EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE最新文献

{"title":"Trivial Pursuit: The Anecdote as Evidence in Theater History","authors":"Mattie Burkert","doi":"10.1215/00982601-11523800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-11523800","url":null,"abstract":"From the Greek for “unpublished things,” the term “anecdote” entered English in the late seventeenth century by way of a translated secret history and quickly became a byword for all manner of literary commodities. Like secret history itself, published anecdotes often operated at the slippery boundary of fact and fiction, incorporating features of the picaresque, life writing, stage drama, jest, and satire. Typically short and often topical, they were ideally suited to a periodical and print marketplace sustained by the speedy reproduction and repackaging of familiar content. Anecdotes about the theater, and about the star actors and actresses who dominated it, were particularly popular. The new collection, English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660 – 1800, examines these “short, often humorous and titillating, sometimes moralistic tales of theater people” (1) and considers the ways they contributed to the rise of celebrity culture. Edited by Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie for University of Delaware Press's new series “Performing Celebrity,” this collection reflects an upswell of scholarly interest in the multimedia landscape of the long eighteenth-century theater and a newly serious attention to theater-adjacent cultural forms that were long marginalized, trivialized, or taken as documentary evidence rather than as cultural artifacts. Collectively, the essays in this collection raise important questions about the formal features, social functions, and circulation of theatrical anecdotes, as well as about the possibilities and challenges they raise for scholars of the period.English Theatrical Anecdotes stands out for its explicit attention to problems of method. The introduction and coda by editors Ritchie and Ladd mark out the epistemological minefield surrounding the use of anecdotes in historical research, and each of their individual essay contributions demonstrates the anecdote's potential for mystification. Ladd's piece, “Samuel Foote, Esq.: Caricature, Class, and the Comic Theatrical Anecdote,” identifies the role anecdotes played in Foote's larger image-management strategy during his career as an actor, playwright, and theater manager. Like a social media-savvy celebrity today, Foote harnessed a newly powerful cultural form to circulate and amplify stories reinforcing his image as a “gentleman clown” (62). As Ladd argues persuasively, the classism underpinning this persona becomes clear only once we recognize the centrality of anecdote to Foote's strategic self-fashioning.Celebrities like Foote might authorize or tacitly approve the circulation of anecdotes that were “on-brand” (75) regardless of their factual truth, but in other cases, anecdotes were crafted intentionally to mislead. In “Killing Delane; Or, Mimicry and the Anecdota Obscura,” Leslie Ritchie identifies a “shady subspecies” of anecdote that acts as a “false witness to history” (27). The anecdota obscura is a weapon in the hands of biographers who suppress historical evidence in t","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"49 1","pages":"147-152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147919476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Owning Ephemerality","authors":"Emily Anderson","doi":"10.1215/00982601-11118352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-11118352","url":null,"abstract":"In the early scenes of Richard Eyre's 2004 movie Stage Beauty, a period piece about the mechanics and gender politics of the Restoration stage, the fictionalized characters of Maria Hughes and Edward Kynaston engage in a telling debate. What would happen to male actors such as Kynaston, who were most celebrated for playing female parts, if and when it became legal for women to act women's parts onstage? Could a woman, such as Hughes, act the part of Desdemona with as much charisma, artistry, and beauty as Kynaston had shown in the part? While these questions form the warp and woof of the entire movie, the dinner scene debate is more precise. “No, Kynaston, Desdemona is yours alone!” pronounces an ebullient Rupert Everett as King Charles II, challenging the possibility that any other actor—man or woman—could perform Kynaston's signature role. Maria Hughes begs to disagree: “But, a part doesn't belong to an actor,” she states, channeling a sentiment that Kynaston had previously shared: “An actor belongs to a part. Don't you agree?”In the context of the movie, Rupert Everett doesn't know what to think. Billy Crudup, as Kynaston, looks down at his dinner plate, falsely modest, and evades. Still, the idea of whether or not an actor could “own” a part, or any part of performance, or who and how one could “own” anything that transpired onstage, forms a conceptual question that animates, equally, eighteenth-century theater and Jane Wessel's lucid, engaging new book. As Wessel articulates, ownership of intellectual property was a newly important category in the eighteenth century, thanks in large part to the 1710 Copyright Act. This piece of legislation allowed authors now to own the rights to their works, and to understand themselves as the owners of the same. As it did so, “authorship” expanded in the eighteenth century to mean the same thing as “ownership”—with the significant caveat that the only