{"title":"Novel Paintings: Learning to Read Art through Joseph Highmore's Adventures of Pamela","authors":"Aaron Gabriel Montalvo","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines Joseph Highmore’s Pamela paintings, possibly the first series of paintings derived from an English novel, in relation to evolving artistic and social practices in the first half of the eighteenth century. Despite the significance of Highmore’s work, the series has been evaluated primarily for its illustrative fidelity to Richardson’s novel. This essay analyzes the series as a production parallel to the novel that is responding to recent developments in the art market that prompted anxieties around issues of class and behavior as the audience for artworks expanded beyond the aristocracy. Drawing on his work in portraiture, a genre at the center of these anxieties, Highmore utilized the popularity of Pamela’s narrative to provide his audience with a lesson in the moral dimensions of spectatorship, depicting the dangers of improper viewing and the social benefits of a moral spectatorship, akin to Richardson’s text’s attention to the correct reading of character. Ultimately, Highmore’s paintings offer a moral pedagogy that makes the proper understanding of paintings a model for properly understanding people.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66501310","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":"Robert Burns and the Refashioning of Scottish Identity through Song","authors":"Stacey Jocoy","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Robert Burns contributed to the collection, compilation, and editing of several song collections, most notably The Scots Musical Museum (1797–1803), although he did not live to see it published. Attribution has proven to be a sticky point of consideration for literary scholars as Burns moved through this conceptual musical museum like a curator: changing, editing, and wholly rewriting sections of song texts to fit his poetic sensibilities. Some tunes were indeed traditional and even Scottish in origin, appearing as they had in earlier collections, while others were almost completely changed, with Burns altering the original text and subverting the traditional message. This, however, had been the traditional art of the ballad maker, and Burns embraced this role, changing both texts and tunes as part of a living, oral tradition. The study focuses on two tunes out of his larger collections, “Greensleeves” and “Ye Jacobites by Name.” “Greensleeves” was a well-known English tune, and “Ye Jacobites by Name” was a ballad that had been used both to attack and justify Scottish resistance to Hanoverian rule. Neither piece would seem to be a particularly promising representation of Scottish culture c. 1800. These pieces, however, highlight an aspect of Burns’s work that not only illuminates his attention to the musicality of these pieces—in an age when most song collections were still printed without notated music—but also his efforts to curate these works, refashioning them to suit a new, proto- Romantic Scottish identity.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45968577","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":"Rabble, Rubble, Repeat","authors":"Zirwat Chowdhury","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay offers a short reflection on Daniel O’Quinn’s Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815. It attends to the forms of historical consciousness that O’Quinn traces within the Society of Dilettanti’s sponsored voyage of William Pars, Nicholas Revett, and Richard Chandler to Asia Minor from 1764–66.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49146149","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":"Animal Domestication and Human-Animal Difference in Buffon's Histoire Naturelle","authors":"Dario Galvão","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper discusses animal domestication and its relation to the boundary between humans and animals, as theorized in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle. Despite recognizing that human beings are animals, Buffon rejects any suggestion that these two classes might be equated. On the contrary, there is a profound difference between them, which Buffon states in core passages of the Histoire Naturelle, notably the “Natural History of Man” (1749) and “Of the Nature of Animals” (1753). In these texts, Buffon suggests that humans and animals are distinct in the same manner as spirit is distinct from matter, thus giving the impression of an absolute denial of rationality to animals, much like the Cartesian concept of the animal-machine. However, as my exploration reveals, Buffon’s ideas regarding domestication can help us better understand his distinction, which should be approached less from a metaphysical or theological point of view than from a naturalist one. From this perspective, the profound difference between humans and animals lies in the violence and dominance perpetrated by humans on animals.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48305945","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":"Wrinkles in Imperial Time","authors":"L. Festa","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This response to Daniel O'Quinn's Engaging the Ottoman Empire addresses the ways in which the book's cross-disciplinary approach and structure generate a reflexive critique of the chronologies that organize our histories.