Recently added articles from The Eighteenth Century:
Women, Work, Rearguard Politics, and Defoe's Moll Flanders
Jul 01, 2008; ... The last third of The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders (1722) opens as Defoe's title character has been reunited widi her husband, Jemy, in Newgate prison. Having recently undergone her own conversion, repentance, and reprieve, Moll exhorts Jemy to follow her example by pleading no ...
"Beings that have existence only in ye minds of men": State Finance and the Origins of the Collective Imagination
Jul 01, 2008; ... Nearly a decade ago, Robert Markley positioned "the new economic criticism" as one of the most significant recent theoretical developments in eighteenth-century studies, describing a series of now classic studies-James Thompson's Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy of the ...
Enlightenment Cybernetics: Communications and Control in the Man-Machine
Jul 01, 2008; ... A scientific commonplace is that the human organism is a complex communications system. Within the body, the network of nervous system and brain communicates or transmits information through a series of electrical channels compared to telephone wires or computer processors.1 Such comparisons ...
"Maui and Orphic blood": Cook's Death in Contemporary Maori Poetry
Jul 01, 2008; ... The interpretation of Captain James Cook's death at Kealakekua Bay in 1779 was subject to contention in the eighteenth century; admiring publicists of the navigator's imperial benevolence such as Anna Seward differed from those like William Cowper, who denounced his irreligious participation in ...
Innovations in Women's Poetry
Jul 01, 2008; ... Innovations in Women's Poetry Co-winner of the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, Paula Backscheider's Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Johns Hopkins, 2005) has given scholars and students a much-needed survey of eighteenth-century poetry ...
The Rhetoric of Disclosure in James Thomson's The Seasons; or, On Kant's Gentlemanly Misanthropy
Apr 01, 2008; ...... the sun appears. In order to disappear. It is there, but as the invisible source of light, in a kind of insistent eclipse, more than essential, producing the essence-Being and appearing-of what is. One looks at it directly on pain of blindness and death. -Jacques Derrida1 I ....
Space and the Representation of Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Advice Literature
Apr 01, 2008; ... The eighteenth century is a particularly rich period for analyzing the relationship between gender and social space. On the one hand, this era marks the beginnings of modern urban society, with its coffeehouses, its salons, and the emergence of newspaper and print culture. Over the course of the ...
Locke's Pineapple and the History of Taste
Apr 01, 2008; ... (ProQuest: ... denotes "strike-through" in the original text omitted.) The problem with empiricism, the argument goes, is that it doesn't know that it is an ideology. Its mistake is to assume that the objects of sensation can be isolated from the cultural background of experience, that ...
The Inhospitable Muse: Locating Creole Identity in James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane
Apr 01, 2008; ... Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them, short of hanging. -Samuel Johnson on West Indian slave owners1 James Grainger's self-proclaimed "West Indian georgic," The Sugar-Cane (1764), is perhaps best remembered for the circumstances of ...
Virtuous Foundlings and Excessive Bastards
Apr 01, 2008; ... Virtuous Foundlings and Excessive Bastards In Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Ohio State, 2005), Lisa Zunshine works through the issues of illegitimacy, class, and gender in eighteenth-century England with efficiency and insight. For a comparatively ...
Empiricism, Substance, Narrative: An Introduction
Oct 01, 2007; ... Why pose the question of empiricism's relationship to literature? How has empiricism functioned as a structuring principle within narratives of the emergence of eighteenth-century literary modernity? Certainly, eighteenthcentury scholars claim the novel as a privileged scene for the enactment of ...
Locke's Wild Fancies: Empiricism, Personhood, and Fictionality
Oct 01, 2007; ... This idol which you term Virginity, Is neither essence, subject to the eye No, nor to any one exterior sense, Nor hath it any place of residence, Nor is't of earth or mold celestial, Or capable of any form at all. Of that which hath no being do not ...
The Politics and Philosophy of Mixture: John Locke Recomposed
Oct 01, 2007; ... It has always been difficult to get the political and the philosophical Locke to agree. When Peter Laslett published his groundbreaking edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government in 1960, he observed how fluently Locke could move between his major political and philosophical works. His ...
"In Idea, a thousand nameless Joys": Secondary Qualities in Arnauld, Locke, and Haywood's Lasselia
Oct 01, 2007; ... Cartesian dualism is articulated as a particular kind of conundrum in Descartes' Sixth Meditation (1640), where he advances the proof that "I have a body." Here, the incompatibility of Descartes's "I" and his body assumes its most impacted, most aggravated, and, paradoxically, its most ...
The Materialist Tropes of La Mettrie
Oct 01, 2007; ... La Mettrie's machine-man, figure of determinist constraint, is in his own way curiously insubstantial. While the image of l'homme-machine evokes matter as a disciplinary instance-an operation upon the will that renders the latter docile and tactile all at once1-his functioning is anything but ...
Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel
Oct 01, 2007; ... "I see into minds, you see," the robot continued, "and you have no idea how complicated they are. I can't begin to understand everything because my own mind has so little in common with them-but I try, and your novels help." -Isaac Asimov, Liar! No one Uterary form has a ...
Thomas Percy, China, and the Gothic
Jul 01, 2007; ... While assembling the materials that were to make up his influential collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Thomas Percy issued the first translation of a Chinese novel in a European language, Hau Kiou Chouan, or, The Pleasing History (1761), and he produced a collection of (mainly ...
The First Samurai: Isolationism in Englebert Kaempfer's 1727 History of Japan
Jul 01, 2007; ... It doesn't take a front-page article in the New York Times to certify that Japanese culture is currently "hip in American mainstream."1 From sushi to manga, from taiko drumming to the latest technological toy, Americans-especially the young-embrace all things Japanese. Yet it might be worth ...
The Magdalen Hospital and the Fortunes of Whiggish Sentimentality in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain: "Well-Grounded" Exemplarity vs. "Romantic" Exceptionality
Jul 01, 2007; ... INTRODUCTION Over the past decade it has become an accepted truth that the establishment of the London Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes, on August 10,1758, was a product of the ascendancy of sentimental ideas in mid-eighteenthcentury British culture.1 There is, however, a ...
Feigning Fictions: Imagination, Hypothesis, and Philosophical Writing in the Scottish Enlightenment
Jul 01, 2007; ... Imagination, fictionality, the experience of pleasure, and the appreciation of beauty have long been grouped together in perceptions of the "literary," and all, despite the varied attacks of "theory" and historicism in what can still feel like recent times, retain a certain resonance and power ...