EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Architecture and Urbanism in Viceregal Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries by Juan Luis Burke (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909468","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Architecture and Urbanism in Viceregal Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries by Juan Luis Burke Luis J. Gordo Peláez Juan Luis Burke, Architecture and Urbanism in Viceregal Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries ( New York: Routledge, 2021). Pp. 232; 50 b/w illus. $170.00 cloth, $48.95 paper. The opening salvo of this study dismantles the myth that traditionally fashioned the Mexican city of Puebla as the quintessential Spanish colonial settlement devoid of Indigenous contribution to its urban design and built form. Architectural historian Juan Luis Burke argues that the Indigenous legacy and presence were deeply ingrained in early modern Puebla from the very conceptualization of the city. Through five chapters, the architectural history of New Spain's second largest city after the viceregal capital is scrutinized in a chronological sequence, [End Page 141] from its founding in 1531 to the baroque transformation of its built environment in the 1700s. The book starts with Puebla's founding and settlement, intended as a Spanish agrarian community embedded in a densely populated Indigenous land. As with other Spanish colonial urban experiments, Puebla emerged as an enterprise in which the state and the church joined forces. The negotiated nature of its early history is stressed in regard to its strategic location, its multiethnic population, and the roots and development of its urban form. By revisiting primary city accounts and historiography on early colonial Mexico and urban design, Puebla's incipient grid model is reassessed in light of the region's Indigenous presence and the pre-Hispanic planning and building traditions. Burke reevaluates the case of pre-Hispanic Cholula, one of the leading Indigenous centers in the area prior to the Spanish colonization, where urban form (along with enduring cultural practices) might have exerted some influence in the design and physical structure of colonial Puebla. A review of the history of royal instructions, urban ideals, and experiences also draws attention to the Franciscan missionaries, who were receptive to medieval theories on urban planning and instrumental in the city's identification with the heavenly Jerusalem, a move that resonated with similar evocations in other colonial cities. In Puebla, this was reinforced by an architectural Via Crucis that reimagined the Mexican city as Jerusalem. The dozen preserved chapel stations and their topographical reenactment comprise a fairly unknown and almost complete architectural ensemble that is here brought to light. Next, Burke traces the reception of Renaissance urban theory and classicizing forms in late sixteenth-century Puebla by delving into the vibrant and sprawling city's built environment, the patrons and architects involved in its shaping, and the images and books that circulated in this Novohispanic region. A \"distinctive regional architectural tradition\" is argued for Puebla, on","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135690183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cities of the Dead as Global History","authors":"Kathleen Wilson","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909448","url":null,"abstract":"Cities of the Dead as Global History Kathleen Wilson (bio) Joseph Roach's famously generative study, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), founded a new paradigm for performance, cultural, and historical studies, one that remains extravagantly transgressive of national, imperial, and hemispheric boundaries and yet astonishingly effective in materializing quotidian and unexpected demographic and cultural flows. (Calling this work \"interdisciplinary\" is quaint, as Eric Lott notes on the dustjacket.)1 That paradigm is circum-Atlantic performance, a tag that beckons to both its trans-hemispheric reach and mobility, triangulating between four continents (Europe, Africa, and the Americas), and to the many beings, practices, and lifeways, human and nonhuman, that constituted its hydrographical conditions of possibility. Performance in Roach's hands becomes a way of interrogating, and learning from, the messiness of cultural confrontations to see how popular and elite practices took shape in relation to each other, \"repetitions with a difference\" that consolidated settlements on other peoples' lands and created new kinds of societies in turn.2 From Thomas Betterton's funeral to King Zulu's Mardi Gras processions, song, speech, dance, and other bodily arts become through Roach's intercultural analysis a new kind of archive, marked by modes of kinesthetic communication and exchange whereby, to quote Victor Turner, \"the ethnographies, literatures, ritual and theatrical traditions of the world\" serve as the basis for \"a new transcultural communicative synthesis through performance,\" a kind of global history of meaning-making.3 For this cultural and ethnohistorian of eighteenth-century Britain and the empire, Roach's study was quite simply the most important to appear on performance in the twentieth century, and since. Bringing together older anthropological and post-structural models with newer performance studies approaches, it helped reshape the interpretive terrain to which cultural and ethnohistorians of empire must attend. This terrain now includes the multiplicities of performances that clashed on the littorals of contested domains and that sometimes even vanquished