EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 by Kathleen Wilson (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909460","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 by Kathleen Wilson Julia Fawcett Kathleen Wilson, Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 ( Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022). Pp. 481; 42 b/w and 13 color illus., 5 maps. $39.99 cloth. Theater, as one of my mentors is fond of saying, is good to think with. Kathleen Wilson's Strolling Players of Empire proves the wisdom of these words as it follows British plays across a ballooning British Empire—from Kingston to Calcutta and from Sumatra to St. Helena—to understand how they interacted with local histories and performance traditions in shaping assumptions about race, gender, power, and empire throughout the long eighteenth century (which Wilson defines as beginning in 1656, when Oliver Cromwell readmitted Jews to England, and ending in 1833, with the abolition of slavery across the empire). Containing her argument within the frame of the proscenium allows Wilson to cover an admirable swath of time and space, and the book offers a powerful example of how scholars might take up the recent challenges proffered by Lisa Lowe and Jodi Byrd (among others) to envision more global histories. The book also intervenes in recent debates about the origins of modern racial categories. Through a series of nuanced and complex readings of English plays and characters as they were adopted, adapted, revised, and resisted by provincial players, Wilson argues that race was never \"only 'skin deep'\" but was (and is) produced through complex performances of power, identity, and empire—and is no less real or ineradicable for being so (468). Wilson relies on performance studies to define performance as a \"way of knowing\" through a combination of mimesis, mimicry, and alterity—as a \"repetition of a repetition, or a repetition with a difference\" that \"can never recapitulate original essence\" (18, 19). This definition allows her to zero in on the ways in which British imperialists attempted to impose their cultural beliefs and behaviors on imperial subjects by forcing them to imitate a narrow definition of Britishness, but also how these same subjects both resisted and expanded that narrow definition by repeating these performances with significant differences. In exploring how the performance traditions and histories of the colonized reshaped what it meant to be British, Wilson \"explore[s] the possibility that, in the eighteenth century at least, Britons, not the colonized, were the premier mimic men and that this propensity both aided and confounded the purposes of colonization\" (16). Without downplaying the violence or cruelty of Britain's imperialist strategies, then, Wilson is careful to recognize the agency and contributions of colonial subjects in resisting and shaping the performances of Britishness that circulated throughout the globe. Strolling Players of Empire consists of","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":"34 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":"135690178","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":"Dancing in the Streets with Joseph Roach","authors":"Elizabeth Maddock Dillon","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909449","url":null,"abstract":"Dancing in the Streets with Joseph Roach Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (bio) INTRODUCTION: THE MISSING PURITAN There are no Puritans in Cities of the Dead. That I say this at all is perhaps because Cities of the Dead has taught me to read in so many important ways, one of which is to attend to absence as much as presence.1 The absent Puritan in Joseph Roach's book speaks to the nature of the transformation he wrought, one that has helped to reorient the field of early American literary studies in ways that are not fully registered in our genealogies of the field. When I began my training as a graduate student in early American studies, the work of Sacvan Bercovitch stood at the forefront of the field. In particular, his book The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) served as both exemplar and roadmap: look to the Puritans as the starting point of American-ness, and trace from there to today, with stops at Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson along the way.2 Implicit in this methodology is a geography—one that places New England at the center of the field of study. This might make sense if you are a professor at Harvard, as was Bercovitch and others in the field before him, including founding figures of early American studies such as Perry Miller and F. O. Matthieson. Roach was a professor at Tulane University when he wrote Cities of the Dead, and the geography of New Orleans is writ large across the book. What does it mean to take New Orleans—and specifically the performances of Mardi Gras parades and jazz funerals—as a fulcrum of cultural history rather than the sermons of seventeenth-century New England Puritans? Well, it changes everything. The last chapter of Cities of the Dead focuses explicitly on Mardi Gras and the parades of New Orleans jazz funerals. At one point in this chapter, Roach describes the \"musical and kinesthetic vortex\" of moving with the Second Line in a jazz funeral—the improvisational mass of marchers and dancers who join the parade as its energy collects and expands in the streets. He is not speaking hypothetically, but rather from within the vortex: \"moving along with the packed crowd of the Second Line,\" he relates, \"an elderly Second Liner politely touched my elbow to draw my attention to my untied shoelaces—a menace amid the flowing mass of dancing bodies, a literal faux pas\" (279). Little of the book is written in the first person; accordingly, this brief, embodied moment stands out from the rest of the [End Page 13] text and invites us to pay attention. Let us start from here, then, and join Roach in the Second Line behind the jazz trombones and the carnival masquers as he traces their routes, touches elbows with elders, ties up his shoelaces to continue the dance without a false step. He is marking the steps of the masquers and