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"Fingal," the second story of Beckett's More Pricks than Kicks (1933), refers to a district north of Dublin but also alludes to James Macpherson's pseudo-heroic Ossian (1762). The central character, Belacqua, a shabby example of the fundamentally unheroic, takes the fair-to-middling Winnie to the Hill of Wolves there, where, appropriately, he soon feels a very sad animal indeed. The landscape, with the Portrane Asylum visible throughout, is described as "A land of sanctuary, where much had been suffered secretly. Yes, the last ditch." Winnie encounters an aged rustic, who insist on telling her about the nearby Martello tower and "Dane Swift" who "kep a motte in it," a motte "of the name of Stella;" and Winnie is fascinated by the thought of "Little fat Presto" setting out in the morning to visit her, "fresh and fasting," walking like camomile. Meanwhile, Belacqua has found a bicycle (presumably, a Swift), and has ridden off like a madman.
My paper will offer a detailed analysis of the Swiftian echoes in the story, with particular reference to the way that Beckett has tended to blend (the uncharitable might say, confused) elements of Stella with Vanessa; but the net effect will be to show how the sense of history and madness shadowed in the landscape ("where much has been suffered in secret, especially by women") affects the reading of the contemporary tale, by offering the analogue of Swift's treatment of the women in his life to critique the way that Belacqua behaves to Winnie.
Dr. Seyed Majid Alavi, Islamic Azad University of Tabriz
No nation's language, literature, and art can be seen in isolation. Nations affect each other and these effects become apparent when art and literature of one nation is compared with another. Comparative literature provides a geographically and chronologically broader perspective on the literary and cultural achievement of humankind, appealing to the pervasive desire to transcend the merely national point of view to engage with great imaginative work of people from different places and times who share a single artistic sphere. Within this global sphere the national literature of countries tends to shape and be shaped through exchanging some of its most original aspects inherited through a unique cultural identity. It is exactly this unique share of an original essence which contributes to the formation of the shared yet diverse global literary spirit.
What the present paper attempts to show is how the Persian literature influenced literary works of the long eighteenth century, preserving its unique identity which was transmitted into the spirit of the period through the translated works of prominent Persian poets. Although the reputation of poets such as Hafiz, Sadi, Rumi, and Fidousi is commonly regarded as the result of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of Rubaiyat, for a full century these poets had enjoyed considerable attention in England due to the British presence in India because of the East India Company. Since the language and civilization of the court had been Persian since Mogul times in India, the English were exposed to the language and eventually came to know one of the richest literatures of the world, a literature they proceeded to translate, interpret, and imitate.
Tracing the history of this enamorment from the scholarly research of Sir William Jones this paper presents the impact of the Persian literature on the scholars and poets of the time up to Byron and Moor's romantic "Orientalizing".
Prof. Christine Alexander, University of New South Wales
No modern reader could fail to notice Austen's sophisticated use of the Gothic in Northanger Abbey: not simply in her well-known parody of the genre but in the way her domestication of the Gothic allows her to question the social order and to reveal the precarious moral and emotional lives of single women. If Northanger Abbey was Austen's first major novel, where did this sophisticated narrative technique come from? How did she develop not simply her parodic style-something that is clearly evident in the juvenilia-but her knack of embedding Gothic horrors into a social novel of "a young lady's entrance into the world"?
My paper will focus on the novelette Lady Susan as a possible answer to this question. Lady Susan is relatively neglected in Austen studies and yet it is more complex in its narrative technique than it is often given credit for. Nor is it usually discussed in relation to its Gothic features. I will argue that the conception of the heroine-Austen's only central portrayal of a wicked woman-and her narrative construction is Austen's first experiment in domesticating the Gothic as she continues to play with various genres. I will explore the parodies of Gothic in the early juvenilia-especially Love and Freindship and Lesley Castle-and attempt to show how Austen has used both Gothic features and Gothic parody in another novel experiment.
Lady Susan is often left out of the developmental narrative of Austen's works from the juvenilia of the early notebooks to the mature 'realistic' novels. This paper further seeks to re-establish Lady Susan within this trajectory of what has been termed Austen's "generic consolidation."
In terms of the conference, my paper will contribute to the theme of "Rewriting" the Long Eighteenth Century by focussing on a non-canonical text by a canonical writer, and by highlighting the value of juvenilia (if we accept Lady Susan as "early writing") as a non-canonical genre worthy of serious attention.
Dr. Doreen Alvarez Saar, Drexel University
In 1781, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, an unknown Frenchman who had become a naturalized citizen of New York and a farmer in Orange County, fled from British-occupied New York. Crevecoeur had spent some time in his Majesty's jails in New York being at that point suspected of having rebel sympathies. He was shipwrecked in Dublin, made his way to London and persuaded the booksellers Thomas Davies and Lockyer Davis to publish his manuscript. That manuscript, Letters from an American Farmer, would become a classic of American literature and make Crevecoeur famous.
My paper will ask how Davis and Davies came to take a chance on this unknown Frenchman and his manuscript. The reasons for their publication were many. They includes the kinds of choices made in the past and thus, I will argue, the kind of material with which both men were comfortable and which both suspected had a market of sorts. A look at the publishing careers of both men and their interests will establish their areas of specialty and the kind of works that found favor with them. Davies is, of course, the better known as an actor, editor and author and most importantly, the man who introduced Boswell to Johnson. He would have been by nature and training alive to the particular literary merits of Letters. In addition, although biographers of Crevecoeur gloss over the unusual nature of the publishing transaction and find it not at all surprising that the poverty-stricken and tattered Crevecoeur was able to persuade respectable bookseller to publish his "lucubrations," I will also develop the idea that there was a possible network of authorship that enabled the transaction to be an acceptable bargain and tie Crevecoeur to a network of learned Americans publishing in London.
Although the scope of my paper is narrow, I will suggest that it begins to open the door to questions that have not been asked about the relationship between author and seller/publisher and the role of social class/social network in achieving publication. The latter is particularly important in the case of a colonial making his own way in the English capital city.
Prof. Peter Anstey, University of Otago
John Locke's famous Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) sought to provide an account of the operations of the human mind using the "plain, historical method." This historical method was also called the experimental method. Locke believed that in using it he was applying to the human mind a method analogous to that which the new natural philosophers, such as Boyle and Newton, were applying to the phenomena of nature. Locke's experimental history of the understanding became something of a model which was taken up in the eighteenth century by the French philosophes and by Hume and David Hartley. The first aim of this paper is to trace the different ways in which Locke's experimental history of the understanding was applied.
The second aim of the paper has to do with the most engaging and insightful literary application of Locke's approach, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, that hilarious "cock and bull story." Ironically, the most important doctrine that Sterne borrowed from Locke and that he applied in his experimental history of the Shandy family, was regarded by Locke as a pathological phenomenon. This was the doctrine of the association of ideas. This paper will explore just how it came about that the very thing that Locke advised should be expunged from the human mind became the most celebrated and exploited psychological thesis of Sterne's extraordinary novel.
Ms. Erin Jane Atchison, University of Edinburgh
[B]anish vile Italian tricks," wrote Robert Fergusson in his 1772 poem "The Daft Days," entreating the Hogmanay fiddlers of Edinburgh to "Gie's Tulloch Gorum" instead. Two months later, the young poet would lament the loss of traditional music to adopted Italian repertoire in "Elegy, on the Death of Scots Music." In his native Scots idiom, Fergusson denounced the "foreign sonnets [É] fresh sprung frae Italy, / A bastard breed!" The patriotism of this sentiment, however, is immediately complicated by Fergusson's own enthusiastic involvement with the musical establishment of Edinburgh, in particular his participation as singer and librettist in the 1769 production of Arne's opera Artaxerxes, starring the Italian tenor Tenducci. Susan Manning writes of Fergusson's poetry that "there are not easy equations to be made between contemporaneity and Anglicisation, or tradition and Scots," and in this paper I shall look at the complex satire of his supposed attacks on genteel "Italian" music in light of recent scholarship questioning the straightforward linguistic (and musical) nationalism of these poems. Fergusson's musical vitriol must be seen in the context of post-Augustan literary convention and the eighteenth-century tradition of political and aesthetic satire. Furthermore, beyond the established relationship between his poem "Auld Reikie" and the urban pastoral of John Gay's Trivia, I wish to draw an important connection to The Beggar's Opera (1728) and the widespread British antagonism throughout the eighteenth century towards Italian opera and "foreign" musical forms. Without repudiating the claims for Fergusson's nationalism and his defence of Scottish cultural identity, I intend to show that those "vile Italian tricks" were as much a part of Fergusson's musical Edinburgh as a "canty Highland reel.