brutality to modelnew ways of being and knowing.4 [End Page 5] The circum-Atlantic conjured by Cities of the Dead revealed an oceanic interculture marked by webs of slavery, forced labor, domination, and subordination that unfolded on four continents thanks to a single ocean and singular human trade, creating a new kind of geopolitical entity that reshaped ideas about transnational and transhemispheric history. The persistence of multiplicity in its intercultural spaces unmoored queries about origin from those merely of the nation-state and its supposedly indomitable will, and directed them instead to the stories of the struggles and triumphs of peoples who survived the murderous circuits of mercantile capitalism—and those who did not. Performance provides a unique perspec","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135691643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Skeleton of the Nation: Networks and Infrastructure in The Review","authors":"Jennifer Buckley","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909455","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909455","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article argues that Daniel Defoe's tendency to write as a form of narrative cartographer predates his novels of the 1720s and owes much to his periodical writing in the early 1700s. Defoe's Review (1704–13) is an unusually peripatetic periodical, written while its author was travelling widely on the business of Robert Harley. Focusing on the periodical's early years (1704–5), this article explores how The Review acts as a repository for geospatial information. It uses correspondence and advertisements to consider how the periodical details the logistics of its publication and distribution, and how that distribution responds to changes in national infrastructure and politics.","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135691647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century by Nicholas Mathew (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909464","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century by Nicholas Mathew Caryl Clark Nicholas Mathew, The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2022). Pp. 243; 49 b/w illus. $45.00 cloth. Focusing on the mobility of Haydn's music within an emerging European economy, Nicholas Mathew's pathbreaking study traces the many ways aesthetics and economics developed in tandem during the second half of the eighteenth century. Unpacked in minute detail is Haydn's deep connectivity to commerce throughout his long and prolific career, enabling Mathew to move the discipline far beyond genre-based studies or traditional understandings of the composer's dealings with the marketplace. Organized into four main chapters—Commerce, Interest, Objects, and Work—the book traces Haydn's chronological trajectory from the feudal Esterházy court environments of Eisenstadt, Eszterháza, and Vienna in the 1780s; to London, the center of European capitalism in the 1790s; and back to Vienna again. The book concludes with a short Epilogue—Value—that places Haydn's last public appearance at a gala performance of The Creation in March 1808 within a broader sphere of interpersonal, media, and institutional exchange. The new economic history lens Mathew employs here foregrounds developments in economics, print media, material culture, and the dynamic world of commercial exchange—one of perpetual motion of people, goods, and liquidity. For a book about the growing interdependence of capitalism and the arts, it's curious that the main source of Britain's economic wealth arising from the transatlantic slave trade is touched on only tangentially. It seems that, for Mathew, Adam Smith's arguments in The Wealth of Nations (1776) about the inefficiency of \"the invisible hand\" (slave labor) had yet to infiltrate economic consciousness. In a dense introduction, Mathew outlines the methodological approaches of new materialisms underpinning the warehouse of information on offer here. Where past studies have explored \"when, where and how music was commodified and consumed, or became intellectual property,\" he emphasizes \"the material forms and protocols that made these things possible\" (10). These include the rise of print culture and the public concert, with its attendant ticket sales, advertising, and merchandising, and \"the many forms of mediation\" they encompass: \"infrastructures, such as concert rooms, booksellers' warehouses, and piano builders' workshops; rules, such as ticketing and music copyright; formats, such as the piano reduction [End Page 132] or the music magazine; and music-related genres, such as the concert review or the celebrity portrait\" (10). As he observes, \"Haydn designed music with an awareness of the things that mediated it,\" helping to create a media culture that was \"more than the sum of its constituent technologies and techniques\" (11). Along the way, ","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135690171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gamboa's World: Justice, Silver Mining, and Imperial Reform in New Spain by Christopher Albi (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909466","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Gamboa's World: Justice, Silver Mining, and Imperial Reform in New Spain by Christopher Albi Karen Stolley Christopher Albi, Gamboa's World: Justice, Silver Mining, and Imperial Reform in New Spain ( Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2021). Pp. 256; 12 halftones, 1 map. $95.