forms of authorship protected under this new law were print based.What then, Wessel asks, of forms of authorship that were not geared toward publication? What then of the manuscript culture that flourished in the theater, and which produced work that was often circulated and consumed in performance but never on the page? Did playwrights “own” the words they produced, even if these words were never put into print?Wessel's main point is that our studies of literary property, theater, and authorship have failed to ask these questions, and that in failing to ask these questions, we have missed key aspects of how theatrical culture developed in the eighteenth century, and how intellectual property was understood. She's right. Her book, in equal measures fascinating and conscientious, walks the reader through a new literary landscape in which an authorial resistance to publication emerges as a complementary strategy to establish literary ownership, one running in parallel with the ideas of authorial ownership established via copyright over printed works. This is a ","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"48 2","pages":"100-105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147889164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contesting Women's Learning and Fashion: Ann Murry's Moral Zoological System in the <i>Lady's Magazine</i>","authors":"Lina Jiang","doi":"10.1215/00982601-10690093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-10690093","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on Ann Murry's serial essay “The Moral Zoologist, or Natural History of Animals,” which appeared in the Lady's Magazine in sixty-seven letters between 1800 and 1805. I argue that Murry's “The Moral Zoologist” contested the bounds of women's scientific knowledge in the eighteenth century. Although some scholarship has argued that women's magazines usually did not provide a coherent curriculum for female readers and confined their female readership to the merely entertaining or domestic, Murry used “The Moral Zoologist” to present readers with a systematic view of animal life, as well as moral reflections on the relationship between humans and animals. In particular, “The Moral Zoologist” includes pointed critiques of the use of animal fur and feathers for clothing and therefore provides a contrasting perspective for readers to consider when they peruse the fashion pieces that also populated the pages of the Lady's Magazine. Murry's work, therefore, shows that eighteenth-century periodicals for women were complex spaces in which different ideas about the relationship between women, science, animals, and ethics could coexist.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135299638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Promise and Problem of Habit in Austen's <i>Mansfield Park</i>","authors":"Peggy Thompson","doi":"10.1215/00982601-10690067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-10690067","url":null,"abstract":"Jane Austen uses “habit” and its variants four times as often in Mansfield Park as she does in her previous novel, Pride and Prejudice. In what seems, then, to be a deliberate exploration of habit, the novel repeatedly recalls Aristotle's views on habit, which could well have been conveyed to Austen through eighteenth-century divines who saw them as compatible with their Anglican theology. Like Aristotle, Austen emphasizes habit as crucial to an ethic that defines virtue not as self-denial, but as fulfillment within a well-governed polis, or, in her case, within an idealized estate. But as Austen explores the promise of habit in Mansfield Park, she also reveals the problems it can create. Most prominently, Austen's novel reminds us that the conditions for cultivating virtue through habituation can also function to cultivate vice or, what is more insidious, virtue understood as resignation and passivity rather than as active principle.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"126 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135299634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Modest Genius: Mathematics, Certainty, and the Creation of the Public Newton","authors":"Alessio Mattana","doi":"10.1215/00982601-10690080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-10690080","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the myth of Isaac Newton's modesty in eighteenth-century Britain. By analyzing both primary sources by and on Newton and scholarship on the concept of “modest witnessing,” this essay argues that a number of actors concerned with Newton's public relevance progressively divested his scientific ideas of mathematics with the goal of smoothing their dogmatic edges and making them more accessible to the polite public. This process, it will be claimed, resulted in creating the myth of the modest Newton, the genius who had discovered the secrets of nature and made them available for the public good.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135299636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Britannia's \"Gallant Crew\": Sailor Poets and the Legacy of William Falconer","authors":"B. Keegan","doi":"10.1215/00982601-10394949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-10394949","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The essay examines the history of poetry written by sailors from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. William Falconer's The Shipwreck (1762, 1764 and 1769) inspired many seamen to turn poet and to write about their experiences at sea. Falconer's influence is seen in how sailor poets write about maritime labor and practices such as impressment and how they represent the beauties and threats of the ocean environment. They also share stylistic features, notably an emphasis on \"terms of art\" specific to shipboard life. Sailor poets provide key insights into important sociocultural developments related to the expansion of the British empire, including significant insights into the horrors of the slave trade and the cause of abolition. Falconer's legacy is one that is deeper than previously recognized.