Prof. Annette Baier, University of Pittsburgh and University of Otago
According to Adam Smith, Hume was reading Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead in the days before his death, and joking about what excuses he could offer to Charon, to delay departure. According to other reports, he was reading Henry Fielding. His doctor, William Cullen, names the Lucian dialogue he was reading as "Kataplus". This, strictly, is not a dialogue of the dead, where the dead, usually the famous dead, engage in conversation, but a dialogue of the dying, who are presented as conversing with Charon or Mercury or the fate Clotho. Fielding's Journey from this World to the Next is of this latter sort, so Hume might well have been reading two versions of what it is may be like to leave this world. The excuses he says he cannot offer, daughter to provide for, house to finish, fit those given by thre tyrant Megapenthes in "Kataplus." His own excuse, that if he could wait a little longer he might see the success of his writings in hastening "the downfall of the Christian superstition," is dismissed by Charon with the words, "You loitering rogue! This will not happen for many a hundred year."
Does it matter which genre Hume was reading, and adapting to his own situation, a dialogue of the dead, or a downward journey? Both genres go back to Lucian, a proclaimed favourite author of Hume's. Samuel Johnson had a low estimate of the dialogue of the dead as a genre, saying that once the characters are selected by an author, it was all too predictable what he (or she-Elizabeth Montagu wrote one such dialogue) would have them say. This was indeed the case with George Lyttleton and Fenelon, and to a lesser extent with Fontenelle. But the downward journey, at least in the hands of Fielding, was a fine vehicle for satire. Hume would have been guilty of eulogising himself had he cast himself as someone like Socrates and Montaigne (favourite characters in the dialogues of the dead), exchanging wise sayings in Elysium. As it was, he made fun of himself, and his hopes for influence on his culture. Ironic, to the end.
Prof. Barbara Benedict, Trinity College, Connecticut
Collections of books, art objects, found things, ethnographical, geological and historical artifacts, and personal souvenirs were endemic in eighteenth-century culture. Wealthy gentry, natural historians, explorers and fashionable urbanites all accumulated objects, while auctions, museums, libraries and shops exhibited things everywhere in the city. The British literature of the long eighteenth century, from 1660 to 1820, similarly brims with things. Empirical descriptions in novels, like the catalogues of purloined items in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders; poetic panegyrics and satires on fashionable items, like the contents of Gulliver's pockets in Swift's Gulliver's Travels; it-narratives like Smollett's History of An Atom; newspaper and broadside advertisements; and separately-published guidebooks and catalogues all record the invasion of these things into contemporary life. These texts, however, display ambivalence about the power relationship of humans and objects, and many writers portray objects as sites of complex meanings. The various, "factual" literatures of collection-collecting catalogues, museum guides, and advertisements-present things paradoxically both as physically real objects, and as transcendent representations of identity and idea, with the ability to take over human meanings. Similarly, occasional poetry about things by poets including Swift, Pope, and Gay, particularly Trivia, shows the clash of self and thing as a complicated exchange of identity. This paper will analyze the way both the popular literatures of collection and eighteenth-century poetry represent things through descriptive and organizational modes that embrace divergent registers of meaning: history, myth, science, religion, personal and social valuation. By analyzing the catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane's collections and of Don Saltero's museum of curiosities, advertisements for medicines, books and objects, and literary works by Defoe, Swift, Pope, Gay Samuel Johnson, and Jane Austen, this talk will argue that this confusion of significance represents the emerging identity of the urban sophisticate: as an object within a commodifying culture, and as the subject that commodifies it.
Ms. Liz Bradtke, University of Melbourne
Recent work on Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman mobilizes the key terms of Wollstonecraft, feminism and imagination. Both Wollstonecraft and her work-two things too frequently conflated-become understood as examples of an ultimate feminist vision that draws up the blueprints for our contemporary understanding of a feminist "movement."
Whilst acknowledging that Wollstonecraft's political critique of a society organized around gendered public/private spheres is important to our understanding of feminine subjectivity, what this paper seeks to argue is that the idea of a "feminist imagination" need not only refer to the mythologisation of the individual mind or political vision-but to the way in which Wollstonecraft and her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman captures the imagination of feminism and how this text is imagined and recast within an ongoing tradition of criticism.
Beyond that, it explores the way in which the process of collective imagining-although working towards the establishment of a feminist chronology-paradoxically manages to de-historicize the Vindication in claiming its terms as continually relevant and blurring those elements so grounded in Enlightenment concepts and rhetoric. Constructions of the public and private sphere, the cult of sensibility and the representation of female sexuality carry with them deep, historical implications that are deformed and trans-historicized by the feminist backward glance as it attempts to consolidate a set of key concerns and locate a point political resonance.
Drawing upon a range of "politically" acclaimed post-60's feminist works, this paper maps how and why these grander concerns are representative of an eighteenth-century society and how they become re-invested with contemporary meanings-deformed from their original, deeply historical contexts.
Ms. Fiona Brideoake, Australian National University
Anna Seward's 1796 poem "Llangollen Vale" was instrumental in the public refashioning of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, known as the Ladies of Llangollen, from sexually-suspect Irish exiles to exemplars of feminized Enlightenment sociability. Butler and Ponsonby eloped together from Ireland to Wales in 1778, creating a life of scholarly and sociable retirement in the North Welsh village of Llangollen. Transforming their small cottage into an elaborately improved Gothic "mansion," they established themselves within the social and epistolary networks of the local gentry. Their circulation throughout national print culture rendered both the Ladies and their Llangollen home significant cultural tourist sites of late-Georgian Britain.
Seward's "Llangollen Vale" has received comparatively little attention in either accounts of the Ladies of Llangollen or Romantic studies more generally. Produced in collaboration with its eponymous heroines, the poem figures Butler and Ponsonby as the apotheosis of a Welsh historical trajectory initiated by Owain Glyndwr's fifteenth-century resistance to English domination. Seward represents Butler and Ponsonby as indigenous elements of the Welsh natural and political landscape, thereby distancing them from the sexualized associations of exile, the metropolis and Catholic "superstition." Affirming the cultural superiority of the naturalized British state, the poem identifies Butler and Ponsonby with the patriotic celebration of learned ladies throughout the 1770s and early 1780s, rather than the gendered backlash of the ensuing decade. Accordingly, Butler and Ponsonby are identified as heirs of British liberty and progress, their scholarly and sociable retirement transforming the region's martial past through the rise of politeness and the feminization of culture. Adapting Elizabeth Fay's concept of "sapphic poetics" this paper traces the political and patriotic commitments underlying the figurative strategies of this important Romantic text, revealing Butler and Ponsonby to embody the same queer dangers Seward's narrative seeks to foreclose.
Prof. Hueikeng Chang, National Taiwan University
In Life of Johnson Boswell observes that the world must "vibrate in a state of uncertainty" concerning the birth and identity of Richard Savage. In 1858, based on a rather well-documented investigation, Notes and Queries declared that Johnson's Life of Savage is but a "romantic narrative" with limited factual support. This paper proposes to reconsider these suspicions of Johnson's partiality, credulity or inventiveness in an alternative context. In writing Life of Savage what Johnson had in mind, I will argue, would be a rhetorical project, rather than a faithful chronicle, that would afford the still anonymous author to participate in the contemporary discursive mainstream on "corruption."
Discourses on corruption in the early eighteenth century were generally preoccupied with an alarming vision of the rupture of given political, social or moral economy. The vision evokes anxiety over certain "gap," or "lack" on the one hand and over the proliferation of differing alternatives on the other. At the bottom of the vision is an unease over unbridled sign behaviors or the phenomenon of unlimited semiosis. In light of such a sinister vision J.G. A. Pocock comments in Virtue, Commerce and History that all theories of corruption are theories of how intermediaries substitute their own interests for those of the principle.