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. In this lively and informative book, Christopher Albi charts the life and career trajectory of the jurist Francisco Xavier de Gamboa (1717–1794), exploring the intersection of the law, the political economy of eighteenth-century New Spain (now Mexico), and Spanish Bourbon reformism. Albi situates his study of Gamboa—seven chapters, organized chronologically and each dedicated to a different phase of Gamboa's career—within the context of a resurgence of interest in colonial legal studies (for example, Bianca Premo's The Enlightenment on Trial [2017]). The cover blurb by Matthew Restall notes that Gamboa was \"neither famous nor a nobody.\" Albi emphasizes that like his subject, he too will stake out a kind of middle ground, without arguing, on the one hand, that Spanish colonial law in the Americas was mere window dressing for imperial power nor, on the other hand, that it was overly and overtly oppressive. Rather, Albi wants to show that judicial administrators like Gamboa functioned in a spirit of pragmatic flexibility and attention to local custom that often put them at odds with enlightened Bourbon reforms that aimed to centralize Spain's administration of its overseas territories for economic and military gains. In the opening chapters, Albi lays out the attributes of Spanish law as it was understood and practiced in colonial Spanish America—grounded in Roman jurisprudence and deeply religious, drawing both on divine or natural law and Catholic canon law. Jurists in eighteenth-century Mexico would have been familiar with the Corpus Juris Civilis, a compendium of Roman law (also known as the ius commune), as well as the thirteenth-century Siete Partidas. Castilian judicial order was adapted to social and geographical realities in the Americas which mandated attention to local customs and underscored the importance of jurisdiction. Albi quotes Juan Solórzano Pereyra, author of Politica Indiana (1648) and the foremost legal authority at the time, who argued for a casuistic and pluralistic approach and emphasized that it was \"better to adjust the law to suit local reality than to try to change reality to suit the law\" (9). The genesis of Albi's project is his desire to challenge David Brading's portrait of Gamboa in Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (1971) as an opportunistic and servile representative of Mexico's merchant class. Albi emphasizes that in opposing certain elements of the Bourbon reforms (particularly those led by José de Gálvez, Visitador General 1765–1771 and Ministro de Indias 1776–1787), Gamboa's primary concern was to deliver Solórzano's vision of justice. Indeed, Gálvez functions in Albi's account as ","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135691447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exoriare Aliquis","authors":"Daniel O'Quinn","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909451","url":null,"abstract":"Exoriare Aliquis Daniel O'Quinn (bio) Perhaps the best way that I can describe Cities of the Dead is to say that, like other virtuoso performances, it stops you in your tracks. Despite the book's propulsive drive across fields, disciplines, locations, and historical moments, my experience of reading it is one of constant self-imposed interruption. My copy is full of marginal comments, sticky notes, dog-ears: physical signs of stopping to allow thought to catch up. What fascinates me is that when I go back to the book the relationship between these indicator marks and the text is never clear: rather than being signs of summation, realization, or skepticism, they are simply traces of the need to rest and testimony that I did indeed go on. I want to think about the need to rest in a book that is constantly moving by looking closely at the analysis of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas in \"Echoes in the Bone,\" the book's crucial second chapter. This chapter is crucial because it sets the pattern for how Roach embeds his arguments on the effigy and on surrogation firmly in an eighteenth-century repertoire while addressing current social formations in the circum-Atlantic. It arguably sets the expectations for everything that follows; attending to its rhetorical structure, therefore, unlocks much of Roach's modus operandi. Cannily holding Purcell's music in reserve, Roach enters the opera via Nahum Tate's libretto to quickly establish, first, the importance of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain to Tate's play Brutus of Alba, and, second, the degree to which the story of how Aeneas's grandson Brutus loves and leaves the Queen of Syracuse to found Britain echoes Aeneas's prior abandonment of the Queen of Carthage to found Rome. They are two origin stories set in parallel about two ostensibly comparable empires. But Tate's act of aligning Virgil and Geoffrey of Monmouth performs a historical sleight of hand: \"The epic account of the Trojan Brute, with its echoes of Virgil, narrates the transoceanic movement out of the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic.\"1 Tate's alignment of these two stories rhetorically transfers the imperial vortex from one global system to another in a way that perfectly echoes Giovanni Arrighi's account of the shifting spatial [End Page 33] dynamics of capitalism in the seventeenth century; but it also radically alters both Dido and the ground underneath her feet.2 As Roach states, \"Although Africa in fact plays a hinge role in turning the Mediterranean-centred consciousness of European memory into an Atlantic-centred one, the scope of that role largely disappears… Dido and Aeneas hinges on the narrative of abandonment, a public performance of forgetting.