musicians and adding a few of his own. He is a good dancer: a new choreography of criticism animates the change-making nature of his book. I aim to trace a few of h","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":"17 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":"135691448","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":"On Memory and Movement","authors":"Amy B. Huang","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909450","url":null,"abstract":"On Memory and Movement Amy B. Huang (bio) Cities of the Dead covers a lot of ground. As Joseph Roach incorporates his experience of walking in the city of New Orleans into his book, he also invites readers to move with him, giving us a sense of being grounded in this particular locale. But even as Roach focuses on New Orleans and London, he shows us that these are spaces of vast intercultures, and that moving within them calls up other moves. In his chapter \"One Blood,\" which centers on Dion Boucicault's play The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana (1859), Roach explains that although Louisiana has been the site of policies that emphasize and reinforce monoculturalism, it is also a \"plural frontier of multiple encounters.\"1 Indeed, the chapter carefully tracks the play's repeated ventures in exploring racial difference and liminality. Having first encountered this book in my first year as a graduate student in a Theater and Performance Studies program, I came to understand performance theory's emphasis on \"twice behaved behavior\" and the relationship between performance and reproduction through Roach's introduction of these concepts, and his linkage of them to specific contexts in the circum-Atlantic world. Cities of the Dead grounded and concretized performance studies for me, showing me the historical impact of how performance has offered substitution and reinvention (rather than exact reproduction), transmitting both memory and forgetting.2 I could see the stakes of surrogation, or the process of substituting to fill in gaps and vacancies, as Boucicault's wife, the white actress Agnes Robertson, delivered performances as an octoroon character, Zoe. Robertson's embodiment of Zoe sensuously enhanced The Octoroon's intrinsic investment in spectacularizing racial liminality as the play delinked Blackness from slavery, and showily substituted the figure of a suffering white woman for the catastrophes of the system of slavery.3 At the end of the play, Robertson's embodied surrogation of Zoe highlights the play's erasure and forgetting of Blackness.4 In further following the concept of racial liminality off the proscenium stage by looking, for example, at the performances by Mardi Gras Indians, Roach also sees how these Black performers [End Page 21] engaged in \"masking Indian.\"5 Challenging early ventures of American theater historiography that emphasized the written word, and which often precluded the study of Indigenous dances and ceremonies, Roach makes clear the significance of orature, which includes \"gesture, song, dance, processions, storytelling, proverbs, gossip, customs, rites, and rituals,\" forms that are \"produced alongside or within mediated literacies of various kinds and degrees.\"6 Orature, Roach points out, can hold onto complex intercultural encounters and transmit knowledge and memory. Thus the Mardi Gras parade routes and the splendor of the costumes and performances place Indigenous and Black people in tight relation to each other, w","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":"25 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":"135691650","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":"Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century by Thomas Salem Manganaro (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909470","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century by Thomas Salem Manganaro Lauren Kopajtic Thomas Salem Manganaro, Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century ( Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2022). Pp. 250. $95.00 cloth, $39.50 paper. The central question Thomas Manganaro takes up in this important and welcome book is this: how to write akrasia, a condition where an agent acts against their own better judgment. His opening example rewrites a scene from Defoe's Moll Flanders, where Moll lapses and returns to her trade as a thief; his closing example offers two versions of a scene from Shakespeare's Macbeth, showing how Macbeth's action of killing the king can be represented as intentional or irrational. The central contribution of Manganaro's book lies here, in working through how one's choices in representing irrational action can explain away or render mysterious the [End Page 146] phenomenon itself. While Manganaro reads several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers as denying or explaining away akrasia at the cost of losing a phenomenon we should seek to understand, he reads a suite of eighteenth-century writers of prose fiction, life-writing, and poetry as preserving the phenomenon through the invention of new literary forms. Manganaro uses akrasia as his primary case of irrational action, preferring it to Aristotelian \"incontinence\" and Augustinian \"weakness of will,\" prominent in Christian frameworks. Akrasia is difficult to pin down, and that slipperiness is an important variable in the argument of this book. Manganaro offers a working understanding of akrasia as a condition of individual agency where one knows what would be the best thing to do, but either freely does not do it, or chooses to do something different, and less good (2). Akrasia is not bad action out of ignorance, nor is it inaction through constraint; akrasia is intentionally doing something you know to be worse than an alternative that is known and readily available. It is important for the history of treatments of this phenomenon, and for Manganaro's own treatment, that akrasia appear paradoxical. This paradoxicality is what attracts attempts to represent, explain, and understand the phenomenon. But these attempts run into an obstacle: explanation and understanding rely on representation, and representation of this phenomenon