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47695652","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":"Liberal Theory and Eighteenth-Century Criticism","authors":"D. Rosen, A. Santesso","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In recent years the academic study of literature has been riven by debates over the merits of “critique” (and near synonyms like “strong theory” and “hermeneutics”). In most of these debates, the only imaginable alternatives to the ostensibly destructive and “suspicious” practices of critique have been various forms of “weak” (i.e., descriptive, contextualizing, or affective) theory. In this essay we argue that: a) the dichotomy presented by advocates of “critique” and “postcritique” is a false one, and b) there is an ambitious and complex species of theory native to the eighteenth century that stands outside this dichotomy altogether. We trace the origins of this “native” theory in the work of a series of authors from Locke, to Dryden and Behn, to Addison, Fielding, and Johnson, to (ultimately) Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth. We argue that this native theory is an outgrowth of period thinking about contracts and (especially) liberalism. Although this theoretical tradition was extinguished, primarily by the “hermeneutic turn” of the early nineteenth century, before it could be fully articulated, we argue that it points to an ethical mode of reading that may be vital to the survival of the discipline today.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46837636","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":"Family Instruction in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Consider the Children","authors":"Judith Stuchiner","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the sequel to the best-selling Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is an argument for early religious education. In the verdant world of Crusoe’s island, we see the importation of religious instruction from Defoe’s The Family Instructor, written only a few years before the Crusoe trilogy. At the outset of The Farther Adventures, Robinson Crusoe departs for his island, leaving his children in the care of his “good Friend the Widow.” Repeating the past, Crusoe deprives his own children of paternal involvement in their religious education, just as his own father had neglected to participate in his own religious upbringing. As the island becomes Christianized by a French Catholic priest and as its inhabitants embrace family life and religious education, Crusoe finds himself an outsider who cannot remain on the island. Unable to join the “circle of Christianity” on the island and unable to resist his compulsion to wander, Crusoe sets off for the “Brazils.” As a result, the lessons of family instruction, transplanted by Defoe into Crusoe’s Caribbean island, have to be taught without the aid of the hero.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47039177","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":"Empire and Modern Media: Vanmour or Less","authors":"Douglas Fordham","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This review of Daniel O’Quinn’s Engaging the Ottoman Empire focuses on his analysis of visual art within a media framework. I focus particular attention on chapters 2 and 3, which foreground the Ottoman paintings of Jean Baptiste Vanmour in the first third of the eighteenth century. Noting the challenge of integrating oil painting into media analysis, the review notes the book’s successful deployment of close visual analysis in a sophisticated social history of art.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49491993","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":"\"Pirate Vices, Public Benefits\": The Social Ethics of Piracy in the 1720s","authors":"Noel Chevalier","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates demonstrates a complex, even ambivalent, ethical perspective on the pirates who form the subject of his narratives. On the one hand, Johnson acknowledges that pirates, legally designated as hostis humani generis, the “enemy of all humanity,” are monsters with respect to legitimate trade; their rapacity and violence threaten the stability of Commerce itself. On the other hand, Johnson engages with Bernard Mandeville’s argument, in The Fable of the Bees, that vice is, in fact, an integral part of a functioning modern society: Johnson even acknowledges that successful pirates display some aspects of “great men.” This article examines Johnson’s moral perspective on pirates in the General History and compares this perspective to comments made about Mandeville’s controversial book by two figures often associated with the mysterious Johnson: Daniel Defoe and Nathaniel Mist.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47889633","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":"Marvelous Maples: Visions of Maple Sugar in New France, 1691–1761","authors":"N. Brown","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Maple sugar was a multivalent product in the New France. Before the “discovery” of maples by early American boosters like Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Rush, French settlers in Canada had already developed a deep connection to maple sap and its sugary products. Although it failed to enter the world market in the eighteenth century like its cane cousin, maple sugar held intriguing—but ultimately unrealized—possibilities for New France within a mercantilist framework. This natural sweetener also fueled a utopian vision of New France and troubled eighteenth-century French beliefs about their own mastery of knowledge, the environment, technology, and the Indigenous Peoples of North America. This article assesses descriptions of maple sugar in both French texts, such as those by Sieur de Dièreville, Baron de Lahontan, Joseph-François de Lafitau, and Pierre-Xavier de Charlevoix, as well as texts associated with several Indigenous nations of the Great Lakes in order to explore the history of sweetness beyond the sugar plantation.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66500997","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}