\"3 Throughout Cities of the Dead one can discern this kind of argumentative strategy. Roach frequently opens in obscurity—Tate's Brutus in Alba is not within most scholars' working repertoires—and then makes a crucial evidentiary alignment to a more well-known text. The en","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135691656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rousseau's Rome: Book IV of The Social Contract and the Specter of Montesquieu","authors":"Sara Furnal","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909454","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Scholars of Rousseau's Social Contract have focused primarily on the text's abstract principles of political right. This theoretical focus has come at the cost of serious consideration of practical aspects of Rousseau's thought, such as his views on bringing the political association into being and what Rousseau calls maxims of politics . One of his extended discussions about political practice occurs in Book IV of The Social Contract , yet this portion of the text largely has been ignored. My central claim is that Book IV merits serious attention since it changes Rousseau's project from one that uses political right merely to condemn institutions to a theory that uses right to identify latent possibilities for changing institutions. Further, this practical theory comes to light most clearly when one understands that he is in conversation with Montesquieu in Book IV on the topic of the Roman Republic.","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135690169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch, and: Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Records of American Settlement by Jerome McGann (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909457","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch, and: Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Records of American Settlement by Jerome McGann Jordan Alexander Stein Daniel Diez Couch, American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic ( Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Pp. 281; 8 b/w illus. $69.95 cloth. Jerome McGann, Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Records of American Settlement ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2022). Pp. 272; 11 b/w illus. $95.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. The two monographs under review proceed at the intersection of material textual studies (sometimes elsewhere called book history or the sociology of texts) and formalist readings of genre. Both identify the implications of their focus well beyond genre. Both ask scholars in the field to read unfamiliar or non-canonical materials in relation to canonical materials that, each argues, can and ought to be [End Page 111] re-read in their light. Despite these parallel methods, each study makes a significant intervention that is not identical––neither readily complementary nor obviously incompatible––with the other's. Nothing, of course, necessarily compels anyone to consider these texts together. But it seems that the absence of any such imperative brings into focus a consequential limitation in two otherwise impressive monographs. After considering each on its own, then, let's consider their relation. Jerome McGann's Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes begins with the premise that for scholars of colonial North American literature, \"nothing is more widely recognized than its 'practical' character\" (3). That is to say, this study extends a line of thinking that presupposes the public and occasional value of colonial texts––sermons, speeches, narratives––rather than any more aesthetic value, especially in the modernist, \"art-for-art's sake\" sense. With this assumption in place, McGann's study draws attention to ways a history of multiple violated treaties with Native tribes haunts this colonial North American literature. This literature, the study argues, is tuned to a frequency where \"the struggle to maintain social order under complex and dangerous conditions, and to persist in the struggle against all odds and in the continual experience of unsuccess and disappointment, nonfeasance and outright malfeasance\" is everywhere in the background, a noise that can't be filtered out (13). Can't be, but also shouldn't be: the heart of Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes rallies around the idea that telling \"impossible\" truths and protecting human memories are the tasks of scholarly vocation (217). The historical dimension of this thesis astonishes with its force, and its imbricated development across eleven chapters and two interchapters points to some of the lengths Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes takes to demon","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135691644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Offensive to pious ears: Obscenity and censorship in eighteenth-century Spanish and New Spain poetry by Elena Deanda-Camacho (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909467","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909467","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Offensive to pious ears: Obscenity and censorship in eighteenth-century Spanish and New Spain poetry by Elena Deanda-Camacho Irene Gomez-Castellano Elena Deanda-Camacho, Ofensiva a los oídos piadosos: Obscenidad y censura en la poesía española y novohispana del siglo XVIII [ Offensive to pious ears: Obscenity and censorship in eighteenth-century Spanish and New Spain poetry] ( Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2022). Pp. 272. €46.00 cloth. This book provides a fresh approach to the topic of obscenity and the Inquisition in the Spanish-speaking eighteenth century. Comparing texts that were deemed \"offensive