Taken Lightly: Women’s Educations and the Radical Materialist Joke.” Representations, vol. 159, 2022, pp. 34–57. !is article is an examination of eighteenth-century jokes about Lucretius and their connection to the inadequacies of women’s education. Mathes analyzes the radical materialist joke and its potential to invoke “notions of subjectivity beyond agential autonomy” in the work of Aphra Behn, Anne Ingram, and Mary Robinson (34). Jokes generally, Mathes points out, fail to revolutionize because they fail to “move beyond the social spheres already likely to appreciate them” and promote continual comedy rather than consideration of “realworld implications” that would incite actionable change (36). In particular, Mathes highlights the reliance on “patrilineal inheritance” in jokes about Lucretius as pointing to the failures of women’s education without successfully inciting useful social change (35). Ultimately, Mathes concludes that jokes’ democratic potential is undermined by the boundaries set by its necessary appeal to a certain ingroup audience.","PeriodicalId":110062,"journal":{"name":"Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127971938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sonia Villegas-López, John J. Mctague, Tomás Monterrey, L. Cottegnies, Leah Orr, Rafael Vélez-Núñez, G. Bayer, María José Coperías-Aguilar, Nora Rodríguez-Loro, Rocío G. Sumillera, M. E. Cantillo Lucuara, Patricia Rodrigues, Víctor Huertas-Martín, Rose Botaish
{"title":"Introduction: Genre Liaisons in Restoration Prose Fiction: Influences, Texts and Reception","authors":"Sonia Villegas-López, John J. Mctague, Tomás Monterrey, L. Cottegnies, Leah Orr, Rafael Vélez-Núñez, G. Bayer, María José Coperías-Aguilar, Nora Rodríguez-Loro, Rocío G. Sumillera, M. E. Cantillo Lucuara, Patricia Rodrigues, Víctor Huertas-Martín, Rose Botaish","doi":"10.1353/rst.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article discusses a six-part à clef secret history, The Amours of Messalina, alongside Peter Belon's The Court Secret and the pamphlet play The Abdicated Prince. These texts narrate a series of allegations surrounding the contested birth of James Francis Edward Stuart in June 1688, the most notorious of which was that he was not the issue of the queen but an impostor born in an adjacent convent and delivered into the birthing chamber inside a warming pan. The pamphlets and broadsides which work together to construct this narrative and other fictions of illegitimacy have been well studied; this article asks what difference it makes when those allegations are translated into sequential narratives, and what this specific case might tell us about the political uses of early novelistic forms like secret history. It argues that rather than revelation and disclosure, these secret histories prioritise displacement and containment, liberating English readers from the need to take the deposed Stuarts seriously.","PeriodicalId":110062,"journal":{"name":"Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125017260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Letter Matters: Corporeality, Physicality, Epistolarity","authors":"G. Bayer","doi":"10.1353/rst.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:During the English Restoration, the writing of letters took on new significance, and the formal tradition of letter writing contributed significantly to the experimentation that played out within the genres of narrative prose fiction. While epistolarity is built on the absence of speakers, merely evoking their spectral presence during the moment of reading, materiality nevertheless finds its way into these indirect forms of communication. In fact, corporeality and the physicality of objects included in letters could be said to make up for the absent body of the speaker. This article discusses how Restoration epistolarity employs such forms of materiality, arguing that readers and writers, both within the diegetic realm and in actual reality, decoded ostentatious moments of materiality as acts that lent letters an element of veracity and reliability that this generic form was not usually able to claim at this particular historical moment. Texts studied include Robert Beaumont's Loves Missives to Virtue (1660) and Margaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters (1664).","PeriodicalId":110062,"journal":{"name":"Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116413787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Some Current Publications","authors":"Garth Libhart","doi":"10.1353/rst.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":110062,"journal":{"name":"Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124583958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Remaking Orinda: The Role of Manuscript Copying and Print Technology in Fabricating Katherine Philips' Legacy","authors":"Paul Trolander","doi":"10.1353/rst.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":110062,"journal":{"name":"Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130262597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scottish Colonial Literature: Writing the Atlantic, 1603-1707 by Kirsten Sandrock (review)","authors":"Laura J. Rosenthal","doi":"10.1353/rst.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":110062,"journal":{"name":"Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122926705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée by Zachary Lesser (review)","authors":"D. Lewis","doi":"10.1353/rst.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":110062,"journal":{"name":"Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131374611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Marwood, Milton, and Monstrous Women: The Neglected Villain of The Way of the World","authors":"Rachel Ewing","doi":"10.1353/rst.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/rst.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":110062,"journal":{"name":"Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700","volume":"24 4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132534991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}