Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Review of: Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, ed. Ed White

Janice McIntire-Strasburg — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:28:26 PST

Review of Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, ed. Ed White (2009), reviewed by Janice McIntire-Strasburg

Review of/compte rendu: Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism

Pierre N. Saint-Amand — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:28:25 PST

Review of/compte rendu: Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism (2010), reviewed by Pierre Saint-Amand

Review of/compte rendu: Louisa Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon

Natania Meeker — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:28:24 PST

Book review/compte rendu: Louisa Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon (2010), reviewed by Natania Meeker

Review of: Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785-1829

Susan Glover — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:28:23 PST

Review of Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785-1829 (2009), reviewed by Susan Paterson Glover

Review of: Lynn Shepherd, Clarissa's Painter: Portraiture, Illustration, and Representation in the Novels of Samuel Richardson

Murray L. Brown — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:28:22 PST

Review of Lynn Shepherd, Clarissa's Painter: Portraiture, Illustration, and Representation in the Novels of Samuel Richardson (2009), reviewed by Murray L. Brown

Review of: Katherine Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747-1800

Rachel K. Carnell — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:28:21 PST

Review of Katherine Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747-1800 (2009), reviewed by Rachel Carnell

Review of: Stephen Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System

Betsey Klimasmith — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:28:20 PST

Review of: Stephen Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (2008), reviewed by Betsy Klimasmith

Review of: Chris Roulston, Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France

Aurora Wolfgang — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:28:19 PST

Review of Chris Roulston, Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France (2010), reviewed by Aurora Wolfgang

Review of: Pam Perkins, Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment

Evan Gottlieb — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:28:18 PST

Review of Pam Perkins, Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment (2010), reviewed by Evan Gottlieb.

Remembering Nature: Soliloquy as Aesthetic Form in Mansfield Park

LORRAINE J. CLARK DR — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:28:16 PST

In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen allegorizes her understanding of the novel of manners as a form of cerebral theatre that stages philosophical dialogues, centrally the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. Is nature a tabula rasa, at best unintelligibly moral, or is it informed by an indwelling telos, an intelligibility? Modernity divorces ethics from aesthetics, virtue from pleasure, the pulpit from the theatre, because we have forgotten nature's inherent telos, intelligibility, or mind. Fanny Price's soliloquizing, like Shaftesbury's, actualizes not a static ideal form that invites aesthetic contemplation but an empirical praxis which attempts, like her rehearsals with the mindless Mr Rushworth, to restore the mind, the brain, the memory that our modern understandings of nature have denied. Austen's philosophic dialogue ideally bridges ancient and modern and transforms private, self-educating acts of solitary reading pleasure into acts of public conversation that can be profoundly improving of public manners and mores.