The financial revolution in the late seventeenth century had extended commercial exchanges into an abstract or imaginary space. The finance market evoked a very strong epistemological, ontological, political and moral disquietude for the very reason that it brought into lively consciousness of the volatility and plurivalence of signs. Johnson took advantage of Savage's "uncertain" life by turning it into a fable of how personality and letters become fluid at the overthrown of the given economy, that is, a fable of lack/differing alternatives. The narrative of Life thus assumes a logical connection with the discourse on the finance market and ultimately with the broader discourse on corruption, which was most prominently articulated in Swift and Pope's satires. In this context, Savage emerges in Johnson's narrative as both the victim of corruption and the incarnate of the subversive other. A re-reading of Life of Savage in the discursive context of corruption helps to highlight how at beginning stage of his writing career Johnson confronted the effects of semiosis triggered by the changes of his times.
Dr. William Christie, University of Sydney
The Thomas Carlyle who knocked on Francis Jeffrey's door in Edinburgh early in February of 1827 was not a young man. Though thirty two, however, he was as yet unknown. The fifty-three-year-old Jeffrey, on the other hand, had for many years been one of Edinburgh's leading advocates and, with Walter Scott, was its star literary attraction. As editor of what was still the leading periodical of the day-the Edinburgh Review-Jeffrey was one of the wealthiest men in Edinburgh, even without taking into account his income as an advocate. At his celebrated country estate, Craigcrook, Jeffrey entertained his friends amongst Edinburgh's legal and professional elite and every visiting celebrity and dignitary, especially though not exclusively those that shared his sceptical intellectual pursuits and liberal, reformist political convictions.
In the republic of letters, in other words, Jeffrey and Carlyle could hardly have been farther apart: the one orchestrating in the Edinburgh Review the last great expression of the Scottish Enlightenment, the other self-apprenticed to become the representative historian and sage of Victorian Britain. Yet an intense friendship immediately developed between the two men, one that survived many years of mutual exasperation and marked ambivalence before finally reaching an impasse characterized decades later by Carlyle in his Reminiscences: Jeffrey "seemed bent on converting me from what he called my 'German Mysticism,'-back merely, as I could conceive, into dead Edinburgh Whiggism, Scepticism, and Materialism."
Their relationship-the subject of this paper-simply could not survive Carlyle's violent reaction against an eighteenth century that from his point of view had gone on far too long.
Dr. Roger Collins and Prof. Robert Hannah, University of Otago
It has been long recognised that Jean Piron's illustrations to d'Entrecasteaux's Voyage in Search of La PŽrouse (first published in Paris in early 1800 and immediately re-engraved for publication in London) are neo-classical in spirit and in form, but hitherto his debt to classical art has not been explored in any consistent way. This paper will present the results of our comparisons between his surviving drawings and the published engravings on the one hand, and the broad sweep of classical and Renaissance art on the other. Furthermore, by plotting the dates at which specific ancient works became accessible to artists-notably those with which Piron appears to betray some familarity-, by noting the collections in which they were held in the late eighteenth century, and by setting this information alongside contemporary guide books, we hope to be able to reconstruct something of the travels he may have made in Italy before leaving France for the Pacific in 1791.
Prof. Kevin Cope, Louisiana State University
Most everyone thinks of exploration and colonization as a matter of sailing over the ocean to faraway sunny places. Traveling the surface of the earth and its seas may have been an English or French or Dutch specialty, but far and away the most international variety of exploration was the visiting of (fully or partially) underground wonders. Whether undertaken for scientific or touristic purposes, the probing of caves, volcanoes, faults, ravines, trenches, geysers, cauldrons, and other dangerous subterranean sites reached a fever pitch in the long eighteenth century. This dangerous pursuit induced virtuosi and curiosity-seekers from throughout Europe to travel to hazardous locations around the globe, including Australia and New Zealand.
One literary (as well as scientific) problem that arose from the spelunking craze was the challenge of "labeling" the geological world: identifying, tagging, naming, and systematizing geologically-interesting venues, venues that had drawn attention in the first place owing to their immensity and therefore resistance to colloquial description. The problem of labeling and organizing earthshattering experiences presents itself at the "macroscopic" level in the effort to set up an official itinerary of seismic wonders, an itinerary analogous to "the grand tour" but intended for a new breed of "extreme" tourists. This problem presents itself at the "microscopic" level in the applying of touristic nicknames to favorite attractions such as particular stalactites that look like Queen Mary. It likewise presents itself in a great variety of ways at every level and scale in between the grand and the small.
The challenge of "systematically" describing the tectonic landscape can be understood in literary terms, as the challenge of extracting a story-line from the vast manifold of experience comprising "culture." It can also be understood in art-historical terms, as the challenge of presenting panoramic landscapes that are cut-and-pasted together from an array of specific dramatic sites rather than apprehended in a single sweeping glance. And it can be understood in scientific terms, as the challenge of deciding which parts of "nature" to isolate and study. In rewriting the subterranean landscape-in reconstituting it as a would-be coherent collection of discrete wonders-eighteenth-century virtuosi deploy an astounding array of genres and discursive strategies, from the alphabetical cataloguing that was on the rise among curators and encyclopedia editors to extravagantly surprising literary modes such as geological satire or comical theology.
This paper will look at some of the ways in which underground travelers attempt to rewrite the underground landscape from a rough "text" of sublime (if puzzling) wonders into a variety of (variously) meaningful storylines. The paper will pay special attention to little-known European and Scandinavian, including Icelandic, contributions to this process. The presentation will be illustrated with remarkable imagery from adventure-filled journals and guidebooks.
Dr. Baerbel Czennia, Georg-August-Universitaet Goettingen
Whether celebrated as a British hero or denounced as a social upstart gone mad, glorified as a friend of native peoples or bedevilled as henchman of British Imperialism, James Cook is as fascinating a figure today as he was in his own time, triggering heated controversies among scholars and non-academic readers alike. The infinite number of ever new editions of travel reports, history books, Cook-biographies, and fictional texts bears witness to the mythical status he has achieved over the last two centuries, both in the Western world and in the decolonized territories he once claimed for the British throne. The battle of the books between anthropologists Marshall Sahlins (Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities, 1981; How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example, 1995) and Gananath Obeyeskere (The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, 1992), and, more recently, Anne Salmond's award-winning Trial of the Cannibal Dog (2003) have intensified public interest in the end of Cook's life as well as reinforced his immortality.
This paper will examine eighteenth-century British literary, especially poetic, representations of James Cook's death on a Pacific Island and compare them to a contemporary long poem composed by a young New Zealand author. Combining traditional literary analysis with post-colonial perspectives, this comparative study will also re-read old and new literary texts as artistic reflectors of and contributions to time-specific extra-literary cultures of public remembrance (or: cultures of commemoration) which in turn are essential for the ongoing process of collective identity (re)formation.
Dr. Joanna de Groot, University of York
This paper seeks to link the well-known persona of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as a contributor to eighteenth-century discourses on "the orient" with her persona as a constrained but active negotiator of gendered and sexual roles. It will bring together a discussion of her sexualised narrative of travel in the Ottoman empire with an analysis of her management of the marital and sexual aspects of her personal life in order to explore the role of cultural "otherness" in relation to gender and sexuality in the elite circles in which she moved. It will suggest how her awareness of sexual dissidence and gender politics interacted with her Italian as well as "oriental" involvements in ways which illumine not just on the complexities of gender, rank, ethnicity and sexuality in an individual life, but also on more broadly significant cultural processes. Her Italian relationships and residence can be set (as she herself did on occasion) in the context of her Ottoman experiences and "expertise" as well as the conventions of English aristocratic or intellectual interest in continental Europe and of her persistent friction with gender and sexual convention. Tensions around sexual identity and conduct were articulated through the material and cultural prisms of "foreigness" in the wider discourses of masculinity, femininity and sexuality as well as in the particular case of this "celebrated" travel writer, "Sappho," and aristocratic wit. It will be argued that an integrated discussion of the "Turkish" and Italian exotic in Montagu's life and work can enhance our understanding of these discourses and of the shifting unstable uses of "otherness" within them.