is a challenge. As Manganaro describes it, \"the core difficulty lies in the fact that the piece of writing needs to maintain two seemingly contradictory truths at once: first, that the person believes that there is an available course of action that is better to pursue, and second, that the person freely and intentionally pursues a different course of action\" (3). The representation of akrasia, then, requires special literary forms. But, and here lies the problem Manganaro finds with the philosophical approaches to ","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":"48 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":"135691444","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":"Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A Geographical Text Analysis by Joanna E. Taylor and Ian N. Gregory (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909469","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A Geographical Text Analysis by Joanna E. Taylor and Ian N. Gregory Adam Sills Joanna E. Taylor and Ian N. Gregory, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A Geographical Text Analysis ( Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2022). Pp. 290; 45 b/w and 62 color illus., 7 tables. $130.00 cloth, $49.95 paper. Reconciling traditional methods of close reading and analysis with those of the digital humanities and what Franco Moretti has termed \"distant reading\" is a fraught business to be sure, especially given the stakes for the future of English literary studies and the humanities in general. However, rather than argue for the merits of one approach over the other or highlight the respective tensions between them, Joanna Taylor and Ian Gregory instead attempt to forge a novel methodology in their compelling and engaging study, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A Geographical Text Analysis, one that employs both close and distant reading, textual and digital analysis, in order to provide different, albeit complimentary, perspectives on Lake District writing from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Taylor and Gregory refer to this methodology as \"multiscalar analysis,\" as it offers readers a means of moving back and forth between \"macro- and micro-approaches,\" enabling them to engage with \"both scales for the development of nuanced literary analysis\" (5). Multiscalar analysis, as they argue, \"defamiliarizes\" the literary text by transforming it into something entirely new, a graph, a map, a chart, or other forms of digital representation, that require both computational analyses as well as more traditional methods of close reading in order to make sense of that data. It is an inherently interdisciplinary approach that serves to \"productively destabilize our assumptions about a literary text, period, or genre\" (6) and, in the process, forces us to ask new questions that challenge conventional ways of reading and established literary canons, thus broadening and diversifying the potential range of texts to be considered within the discipline of English literary studies. To that end, Taylor and Gregory have assembled a substantial body of writings about England's Lake District from 1622 to 1900, including, most notably, the works of the so-called Lake Poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, as well as those by Thomas De Quincy, John Ruskin, Robert Anderson, and Beatrix Potter, among others. The \"Corpus of Lake District Writing\" (CLDW) they construct also contains a wide variety of guidebooks, chorographies, travel narratives, and journals that provided the would-be tourist information about and broader access to the geography of the Lake District, highlighting its most significant and perhaps meaningful places to visit and offering a sense of what one might expect in terms of its affective and aesthetic impact on the visitor. In total, the CLDW comprises ","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":"20 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":"135690173","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":"Essential Workers of the Palais-Royal: Prostitution and the Public Good in French Revolutionary Drama","authors":"Cecilia Feilla","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909453","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909453","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: From 1789 to 1792, the issue of prostitution was absent from parliamentary debates, policy agendas, and journalism in France. This article looks to theater and pamphlet literature instead for examples that break the silence around prostitution, with special emphasis on the play, Le Serment civique des demoiselles fonctionnaires publiques du Palais-Royal (1791), in which prostitutes debate their status and duty in relation to a new Revolutionary decree on public workers. Using print and performance to intervene in public discourse and promote their interests, prostitutes of the Palais-Royal are shown as crafting a notion of citizenship based not on a discourse of natural rights, as prominent feminist activists of the period did, but rather based on their contribution to the public good as essential workers for the nation.","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":"5 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":"135690175","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":"Whose Memory? Whose Forgetting?","authors":"Lisa A. Freeman","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909447","url":null,"abstract":"Whose Memory?Whose Forgetting? Lisa A. Freeman (bio) When we consider the fields of Eighteenth-Century Studies and Theater and Performance Studies, it would be difficult to think of a scholarly book that has been more influential and more far-reaching than Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, first published by Columbia University Press in 1996. The collection of short essays that comprise this roundtable are dedicated not only to celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the publication of this award-winning work, but also to illustrating the transformative impact it has had on scholarship across these intersecting fields both with respect to the conceptual apparatus and methods we use, and to the narratives we trace and the knowledges we produce.1 By way of offering a brief framing introduction, I want to take a quick look backward before going forward with an account of Cities's impact on our period of study and its indelible imprint on the shape of critical work today. Some might say that Roach's study of embodied performance across what he deftly termed, drawing on the influential work of Paul Gilroy, the \"Circum-Atlantic\" has traveled an almost immeasurable distance from his own dissertation work, conducted at Cornell University so many years ago, on \"Vanbrugh's English Baroque: Opera and the Opera House in the Haymarket.