Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Compte rendu: Pierre Saint-Amand, The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment, trad. Jennifer Curtiss Gage

Mitia Rioux-Beaulne — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:50 PDT

Compte rendu/review of: Pierre Saint-Amand, The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment, trad. Jennifer Curtiss Gage

Critique littéraire par Mitia Rioux-Beaulne, Université d’Ottawa

Review of/compte rendu: Ellen R. Welch, A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction

Paul J. Young — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:48 PDT

Review of/compte rendu: Ellen R. Welch, A Taste for the Foreign: Worldly Knowledge and Literary Pleasure in Early Modern French Fiction

Reviewed by Paul J. Young, Georgetown University

Review of: Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. G.A. Starr and Linda Bree, introduction and notes Linda Bree

Lee Kahan — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:47 PDT

Review of: Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. G.A. Starr and Linda Bree, introduction and notes Linda Bree

Reviewed by Lee Kahan, Indiana University South Bend

Review of: Jane Austen, Persuasion: An Annotated Edition, ed. Robert Morrison

Sarah Raff — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:46 PDT

Review of: Jane Austen, Persuasion: An Annotated Edition, ed. Robert Morrison

Reviewed by Sarah Raff, Pomona College

Compte rendu/review of: Madame d’Arconville: Une femme de lettres et de sciences au siècle des Lumières

Éliane Viennot — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:45 PDT

Compte rendu/review of: Madame d’Arconville: Une femme de lettres et de sciences au siècle des Lumières, éd. Patrice Bret et Brigitte Van Tiggelen, préface d’Élisabeth Badinter

Critique littéraire par Éliane Viennot, Université Jean Monnet

Review of: Cheryl L. Nixon, The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body

Pat Whiting — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:44 PDT

Review of: Cheryl L. Nixon, The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body

Reviewed by Patricia Whiting, Carleton University

Review of: Christopher J. Lukasik, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America

Jordan Alexander Stein — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:43 PDT

Review of: Christopher J. Lukasik, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America

Reviewed by Jordan Alexander Stein, Fordham University

Review of: Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination

Alex Wetmore — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:42 PDT

Review of: Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination

Reviewed by Alex Wetmore, University of the Fraser Valley

Review of: Richard Adelman, Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750-1830

Nancy Kendrick — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:41 PDT

Review of: Richard Adelman, Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750-1830

Reviewed by Nancy Kendrick, Wheaton College

Review of/compte rendu: Patrick Coleman, Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer

Caroline Jacot Grapa — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:40 PDT

Review of/compte rendu: Patrick Coleman, Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment Writer

Review by Caroline Jacot Grapa, University of Lille

Compte rendu/review of: Paul Pelckmans, Le Problème de l'incroyance au XVIIIe siècle

Mladen Kozul — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:39 PDT

Compte rendu/review of: Paul Pelckmans, Le Problème de l'incroyance au XVIIIe siècle

Critique littéraire par Mladen Kozul, The University of Montana

Review of: Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity

Neil Saccamano — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:38 PDT

Review of/compte rendu: Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity

Reviewed by Neil Saccamano, Cornell University

Promoting Liberty through Universal Benevolence in Elizabeth Hamilton's Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

Julie Straight — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:36 PDT

In Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), Elizabeth Hamilton champions attention to family and immediate neighbours, yet she also advocates universal benevolence, which she aligns with local affections against selfishness. Her praise for the British in India suggests the difficulties of this alliance, for her love for her deceased brother, an East India Company employee, apparently distorts the understanding of the East that it inspires her to seek. She implicitly warns her readers of her own weakness, however, by showing her rajah progress from loyal naïveté to disillusionment, and she asks her readers to follow him in recognizing British faults. Satirizing British cruelty in the Western Hemisphere, in the East, and at home, she contrasts this cruelty with the universal benevolence that the British owe to all people, and she seeks to inspire such benevolence by engaging readers' sympathy for characters unlike themselves. Defining people of all nations as brethren and neighbours, Hamilton especially warns her women readers against too narrow a devotion to their immediate families, encouraging them instead to expand their service into the public realm.