Dr Francesca di Poppa, Texas Tech University
In his Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, Hume offered an argument frequently labeled as "the argument against miracles." However, a careful reading shows that Hume's argument is not against miracles, but against belief in miracles. In other words, Hume argued forcefully that we can never be justified in believing that a miracle occurred, but his argument does not allow the conclusion that miraculous events are impossible.
In this paper, I will offer a comparison between Hume's argument and Spinoza's argument against miracles in Theological-Political Treatise. It will show that Spinoza anticipated Hume's main points. It will also show why Spinoza could do what Hume could not: based on "clear and distinct" definitions of God's will and power, Spinoza shows that a "miracle" is a contradiction in terms.
I will then explain that Hume could not offer that kind of argument, based on his rejection of seventeenth-century notions of causation, law of nature and God. Hume rejected the notion that there are necessary causal connections between events that are accessible to us. If Hume is interpreted as taking a merely epistemic stance regarding causation (i.e. causal connections may well exist, but we cannot access them), then, for all we know, miracles could be happening all the time. Since we do not know what the real laws of nature are, what we see may well be a continuous violation of them (for example, what if objects naturally "fall upwards"?).
In conclusion, because of his rejection of a metaphysical concept of causation, Hume cannot really offer an argument against the possibility of miracles. It is a small price to pay, in his philosophy, for his caustic criticism of traditional metaphysics. But let us not forget that Hume's modernity springs from the same motivations as those of Spinoza: the thirst for a philosophy (as well as a political life) not encumbered by dogma and "faith."
Dr. Jennifer Dowling, University of Sydney
At the turn of the eighteenth century, small pamphlets recounting the star-crossed romance between a young knight, Zigmund, and the beautiful Mageleyne, the daughter of his father's enemy, appeared in the packs of pakntregers, peddlars who sold chapbooks throughout Europe. Since its introduction, the Proven�al legend had travelled extensively, from its origins in France through Germany, courtesy of Veit Warbuck, and attained new heights of popularity in Russian and Polish during the seventeenth century. At this time, however, the story returned to Central Europe to captivate a new audience. What makes the situation unique is not the popularity of the material, but rather the language: Yiddish.
Despite the inability of the audience to participate in courtly life, chivalric romances were popular in Yiddish literature. Appearing first in FŸrth in 1698, the tale of Zigmund and Mageleyne was reprinted three times in less than twenty years-at Amsterdam in 1700, Prague in 1704, and Offenbach in 1714-making it the early-modern equivalent of a bestseller. Three of the chapbooks are very similar: in length, rhyme, language and judaization of the primary text. The other has, on the other hand, been significantly edited and reworked. This paper will discuss these four versions of the tale not only in terms of their literary and linguistic characteristics but also their socio-historical significance, as they play a role in a larger re-emergence of chivalric tales in Yiddish literature. These comparisons will illuminate the choices made by the printers/authors, which will, in turn, generate new interpretations of the texts.
Dr. Melissa K. Downes, Clarion University
Robinson Crusoe is not an erotic text in any common understanding of the word. It does not come wrapped in brown paper, nor is it passed amongst students with certain page corners carefully folded down. But at its basis it develops a masculine subject identity linked to the domination of that which is scripted as feminine and, as such, has a great deal to do with erotics, with the gendering and sexualization of power. This presentation, part of a larger work, will focus primarily on Friday-both as Crusoe's erotic possession and as Crusoe's domesticated erotic, his wife.
To assume no erotic relationships on the island because women dwell only at the edges of this text is to ignore Friday in problematic ways, dismissing a relationship of intimacy developed within the master/slave positioning of Crusoe and Friday. The clearest "social" and feminine object at the heart of this text is Friday.
One of the ways that Friday functions erotically is via his transformation into objectified property, displayed, possessed, and contained within the blazon. A comparison of Crusoe's description of Friday with blazons more generally accepted as erotic, shows the similarity in form.
I would also suggest that Friday's sensuousness is tied to a domestic erotic. As Peter Hulme convincingly argues, Crusoe/Defoe must render Friday as a mythic creature, the grateful slave, in order to sustain his vision of a workable Caribbean imperialism. But in comparing Friday's treatment to the historical realities for early eighteenth-century slaves and early eighteenth-century English wives, his treatment is far more that of a wife. In this family drama on the island the worker/slave is also a wife and mistress. To recognize the erotic in Robinson Crusoe, one must first recognize that power, control, possession, and domination are central to the scripting of the amatory in eighteenth-century British narrative, from conduct books to Clarissa.
Prof. John Drummond, University of Otago
"No great composer has been more misrepresented by posterity than Handel," wrote Winton Dean in 1980. In the 1720s and 1730s Handel was viewed as a skilful German composer of high-brow Italian opera for professionals, particularly adept at the portrayal of sensuous and violent behaviour, and providing entertainment in a foreign language for the cultural elite. By the 1780s, his scandalous operas forgotten, he had become transformed into the great composer of noble and worthy oratorios like Messiah, providing amateur choral societies the length and breadth of England with material that they could both sing and appreciate. By the 1820s his German background had also been expunged from history, and he had now become the supreme Englishman, later to be described by Julian Marshall as "singularly attuned to the best features of the English character."
Some scholars (such as Linda Colley and James Day) suggest that these transformations of Handel were part of a process of social change, even of national social engineering. Others (such as Dean) exclaim in horror at the misrepresentation of a great composer. But we need not be alarmed at the transformations of Handel-and they continue to this day-for he was himself a great transformer of his own and others' music. Indeed, both his own creative transformations, and the creative transformations of him exercised by others, were part of a normal eighteenth-century process, a practical exercise of craft in the service of truth. Only when Romantics established a quite different image of artistic truth (or pretended to do so) did this become disreputable. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then transformation may be deemed the eighteenth century's sincerest form of tribute, as Mozart showed when he re-orchestrated Handel's Messiah.
Ms. Alexandra Dumitrescu, University of Otago
Romantic William Blake (1757-1827) keeps fascinating the contemporary audience, which turns popular bits of his works into fetishes or clichŽs. However, it is not the Blake of Song of Innocence and Experience or of Jerusalem that I wish to discuss, but the less palatable Blake of little known texts such as All Religions Are One (c. 1788), Book of Los (1795), and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), with a special focus on the last mentioned. I will treat this more overtly antinomian Blake in support of a recent cultural debate centring on the term metamodernity.
During the late eighteenth century, two areas of tension started to trouble the "otherwise firmly stable edifice established by the exercise of logical reasoning" (Beer 2005 1). The need to reconcile revealed knowledge with Newtonian and Lockean systems, as well as the necessity of integrating sensibility in Locke's account of the mind were proclaimed most openly and vehemently by visionary poet William Blake. The enthusiastic dissenter who, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, would say "[s]ooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires" (Blake 1793), in the same move professing the intrinsic unity of all things-"[e]verything that lives is Holy" (Blake 1793)-was intent on integrating intuition and the full nature of sensibility within his complex system of thought.
The eighteenth-century preoccupation for achieving the unity of the self by means of striving towards epiphany or connecting across ontological levels reflects most explicitly in Blake's illuminated works, where he seeks unity of both vision and of arts. Given our experience of Jungian psychoanalysis which underscores realisation of the self as the most worthwhile of the human endeavours, we are now in a position of understanding more clearly what this unity means and therefore of recovering something of Blake's purpose that might have remained obscure to his contemporaries.
This condition of unity and self-realisation contrasts postmodern fragmentarism and indeterminacy, thus suggesting the actualisation of Blake's "prophecies" as a paradigm of thought best described as metamodern. As most principles of metamodernism can be traced back to Blake-the principle of theory/explanation overlapping, the redemptive role of feminine energies, the need for the integration of psychic archetypes-metamodernism appears as a complex phenomenon which recaptures and at the same time integrates eighteenth-century preoccupations.
Prof. Chris Fauske, Salem State College
Still read because of their searing literary power, the Irish pamphlets of Jonathan Swift have suffered from almost three hundred years of remorselessly uncontextualized reading. Worse, literary thinkers and scholars have often been drawn into extrapolating from Swift's works to make claims about the the Irish state and economy in the opening decades of the eighteenth century that are hopelessly inaccurate.