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"52 3","pages":"188 - 215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72394437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"William Falconer and the Rhetoric of the Sea","authors":"Jamie M. Bolker","doi":"10.1215/00982601-10394936","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-10394936","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores how William Falconer's A Universal Dictionary of the Marine exemplifies the \"rhetoric of the sea,\" which operates according to an inclusive approach to maritime knowledge, which maritime authors adopted in an effort to translate into writing a unique, physical practice at sea. Since maritime practice involved diverse processes in an environment that could not be controlled, maritime and navigation books thereby contained diverse styles and forms, from poetry, to criticism, to illustrations, to definitions, in an effort to reflect the diversity, and experience, of the sea itself. This essay places Falconer's Dictionary (1769) into a longer history of maritime and navigation books, especially dictionaries, including John Smith's Seaman's Grammar and Dictionary (1626), and the development of specialized dictionaries in English. Building on developments in \"blue ecocriticism,\" this essay concludes by suggesting that the eighteenth-century rhetoric of the sea provides us an understanding of the semantic and physical power of the world's oceans.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"494 1","pages":"166 - 187"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86804824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"William Falconer: Sailor, Poet, Lexicographer","authors":"William Jones","doi":"10.1215/00982601-10394857","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-10394857","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:William Falconer (1732–1770) suffered a catastrophic shipwreck as a young man, which became the subject of his celebrated poem The Shipwreck (1762), with revised and extended editions in 1764 and 1769. He is also the compiler of the Dictionary of the Marine which remained the standard work of nautical reference until the end of the sailing ship. Largely forgotten through the 20th century, Falconer's work is now being recognised as a significant and unique contribution to our understanding of the literature, and indeed the world view, of the eighteenth century. This essay traces his life and intellectual development from an impoverished childhood to a career in both the merchant and Royal Navy, and to distinguished achievements as poet, sea-scientist and lexicographer.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"222 1","pages":"13 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75903617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Visual Anatomy of Falconer's The Shipwreck, 1762–1818","authors":"Sandro Jung","doi":"10.1215/00982601-10394923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-10394923","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article offers an account of all illustrated editions of William Falconer's The Shipwreck (1762), including anthologies such as John Roach's Beauties, that were produced up to the end of the handpress period. It examines both the illustrations of specific scenes or moments from the poem and other visual paratext. In addition to providing a detailed study of the editions, including their marketing and pricing, it focuses on interpretive shifts in the illustrations—from exclusively ship- and shipwreck-related iconography, to the expression of human concerns, especially in terms of the tragic-sentimental mode that characterizes a large number of these illustrations. The illustrations will not be discussed in isolation but will be related to how artists at various exhibitions in that period engaged with Falconer's work and made present various aspects of it. In its comprehensive coverage of how publishers catered to different groups of buyers, the essay recovers a hitherto uncharted visual archive stemming from Falconer's poem. Questions related to readership, visual literacy, the commodification of the visual images accompanying The Shipwreck, and the role illustrations played in the mediation of the work will underpin my account of how the visual apparatuses added to editions affected the marketing and reception of Falconer's poem.","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"45 1","pages":"134 - 165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82284859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editors' Note","authors":"Cedric D. Reverand, Michael Edson","doi":"10.1215/00982601-10394831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-10394831","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43296,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE","volume":"8 1","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78671241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}