Hannah More's Art of Reduction

Andrew Heisel — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:35 PDT

Hannah More is widely viewed as a major figure in the rise of evangelicalism, but how she played her role is still in doubt. She can be read as a conservative interested in maintaining social hierarchy or even as a radical who levels social strata by insisting that only spiritual classifications are important. An underlying network of theological uncertainties in More's writing creates this divide in the criticism of her work. More insists on the plainness of the Bible, but, since readers nonetheless err, she suggests its plainness must first be matched in the reader in order for the text to be understood. She contradictorily indicates that the Bible or morally sound fictional works may improve the reader and that readers must already be purified before a text can have saving effects. On the one hand, this theological ambiguity can be liberating. On the other hand, the Pauline universalizing rhetoric on which More relies, rather than having the salutary impact recently described by philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, creates a constant interrogation of self and others in order to reduce individual particularity. More's fiction continually figures forth the need for an "annihilation of the self" that is to be admired for its saving power and yet also pitied for the suffering it creates -- suffering which is the vehicle of both that annihilation and attendant salvation.

Shocked Sensibility: The Nerves, the Will, and Altered States in Sade's L'Histoire de Juliette

Sean M. Quinlan — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:33 PDT

The Marquis de Sade modified his early ideas about sensibility in his post-revolutionary writings, especially in L'Histoire de Juliette (1799-1801). Throughout L'Histoire de Juliette, Sade's characters discover that the power of the will -- le moral -- can master the physical world of sensation. To achieve this state, however, they must first understand the working of the sensory apparatus itself. By using this biomedical knowledge, Sade's libertines could unleash their inner drives and push themselves into transcendent forms of experience. Sade's method had two components: first, libertines must repress their sensibility in all its moral and physical dimensions in order to unleash its full power. Second, libertines learned to shock their nerves through extreme sensory experiences and thus overwhelm ingrained moral values and behaviour. Taken together, these experiential techniques potentially released the libertine's creative mind. In this process, the libertine transcended the conventions of aesthetic mimesis, by substituting expressivity for reality itself.

`Piety and Popishness': Tolerance and the Epistolary Reaction to Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison

Patrick Mello — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:32 PDT

Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753), in its every aspect, attempts to solve the problems of religious difference in the post-Jacobite world. Recent readings argue that despite the apparent openness of Sir Charles's marriage proposal to his Catholic love interest, Clementina, the novel presents Catholicism as a threat to both the protagonist and his nation, reducing Sir Charles Grandison to a highly politicized tolerationist platform. For Richardson's contemporary opponents, a "True Englishman" is an Anglican of conservative social values, an icon they believed Richardson countered by offering the religiously liberal Sir Charles as an alternative model of English character. Through my analysis of the anonymous epistolary responses to the novel, the social and political milieu that informed them, and the novel itself, I challenge the critical assumption that Sir Charles Grandison puts forward a recognizable tolerationist agenda, instead arguing that it works against politically authorized intolerance by unyoking religion from public policy altogether.

La Déconstruction de la scène de bataille dans les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) de François Fénelon

Romira M. Worvill — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:15:30 PDT

L'auteur des Aventures de Télémaque a semé son épopée de « tableaux », c'est-à-dire de passages de description qui sont inspirés d'une connaissance approfondie des beaux-arts et qui supposent des connaissances similaires chez le lecteur. On examine ici les techniques picturales employées par François Fénelon dans les scènes de bataille qui déterminent l'attitude du jeune protagoniste envers la guerre et les guerriers. Il s'avère que la représentation des divers « spectacles » de la guerre auxquels réagit Télémaque rappelle les trois tendances stylistiques incarnées dans des tableaux faisant hommage aux exploits militaires de Louis XIV: ceux de Charles le Brun, d'Adam Frans Van der Meulen et de Joseph Parrocel. La comparaison des descriptions de Fénelon avec les toiles de ces peintres suggère que l'auteur des Aventures de Télémaque cherchait à combattre non seulement l'idéologie de la gloire guerrière qui dominait le milieu du jeune Duc de Bourgogne, mais aussi l'influence séduisante des images militaristes dont il était entouré.