Long distrustful of the literary apparatus built up around Swift, historians, economists, and legal historians have only recently begun to turn their attention to Swift's work. What they are saying should help recontextualize Swift's Irish pamphlets. While the verbal tricks and techniques of Swift's pamphlets remain open for literary analysis, their background and impact can finally be honestly assessed.
It was not Jonathan Swift who was derided in Primate Boulter's mocking claim that "the angel of St Patrick's is now guardian of the kingdom"; rather, it was Archbishop William King. This lack of regard for Swift among the clerical and political elite was typical of the period.
Drawing on my work as one of the co-conveners of the "Money, Power, and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies of the Financial Revolution in the British Isles, 1688-1776" biennial colloquium and on my own work on the Church of Ireland and the Irish state in the opening three decades of the eighteenth century, "Nothing remarkable: The 'Irish' pamphlets of Jonathan Swift" will seek to rewrite commentary on Swift's Irish pamphlets to restore them to their original purpose and effectiveness.
Prof. Jan Fergus, Lehigh University
Claudia Johnson has shown us that Jane Austen is intimately connected to war by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century male readers; Kipling's "The Janeites" offers one example. Making a similar connection, Patrick O'Brian's hugely successful Aubrey-Maturin historical novels add battle and carnage, diplomacy and spying, the slave trade and overt sex to Austen's world-elements whose absence once defined Austen's alleged "limitations" and that critics now uncover in her work. O'Brian's novels also borrow as much as they can of Austen's language and style, her wit and humor, her ironic rendering of character, and her narrative techniques, creating a "wooden world" that partly imitates Austen's well-known "3 or 4 families in a Country Village."
Imitation is always both flattery and, as Jocelyn Harris reminds us, critique. O'Brian is not modernizing Austen-his novels are set in her time. His critique lies in rewriting her by placing men and a man's world at the center. But his critique is also homage. Ultimately this rewriting makes little difference within the central relationship: the homosocial bond between O'Brian's most complex character, the spy, physician, crack shot, naturalist, and yet sometimes feminized Stephen Maturin and the "man's man," the heroic Captain Jack Aubrey. Though Maturin seems at first as far as possible from Emma Woodhouse, like her he observes and supplies ironic commentary on the action and yet serves as an ironic butt, and like her he ultimately serves to rework gender expectations-but those of our own culture, not Austen's. From the late 1960s on, O'Brian's Maturin both resists and reflects feminist stances on gender that were evolving in western culture. I propose in this paper to look at the ways O'Brian sometimes uses Austenlike style to accomplish gender work in our cultural moment that is surprisingly parallel to Austen's in Emma.
Prof. John Gascoigne, University of New South Wales
How did conceptions of the social and political functions of religion differ between eighteenth-century Britain and the Pacific societies Cook and his men encountered? This paper will seek to answer this question by exploring the response of Cook and his men to the Pacific world and by sketching the role of religion-both established and dissenting-in the world from which Cook came.
In the first place, then, the paper will examine Cook's own religious views (or lack of them) and outline the variety of religious influences to which he was exposed, particularly the Established Church in which he was born and the Quaker community which he came to know through the family of John Walker, his first employer. Such diversity prompts a discussion of the way in which eighteenth-century Britain dealt with religious pluralism and the ways in which this resulted in religious forms which were at variance with those that Cook and his men encountered when they arrived in the Pacific.
Such differing social roles of religion among the European voyagers and their contrast with those of the peoples of the Pacific also prompts a discussion about the varying attitude to ritual practice in both societies. This also highlights the differing attitudes to the uses of religion as a source of this-wordly help and the contrasting attitudes held by different cultures on the issue of the border between the natural and the supernatural. Lastly the paper will reflect on the way in which indigenous reactions to the Europeans could be shaped in religious terms and, reciprocally, the impact of Pacific religious practice on European understandings of religion.
Prof. Penny Gay, University of Sydney
Restoration comedies routinely contained a drinking song (for male carousers) or a more elegant piece sung by a 'maid' (professional singer) in a domestic interior, to a generally female on-stage audience. But in the course of the eighteenth century the expected song was frequently given to one of the principal women in the play. By the time of Hannah Cowley's popular success, The Belle's Stratagem (1780), the song is sung in public at a masquerade by the (masked) heroine. The emergence of excellent singing actresses from the 1730s onwards paralleled developments in the drama, particularly comedy, towards a performative model of genteel femininity that included such accomplishments as musical abilities. (Burney's and Austen's heroines-arguably influenced by dramatic models-routinely sing in public social gatherings.)
Not all star actresses were excellent singers, but all were expected to have a competence, especially if they aspired to shine in comedy (perhaps this is one reason for Mrs Siddons's choosing to specialise in tragedy, though like most ingŽnues she began with comedy). What is particularly interesting is the emergence of a tradition of the singing actress who could, and sometimes did, cross over into opera or oratorio, or perform at the pleasure gardens, but whose bread-and-butter was a contract to act in legitimate drama at one of the patent houses. Examples include Kitty Clive, Elizabeth Farren, Sophia Baddeley, Anna Maria Crouch, Dorothy Jordan. Composers attached to the theatres who wrote songs for these actresses (knowing their capabilities) include Thomas Arne, his son Michael Arne, and Michael Kelly.
This paper will briefly trace the history of the female-voiced song in "legitimate" drama during the eighteenth century, linking it to a refashioning of the image of the actress in terms of her affective capabilities: my survey concludes with a move away from comedy into melodrama at the turn of the century. I hope to provide recorded examples.
Prof. William Gibson, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
My proposed paper is an examination of the use of popular jestbook-style humor in the early novels of Tobias Smollett. I argue that Smollett's use of scatological and grotesque humor is an affirmation of the picaresque tradition as it is embodied in the original Spanish texts, with which he was familiar. My paper contends that Smollett was attempting to reinvigorate the picaresque tradition with a dose of dark comedy that was being steadily smoothed out of it by contemporaries such as Lesage and Fielding, but that remained in vogue through jestbooks and penny pamphlets. A comparison between Francisco Quevedo's El Buscon, Smollett's Peregrine Pickle, Lesage's Gil Blas, and contemporary jestbook humor will elucidate the relationship between them in order to demonstrate Smollett's self-conceived place in the picaresque tradition. As part of my paper, I uncover a definition of the picaresque, as Smollett understood it, which opens a wider perspective on the tradition in the eighteenth century.
Prof. Brean Hammond, University of Nottingham
My current research project is an edition, for the Arden Shakespeare series, of a curious and interesting part of the Shakespeare Apocrypha. In 1728, the Shakespearean scholar Lewis Theobald presented on the stage a play called Double Falshood, that he claimed was based on original mss of Shakespearean provenance that he had in his possession. My introduction to the Arden edition of the play will argue that this claim was largely genuine. The play that Theobald adapted and produced, I will argue, is related to a lost play by Shakespeare and John Fletcher based on the Cardenio story in Don Quixote. This paper will present a summary of parts of the evidence.
Dr. Melissa Jane Hardie, University of Sydney
Published in 1798, Charles Brockden Brown's epistolary novel Wieland; or, the Transformation retells the case of a New York farmer who in 1781 killed his family on "divine instruction," that is on the "advice" of auditory hallucinations. In Wieland Brockden Brown coins the neologism "biloquism" to characterise the phenomenon of vocal projection more commonly known as "ventriloquism," and with which device he resolves the mystery of hearing voices. Brockden Brown redisposes the elements of the crime to incorporate epistolary reportage and ventriloquism as forms of testimony, reliable and unreliable, and forms of fictional projection. Nearly a hundred years later the 1874 kidnapping of Charley Ross saw the phenomenon of senseless crime become a mass-mediated event, one so familiar that the name "Charley Ross" became a sort of a colloquialism meaning "lost child," and a street ventriloquist in Philadelphia could deploy the features of the case in a street show that included his projecting pleadings from "Charley Ross" into a box.