to pious ears\" in New Spain (colonial Mexico) and Spain, Elena Deanda-Camacho puts together a culturally relevant cluster of texts that have been extensively studied by dieciochistas but not paired in this way. In this rich context of interpretations, the originality of Deanda's approach lies in the comparative/transatlantic perspective and the archival work related to inquisitorial practices across the Atlantic that she deftly employs for her reading. As Deanda states, her book is written from the vantage point of Transatlantic Studies, since \"Spain, in the eighteenth century, was not only the [Iberian] Peninsula but a whole Empire\" (15, my translation here and elsewhere). Deanda's writing style is elegant and sassy at the same time, entertaining, not afraid of polemic, and very contemporary, so the book is a pleasure to read even if one does not agree with some of her propositions regarding classical texts, such as the brutal medieval Carajicomedia or Meléndez Valdés's delicate Besos de amor. Deanda reviews foundational inquisitional texts and the changing ideas surrounding the role of the inquisitor. Exploring reactions to canonical texts like Fernando de Rojas's Celestina or King Solomon's Song of Songs, Deanda offers an eye-opening discussion of the modus operandi of inquisitorial censors. Especially interesting is the review of the different indexes of forbidden books and the process by which books ended up there. Deanda situates in the Index of Sandoval the first connection of the notion of the sacred, love, and obscenity, and notes how texts such as Ovid's Ars Amatoria were allowed in Latin \"due to their elegance\" (53) since that was the language of the inquisitorial reader. The same text was censored in Spanish. This introduces the fundamental question of class and race as factors [End Page 139] that are attached to the notion of obscenity in early modern Spain and the colonial territory of New Spain. Deanda argues that \"lascivious propositions\" were the most prosecuted from then on. Chapter 1 is an utterly brilliant introduction to the notion of obscenity and another enlightening discussion of the notion of censorship. Following Deleuze's The Fold, Deanda states that \"obscenity and censorship exist in a relationship of fold, they are the two faces of the same coin … I argue that obscenity and censorship, even w","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135691648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Narrative Mourning: Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel by Kathleen M. Oliver (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909471","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Narrative Mourning: Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel by Kathleen M. Oliver Mark Fulk Kathleen M. Oliver, Narrative Mourning: Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel ( Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 207; 7 b/w illus. $34.95 paper, $120.00 cloth. Studies such as Thomas W. Laqueur's The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015) and Phillipe Ariès's The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years (1981) have provoked cultural reappraisals of our changing relation to death and dying in the West. Kathleen M. Oliver's book picks up the challenge of these studies, particularly relating them to the changing theories and practice of death in the eighteenth century as read through major and minor novels of the period. Oliver's analysis centers on close readings of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753); Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Familiar Letters between the Principal Character in David Simple (1747), and Volume the Last (1753); Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771); and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Building her study around the changing cultural dynamics concerning death between 1748 and 1794, Oliver argues that the eighteenth century evinces \"a world of epistemological uncertainty,\" as ideas of an embodied soul transform into the view of a \"consciousness that transcends time and place and body\" (161). Oliver's study uses the notion of relics and relicts as the centerpiece to her understanding of the changing dynamics around death in these novels. The word \"relic\" evokes the medieval relic, which was a physical piece from a saint that was expected to carry holy power, including the power of healing, and became an important emblem of a system of religious power. Oliver uses the term \"relict\" to denote physical remnants of the dead more generally; in practice, the distinction between relict and relic is often elided. In her study of the eighteenth century, the relic/relict moves from a remnant that carries with it power from the decedent to a thing that merely invokes the memory of the person who is gone. Oliver traces the change she sees from relic/relicts as objects that continue to embody the dead [End Page 149] to objects merely of remembrance in the novel to John Locke's arguments in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) that the soul is not necessarily connected to the body and can exist apart from it. Locke's formulations take time to displace older ideas of the soul suffusing the body and its remnants, becoming instead represented by the ever-present ghosts of the gothic novel. Clarissa represents the earliest manifestation of the idea of the relic/relict, being a text that references a time when these had some power and prescience that could shape the lives of the living. While they m","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135690174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}