\"2 But those of us who are attentive students in the field can recognize in Roach's ever erudite work the expansive, interdisciplinary sway of a touchstone figure like John Vanbrugh, whose own career both straddled and intermingled the disciplines of drama, music, and architecture. Even more, we can trace the Baroque as an influence on the style and substance of Roach's capacious mode of thought, specifically the emphasis on repetition with a difference and the ability to discern those variations with a fine-tuned acuity that understands ornamentation as an embodied expression of the incongruous conditions of human life. Indeed, little noted in this respect is a statement which Roach sets out in the penultimate sentence of his original preface that substantially grounds the work and insights of Cities of the Dead in the unruly and voracious world of eighteenth-century [End Page 1] cultural production and consumption. Explaining that the \"topoi of memory as performance\" which recur across his book take their inspiration from \"the aesthetic tangibility of live performances,\" he makes a deliberate point of clarifying: \"I use the word aesthetic in what I understand to be its eighteenth-century meaning: the vitality and sensuous presence of material forms.\"3 For Roach, then, it is important that when we talk about the long, deep, and wide influence of eighteenth-century culture, ideology, and thought on the shape of things today—for better and for worse—we also engage its embrace of an aesthetic that was felt in and expressed through bodies in performance. Eschewing the kind of cold formalism evacuated of hu","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":"113 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":"135690172","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":"My Life's Travels and Adventures: An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland by Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909463","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: My Life's Travels and Adventures: An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland by Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa Daniel O'Quinn Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa, My Life's Travels and Adventures: An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland, ed. and trans. by Władysław Roczniak ( Toronto: Iter Press, 2021). Pp. 305. $53.95 paper. Scholars in a wide range of fields should be grateful both to Władysław Roczniak and to the Iter Press for bringing this fine critical edition of Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa's extraordinary memoir My Life's Travels and Adventures to an English-speaking audience. A welcome reminder of the degree to which \"eighteenth-century studies\" remains focused on Western Europe and its colonial holdings, Pilsztynowa's narrative lies at the crossroads of Slavic and Ottoman studies. Dated 1760, her manuscript was written during the author's second lengthy stay in Istanbul. Despite its explicit framing as an injunction to piety, the memoir seeks to both entertain and edify her readers by blending a fast-paced account of her lengthy sojourns in the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and the Balkans with a broad array of anecdotes and historical vignettes. It was first published in Poland in the early twentieth century by a male scholar as a warning against women's emancipation. The text itself provides an ample rebuttal to any such paternalism. The very text in which Pilsztynowa writes herself into existence demonstrates that the ostensible protections provided by marriage are at best a fantasy and at worst an alibi for men's traffic in women and their property. Her memoir starts in 1732 with her forced marriage at age 14 to a Polish oculist named Jacob Helpir and her immediate transplantation to Istanbul. Her husband is imprisoned almost immediately after the death of a patient and over the next few pages Pilsztynowa proves herself to be an adept negotiator, a quick study in the medical arts (although we are never far away from sorcery and sheer luck), and an able operator in the multi-linguistic, multi-faith society of Istanbul and the war-torn Balkans. The same chapter is also chock full of anti-Semitic episodes (throughout the book, Jewish doctors and pharmacists conspire to destroy her and her practice), accounts of purchasing prisoners as slaves (something of a hostage broker, she buys Christians from the Ottomans and Ottomans from the Russians with the intent of selling them back to their families), and scenes of marital abandonment and abuse (her husbands and other male companions can be counted on to steal from her at every turn). In the opening thirty pages, the reader is confronted with so many types of narrative discourse that one is forced to adjudicate between what is legend, what is pure fabrication, and what is ostensibly accurate reporting. Roczniak's illuminating annotations and appendices allow the reader not only to keep track of her wildly peripatetic itine","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":"5 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":"135690184","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 Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers by Lindsay Eckert, and: Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909456","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers by Lindsay Eckert, and: Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës by Devoney Looser Stephanie Insley Hershinow Lindsay Eckert, The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers ( Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2022). Pp. 258; 6 b/w, 3 color illus. $120.00 cloth, $34.95 paper. Devoney Looser, Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës ( New York: Bloomsbury, 2022). Pp. 576; 16 pp. insert. $30.00 cloth. How did Romantic writers imagine their readers? How did Romantic readers imagine those writers? Scholars working in book history and on print culture, on celebrity and on reception have illuminated our understanding of the relationships between artists, their intimates, and their admirers. It is no longer considered anachronistic to talk of the \"fandoms\" that grew around certain illustrious figures; rather, historicizing such subcultures is understood to be a mission worthy of serious study. The two books under consideration in this review tackle these questions via different genres and at different scales. Lindsay Eckert's The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers is a monograph, a study of the thorny subject of \"familiarity\" in Romantic-era writing and culture. Devoney Looser's Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës is a biography—the first, somehow—of Jane and Maria Porter, prolific writers whose names were well known in Regency parlors as both celebrated authors and as subjects of rumor and speculation. Eckert offers an expansive view of the era, treating both the usual suspects (like Wordsworth and Byron) and those less often analyzed in their own right (like Lady Caroline Lamb or Hazlitt-as-novelist). Zooming in on a single case, Looser shapes the scattered but extensive correspondence between Jane and Maria Porter into an immersive account that tracks a single family but also, given the sisters' many famous and infamous correspondents, opens up to capture their broader milieu. Read together, [End Page 107] Looser and Eckert give us a complex, enticing picture of Romantic celebrity—one that expands the terrain beyond the stories we're used to. Eckert argues that successful authorship in the Romantic era depended on the careful navigation of challenging expectations about how best to establish connections—in and outside of the printed text—between authors and readers. One way to think of Eckert's study is as a prehistory of parasocial relationships (though this is not a term she employs). Social media has, as countless op-eds have warned us, encouraged fans to foster unhealthy relationships to celebrities they have never actually met (and likely never will meet). The seemingly direct access granted by social media can appear to flatten hierarchies (or, put more optimistically, to d","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","volume":"375 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":"135690176","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":"Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object by Matthew C. Hunter (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ecs.2023.a909473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.a909473","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object by Matthew C. Hunter Rebecca Marks Matthew C. Hunter, Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2019). Pp. 304; 20 color and 68 b/w illus., 1 table. $54.00 cloth. \"Elemental art history\": this is how Matthew C. Hunter, in the closing pages of Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object, describes the scope of his book (184). Painting with Fire offers a [End Page 134] multifaceted and enthusiastic study of the science behind British art from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. While Hunter's work centers around Reynolds, its remit is much wider, starting with the discovery of artificial phosphorus in the 1600s and progressing chronologically all the way to the rise of photography in the 1800s. It is \"elemental\" not only because of Hunter's interest in \"Chymistry,\" but also because of the technical nature of his research, which breaks down his sources into their most elementary mechanics (43). Painting with Fire is certainly a history of art, if not a conventional work of \"art history,\" since it pays closer attention to techniques and methodologies than it does to critical or visual analysis. This is certainly not a bad thing, for Hunter's interdisciplinary approach reflects the thematic purview of his thesis, which—like previous publications by Jon Klancher (2013), Magdalena Bushart and Freidrich Steinle (2015), Hunter himself (2013, 2015), and most recently Stephanie O'Rourke (2021)—explores the interplay between sciences and the humanities in the Enlightenment period. While Hunter's book broadly falls into the category of history, it also has a philosophical undercurrent. Throughout, Hunter sustains a close focus on the eponymous theme of \"temporality,\" and the various questions which it might raise about the preservation of paintings. For example, the front cover of the book—a close up of Reynolds's decayed, flaking Portrait of James Coutts (1771)—exemplifies what Hunter means by the \"temporally evolving chemical object\" named in his title. The corrosion of this particular work, Hunter tells us, is the result of chemical experiments Reynolds undertook in his studio and used on his canvases, in the hope of creating new painterly effects and, ironically, ensuring their longevity. It is a painting that reflects the ways in which Enlightenment artists looked to the sciences in order to advance and legitimize their discipline, even though such efforts were not always successful. Informed by publications by Jordan Bear (2015), Robin Kelsey (2015), and Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón (2015), another one of Hunter's goals in Painting with Fire is to disrupt how we think about the history of photography, a medium which, more than any of the other fine arts, relies on chemical and mechanical processe","PeriodicalId":45802,"journal":{"name":"EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES","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":"135691457","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}