Brockden Brown's deployment of the trope of ventriloquism follows several decades of interest in ventriloquism as, as Steven Connor describes it, a "theatre of utterance," relating "bodily agitation" and "inspired speech." If the question brought to Wieland is, as Connor has it, "where does speech come from?" then this question, one distractingly close to the very formulation of a republic based on "free" speech, can be read through the relative claims of enthusiasm and rationality as its origin. In its allegorical depiction of these questions, Wieland "re-writes" as biloquism the mystical practice of the ventriloquist (a revision coeval with Coleridge's deployment of ventriloquism as a metaphor, though in his case to somewhat different, non-nationalist ends). The paper organises its argument around the trope of biloquism in two ways: as a "rewriting" of arguments around enthusiasm and rationality across the long eighteenth century, with distinctly American purpose; and as a trope for the intrusion of "true crime" narratives in fictional compositions, pace Gladfelder's (2001) work on criminality and narrative in eighteenth-century England, but again turned to the American context as one of powerful rewritings and revisions.
Prof. Jocelyn Harris, University of Otago
The full extent of Jane Austen's intertextualities will never be known, but ample evidence exists to prove that she, like most other authors, frequently made books out of other books. Writers draw their raw material from other writers as much as from unmediated reality, but source-hunting and the identification of intertextuality are not the same. The first has an air of triumph about it, as though the writer has been caught out in a disgraceful act. Romantic writers have much to answer for here in their insistence that every word needs to be original, different from anything that has gone before. But even they wrote highly intertextual and allusive works, the battle between the ancients and the moderns has been new-dressed in Oedipal theory, and post-modern writers re-vision their predecessors. The idea that the relation of books to books offers an entré into the author's mind may look perilously close to the intentional heresy, but great authors are also great readers, who assimilate other books into their mental furniture. In this paper, I shall explore some varieties of Jane Austen's intertextual references, particularly those that improve Burney's Wanderer, explain the conclusion of Persuasion, critique Scott's first three novels, or exhibit silent affinities with Wollstonecraft.
Dr. Judith Hawley, Royal Holloway, University of London
Fielding and Sterne bear a curious relation to literary history. Tom Jones steps aside from progressive literary history by employing classical allusions and romance tropes to distinguish his fiction from the 'rising' novel. Tristram Shandy is sometimes seen as out of date: a throw-back to the traditions of Menippean satire or a forerunner of the post-modern novel. Yet they were also very timely: Fielding incorporated the Jacobite Rebellion into his plot as events unfolded and Sterne registered the shadow cast by the Seven Years War by harking back to King William's Wars.
One way of exploring their treatments of history is to analyse how they rewrite the History of England. Fielding alludes frequently and sceptically to works of this name by Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, Laurence Echard and John Oldmixon. Sterne literally rewrites Rapin, coopting the public record for uncle Toby's private history. Sterne borrows Rapin's narrative line in order to digress from it. Fielding too claims the right to digress and both writers claim that their digressions are not chaotic but part of a well-ordered plot machinery.
Yet Fielding and Sterne step out of line in different ways and to different ends. Fielding's digressions are sanctioned by classical precedent: they are the flashbacks of epic in which the narrator supplies the past in order to make the present more fully intelligible. Sterne's digressions are Menippean in origin, but filtered through a parodic version of Lockean association. They subvert the idea of full intelligiblity and disturb the very idea of the forward march of history. Both writers step out of line in a time of war. Both dramatise the workings of memory-whether cultural or personal-in the face of trauma. They remind us of the need to step aside from the present moment of violent crisis in order to think about whether or not it is possible to rewrite the History of England.
Dr. Nikki Hessell, Massey University
Samuel Johnson's parliamentary reports for the Gentleman's Magazine have typically been treated as literary artefacts and thus described in terms of their place within Johnson's oeuvre. At the time of composition, however, these reports were pieces of journalism designed to take their place within a competitive print culture marketplace. By examining the reports out of context, scholars have tended to treat Johnson's Debates as transcendent, as W. Jackson Bate implied when he called the collected reports "one of the most remarkable feats in the entire history of journalism." But the best reporting of any era must have conformed to a range of professional standards and audience expectations, making it not so much transcendent as typical.
Beyond the well-known prohibition on reporting Parliament that contributed to the Lilliputian disguise that the Gentleman's Magazine adopted, what were the normal journalistic standards of Johnson's day when it came to parliamentary reporting? This paper considers Johnson's parliamentary reports in the context of the wider business of the press in the late 1730s and early 1740s. Using the evidence of contemporary newspapers, pamphlets and periodicals such as the rival London Magazine and the pro-Ministry Daily Gazetteer, this paper argues that Johnson's innovations for the Gentleman's Magazine are best understood as a response not simply to the legal constraints that prevented the free publication of parliamentary transactions, but more importantly to a competitive environment for parliamentary news. By treating the parliamentary reports as parliamentary reports, and not as the peripheral juvenilia or ephemera of a central literary career, the paper resituates this important body of work in its original genre.
Ms. Michelle Hetherington, National Museum of Australia
The earliest known painting of Captain Cook, in a group portrait by John Hamilton Mortimer, dates from late 1771, the year of his return from his first Pacific voyage. The commissioner of the portrait, Lord Sandwich, has been painted with care and accuracy, as has Joseph Banks who enjoyed most of the celebrity arising from the voyage, but Cook seems to bear little resemblance to his subsequent representations.
The second portrait, perhaps the best in terms of psychological insight, was painted by William Hodges, artist on the second voyage and directly answerable to Cook during their three years together. Missing for many years, the portrait was known from its engraving published at the front of the second voyage account-a best seller translated into many languages and reprinted many times. Transcribing an oil portrait into an engraving inevitably results in changes which tend to diminish the subtlety and modulation of the original image. It is this engraved portrait, the earliest widely known and accessible image of the navigator, and another by Nathaniel Dance, that have held greatest authority as the true face of Captain Cook for over 200 years.
But as Cook's fame has increased, more images of him have been required. Artists have worked from a handful of prototypes, each with their own set of limitations. The fashioning of authoritative portraits of Cook from such a slender and compromised base has allowed artists to project onto Cook their own attitudes and beliefs, and a survey of the many faces of Captain Cook provides a fascinating study of the transformation of an able navigator, cartographer and captain into a mythic figure of British imperialism and a hero of the eighteenth century.
Prof. Philip Horne, University of London
Henry James writes in his preface to 'The Aspern Papers' that 'I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past-in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table.' In 1905 James's stern friend Charles Eliot Norton commented privately on James that he and his friend W.D. Howells were not 'as good as they would have been if they had been trained with some acquaintance in childhood with Homer and Virgil and the historic stream of imagination in literature.' But the flow of James's imagination was fed by some historic streams, and this paper will attempt to investigate some of the significances of the eighteenth century for him-as his most 'palpable imaginable visitable past'-and put together a suggestive picture of James's attitudes.
James is generally thought of as a modern, if not a modernist, and seldom engages at length with the eighteenth century. Yet there are consistent patterns of reference, and he addresses the previous century very interestingly, both as a critic and in his fiction (and indeed in his drama-the ill-fated Guy Domville being set in 1780). He set one early tale, 'Gabrielle de Bergerac', in pre-Revolutionary France, and reviewed a good number of memoirs, collections of letters etc. which deal with the eighteenth century. His The Sense of the Past carries its time-travelling hero back to 1820-and is a kind of dramatisation of his views of the (im)possibilities of the historical novel (Henry Esmond was his favourite Thackeray novel). He also writes interestingly about the American Revolution, and was fascinated by the French Revolution, to which he often refers. I am also very interested in his allusions to poetry and prose-and he often alludes to Pope, Johnson, and Goldsmith in particular (indeed he wrote an oddly neglected Introduction to The Vicar of Wakefield in 1900). The paper will deal with James's meditations on the availability and meaning for him of the eighteenth century, this 'nearer distance', and reflect on his construction of it-with an eye to the implications for this for modern scholars of the eighteenth century.
Philip Horne
I am a Professor of English at University College London. My main research has been on Henry James (Henry James and Revision (1990) and Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999) being the main things), besides quite a few articles and a few editions of James works.
Dr. Ingrid Horrocks, Massey University
It is by now a standard understanding of eighteenth-century studies that the metaphor of the "prospect" view, as developed in the poets like Pope and Thomson, based its authority on the notion of being able to present what John Barrell first labelled an "equal, wide survey" of society as a whole from a single, stable position. I take this as my starting point, but focus instead on the alternate, more ambiguous literary figure which I argue becomes important once this fantasy can no longer be sustained: the figure of the wanderer. While the wanderer, like the observer of a prospect, still lays claim to some kind of vista, it is not a view of the world from a stable elevated height, but rather a view assembled from multiple fragmentary sights, and from numerous interactions. This shift is a kind of stepping down, in both literal and figurative terms, of the poet and the imagined observer of society, from the hill-top to the fields and the town.
I focus on a single moment of transition, which I explore through the shift from the prospect view in Thomson's poetry to uses of wandering in Goldsmith's. In The Seasons (1726-30) Thomson seeks-often nervously-to separate his own poetic persona from his evocations of "lost" or "straying" wanderers, whose very presence in his poetry is nonetheless suggestive. Such ghostly figures, who lack the eminence to gain the implicitly political power to generalize, become precisely those taken up in texts such as Goldsmith's. The title of Goldsmith's poem, The Traveller, or A Prospect of Society (1764) could be followed by a question mark: can the vantage point of "the traveler" provide a new, more egalitarian "prospect of society"? I am interested in the difficulties Goldsmith encounters as he examines and seeks to answer this question, and in how he influentially transforms Thomson's "benighted wretch"-his own "houseless stranger"-into the figure through which to re-imagine the possibilities for a limitless and "disinterested" vision.
Dr. Christina Ionescu, Mount Allison University
Set against a backdrop of Venice's fading glory, Carnevale is an epic journey through the remarkable life of Cecilia Cornaro, the daughter of a Venetian merchant who is the last woman to be seduced by Casanova, a woman who, twenty-five years later, engages in a destructive love affair with none other than the English poet Byron. Lovric has been criticised for "extend[ing] the credibility of the story a bit too far in the character of her protagonist Cecilia Cornaro[, who] supposedly has an affair with Casanova at a very young age, then much later on in life has another love affair with Lord Byron". Nonetheless, a splendidly decadent Venice in the last decades of the eighteenth century is brought vividly to life by Cecilia's gaze which captures the city and its inhabitants with candour and devotion. In Carnevale fiction meets reality, love story encounters history lessons, the Baroque and Enlightenment face the Age of the Romantics, and the twenty-first century looks somewhat nostalgically at the eighteenth century, transposing and reinventing while repainting it. The story is told as a first-person narrative by Cecilia, a gifted portrait artist, who recounts her introduction to the world of libertine pleasure and artistic pursuits by Casanova, then an old figure who can only shine by moonlight, a Casanova who is quintessentially of that eighteenth century which was swept away by the French Revolution. My reading will focus on the representation of this eighteenth-century Venetian female portrait painter created by Lovric in order to establish to what degree her artistic reflections on the genre as well as her fictional existence reflect the ideology and power relations of her cultural sphere.
Dr. Leyli Jamali, Islamic Azad University of Tabriz
The reevaluation of canonical texts by applying poststructural theories has made the rewriting of any period possible through rewriting the subjectivity of its authors or 'writing subjects'. The present paper aims to rewrite the subjectivity of an eighteenth-century spokesman of patriarchal ideologies as a degendered androgyn under the light of Lacanian and Kristevan insights. By challenging the idea which sees Defoe and many other fathers of the English novel as misogynists due to their fixed subjectification, and focusing on the inconsistency in Defoe's voice as a writing subject, this paper traces Defoe's psychological journey from the Lacanian Symbolic, featured in his early novels, towards the realm of the Lacanian Real in his last work. The paper examines Defoe's whole novelistic output chronologically to present a unified picture of Defoe's gradual quest towards the deconstruction of subjectification and his deterioration of gender boundaries by rewriting his Self while writing his texts.
Ms. Olivera Jokic, University of Michigan
My paper examines several late eighteenth-century texts from the India Office archive whose authority as historical documents stands at odds with their status within the archive, where they were suspect as fiction because of unconventional subject matter and genre. In place of confident historical information, these texts reveal that the official archive struggled for authority in the manner we usually understand to be typical of early British fiction.
The texts considered in this essay come from the Home Miscellaneous series of the archive, where documents for which "no better place could be found" (in the words of its archivists) were stored. All of them versions of a story about a "beautiful Moor woman," supposedly abducted from her house in Madras with the assistance of a British official, these texts defy classification into any of the conventional document categories of the archive. This story's nameless main character is the forsaken mistress of a local prince and her fate in the tale testifies to the contact between official documents of colonialism and orientalist genres of fiction.
The names of other characters in the cast reveal, however, that this unusual story of passion and intrigue should be read in conjunction with the more explicitly political reports of a 1776 scandal; this one involved several East India Company officers who usurped their Governor's office in Madras to protect their private business interests. Sentenced to obscurity as a provincial incident, "Madras revolution" was further eclipsed by colonial historiography that focused on the impeachment of Warren Hastings as a turning point in British imperialism.
The writers of these documents vied for London's attention from a provincial colonial town by writing competing reports which claimed best to convey the accurate and sordid details of the imbroglio in a region few London administrators would ever visit. The legal governor and the usurpers accused each other of malfeasance and falsehood, arguing that forgery could best be detected in the "Moor woman" murder mystery, whose abundance of curious detail showed that it must have been written "with the most Studied Attention." To recognize the appropriate manner of documentation, the readers were required to presume what was possible in the colony and to recognize the "style" of writing by which the reality could be appropriately represented.
Tracing the stories' echoes through the archive and historiography, I argue that literary scholarship provides crucial tools for understanding the political implications of archive's negotiated poetic conventions for colonial politics in the late eighteenth century. While the official archive remains critical for our ability to re-constitute colonial scenes from the period, these texts present particular interpretive difficulties for the readers. Their substance and their marginal position suggest that the realist detail from the archive must be read in conjunction with apparent "fiction" from the eighteenth century, inconsistently with the hierarchy of genres we conventionally use to authenticate historical accounts about the period. They ultimately invite more research into the eighteenth-century circulation of the genres of evidence between literary and non-literary texts and its consequences for textual interpretation today.
Dr. Adrian Jones, La Trobe University
Histories recount that the long-eighteenth-century began the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and witnessed the rise of Eastern Europe: first with Sweden, then with Russia and Prussia. Consider Voltaire'ev. Catherine collected cash and the crown jewels for them to take as gifts. Baltacõ Mehmed Pasüa indulged their request and concluded peace. Many Turks maintain he also had an assignation with Catherine.
Onsets of Ottoman decline are blamed on the lascivious lassitude of a divan poet. A huge Ottoman army of janissaries, Balkan Christians, Anatolian Turks, and Budzhak and Crimean Tatars parted, and Peter and his army of 40,000 scurried back to Ukraine. Talk of bribes received and imperial sexual favours given has since shaped Turkish folklore, but that talk is not reciprocated in losing Russia, ironically the next great power in Europe. Yet the significance of Peter's victory in 1709 over Sweden at Poltava hung in the balance at the Prut in 1711; Peter's "great-ness" was at stake. If Peter had been captured as well as defeated, he would have mirrored the fate of Charles XII of Sweden, a royal refugee languishing in Ottoman Bender. This paper contrasts stories told about the battle by French and English diplomats and mercenaries, and by Russian and Turkish participants.
Dr. Donald Kerr, University of Otago
Between 1782-1817, under the pseudonym "Peter Pindar," Dr. John Wolcot (1738-1819) wrote more than sixty satires, five miscellanies of serious and humourous verse, two edited works, one play, and a large number of unpublished pieces. As the prime Regency satirist, his attacks on the follies and foibles of George III, William Pitt, Sir Joseph Banks, James Boswell, and others are well known. Even though his works were taken up by an eager populace, his relationship with both English printers and publishers was precarious and testy. Indeed, acknowledging the small pecuniary returns he wrote: "Satire is bad trade." In an effort to increase book sales, Wolcot plied his trade to the Americas, dealing in the main with Benjamin Franklin Bache, Franklin's grandson, and William Duane, both journalists and newspaper proprietors. Based on unpublished archives at Special Collections, Auckland City Library, this paper examines the English and trans-Atlantic traffic of Wolcot's verse, and touches briefly on his relationship with publishers William West and John Walker, and the printing family of Spilsbury.
Mr. Edmund King, University of Auckland
Pope's quarto edition of Shakespeare, issued by the Tonson publishing house between 1723 and 1725, has received almost universal censure in subsequent accounts of eighteenth-century Shakespearean textual criticism. Perhaps the most controversial-and, in retrospect, wrong-headed-of Pope's editorial innovations was his "degradation" of "suspected passages" to the bottom of the page, and his use of critical sigla to denote critical judgements within the text. (Marginal inverted commas marked "shining passages" and stars noteworthy speeches, while obelisks signalled "low" [and therefore presumably interpolated] material.)
To many, Pope's treatment of the Shakespearean text has appeared merely eccentric; Colin Franklin, for instance, remarks that "nothing in eighteenth-century Shakespeare editions was more whimsical than the appearance É of Pope's commas in the margin, or his É award of a star to a scene" (Franklin, Shakespeare Domesticated [1991], 178). Many twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics, meanwhile, have followed David Nichol Smith's broadly "whig" interpretation of early eighteenth-century Shakespearean editing-that Pope was "a man of genius pursuing a wrong method," while his antagonist and editorial successor Lewis Theobald was a critic of humble talents following the "right" one. Theobald's scholarship, derived from Bentleyan classical and biblical editing, has been seen to "win out" over Pope's "gentlemanly" and taste-based editorial project.
In this paper, I want to re-examine Pope's editorial sigla, and suggest that the identification of Pope with gentlemanly amateurism has somewhat obscured his awareness of (and reliance on) classical-humanist editorial practice in the 1723-1725 Shakespear. Focusing particularly on Erasmus' Adagia and the notes to Pope's Iliad and Odyssey translations, I want to argue that, in his use of "stars" and "obelisks" as well as in his "degradations," Pope may have been consciously trying to emulate the classical textual-critical method attributed to Zenodotus and Aristarchus, as mediated (somewhat inaccurately) through later humanist accounts of ancient editing. Just as Bentley's Horace imposed a "modern" textual-critical apparatus onto an ancient author, Pope's Shakespear, I shall suggest, was an attempt to graft an ancient editorial mode onto a modern work.
Dr. Cynthia Klekar, Western Michigan University
This paper examines a crucial but neglected aspect of Adam Smith's articulation of the relationship between moral and economic theory by examining in the Theory of Moral Sentiments how the languages of gift exchange, obligation, and benevolence-all crucial concepts for eighteenth-century moral and economic philosophy-are informed by concerns of self interest. The fantasy of gift exchange as a form of mutual and reciprocal obligation, as I have argued, underwrites discourses of benevolence, and allows eighteenth-century philosophers and writers to disguise economic self interest within the fiction of disinterested and mutually beneficial exchange. Drawing on recent critiques of theories of gift exchange (by Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall Sahlins, and Jacques Derrida, among others) I demonstrate the ways in which the structure of gift giving-idealized by many followers of Marcel Mauss such as C. A. Gregory and Lewis Hyde-undermines the very disinterestedness that the exchange is thought to perpetuate. The processes of the misrecognized or impossible gift, described by Bourdieu and Derrida, are evident in Smith's work: In The Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments, he returns repeatedly to the impossibility of envisioning a moral economy separate from a market economy. In both works, Smith demonstrates the seemingly unending processes of negotiation involved in benevolent exchanges, and the impossibility of extricating the moral from the economic. The discourse of benevolence invariably is contained within a language of asymmetrical obligation, and gifts-and generosity more broadly-are always marked by calculations of value, self-interest, and the expectation of return. Ultimately, the gift remains an idealized embodiment of an ethic of generosity. The gift always already is a fiction because the process of gift exchange is predicated on the market. Therefore, it is the gift, not the commodity, that provides the vocabulary of exchange in the eighteenth century. Thus, as Smith and other eighteenth-century philosophers attempt to formulate a moral philosophy based on benevolence as an alternative to capitalist self-interest, they in actuality reinscribe the crisis they attempt to resolve.
Ms. Shino Konishi, University of Sydney
The face is a powerful symbol; the word is commonly used metaphorically, for instance, to be "two faced" or duplicitous, to "look someone in the face" or be confronting, and to "lose face" or be humiliated. Despite this modern signification Mary Cowling claims that the contemporary attitudes towards the face have become "more perfunctory and far less reverent" than they were in the eighteenth century. The face was considered the most obvious conduit between the inner being and the external world, as it housed all of the body's organs of sense, allowing us to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Consequently, the face was fetishised, and according to Deidre Lynch "understood less as a natural fact, and more as a prototypical sign, an exemplary sort of reading matter." The eighteenth-century face, then, was a highly-nuanced symbol that could be interpreted in myriad ways: William Hogarth claimed that the "face is an index of the mind," Johann Caspar Lavater considered it "the most beautiful, eloquent of all languages," and Georg Lichtenberg described it as the "most entertaining surface on earth." For the eighteenth-century European voyagers who explored terra australis reading the Aboriginal face was a vital skill, as their want of a common tongue ensured that it was the only means by which they knew to gauge the Aboriginal nature and passions, measure their morality and intellect, or determine their racial affinities. This paper will critically examine these representations of the Aboriginal male face and their reading of the indigenous countenance in light of contemporary discourses on race and savagery, and aesthetics and physiognomy.
Prof. Elizabeth Kraft, University of Georgia
This paper is part of a larger study that I am completing on women novelists of the long eighteenth century and the ethics of desire. In this work, I use biblical narratives about women as ethical paradigms against which to read fiction by Behn, Manley, Haywood, Fielding, Burney, and Inchbald (primarily). I adopt this strategy from the exchanges held about women's subjectivity between Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray. They focus on the Song of Songs. I simply expand to draw in other helpful texts.
In this presentation, I look at the use of language by Manley and Haywood as a means of both concealing and revealing desire. The paradigmatic stories against which I read "The Adventures of Rivella," " Love in Excess," and "Betsy Thoughtless" are the stories of Esther (Book of Esther) and Zipporah (Exodus).
I draw on William Warburton's discussion of hieroglyphics in The Divine Legation of Moses in order to ground my argument in an eighteenth-century context, but the "new approach" has more to do with the theoretical juxtaposition of ancient women's voices and early modern women's voices and what they tell us about the ethics of desire.
Dr. Susan Lamb, University of Toronto
This paper reintegrates Swift's Gulliver's Travels into the web of understandings it relied on around a now overlooked but then unavoidable part of expansionist travel: captivity. By taking contemporary attitudes towards former captives, their published narratives, and captivity into account, Gulliver's Travels emerges as more deeply connected to travel culture than the common view of it as an uncomplicated parody of travelogue takes it to be. The connection of Swift's work to an awareness about captivity and its implications is reflected even on the most basic level of plot: Gulliver is first captured by little people, who chain him, use him in a war, and eventually want to kill him, and ends having been the servant to a people who hate him as another species, but whom he so idolizes as to attempt an impossible emulation. Like the contemporary non-fictional captivity accounts that were equally travel narratives, Gulliver uses what had been an unwanted intimacy with "foreign" cultures as an unassailable ground of authority-it gives him a culturally-accepted position to comment on Britain that an obscure ship's captain could not usually claim. Indeed when a former captive could use the techniques and categories of standard travel practice to produce publicly useful knowledge, it was treated as a central selling point in an account's publication.
Yet the acculturation and submissiveness captivity often forced on the traveller also provoked suspicions about his or her loyalties and disturbed the usually complacent equation between travel, knowledge, and power. While Gulliver claims the forms of authority his culture granted to travellers, then, Swift also plays off the nervousness captivity narratives displayed about the relationship between travel authority, personal experience, and powerlessness. Contrary to the bulk of the works published in the tradition Swift employs, each of Gulliver's voyages alienates him still more from England and his own culture, so much so that by the end of the work he can hardly support being in the presence of other English or the human race in general. In this paper I tease out the implications to the Travels of a context in which former captives and the metropolitan audience were as deeply invested in the belief that the knowledge gained in travel and captivity was of demonstrable benefit as they were in discovering that former captives had not become disaffected from British culture or otherwise contaminated by "foreigness."Prof. Helen Leach, University of Otago
When Captain James Cook observed the preparation of a ceremonial dish on Tahiti in 1769 he referred to it as a pudding, despite its use of ingredients that would never have been found in a traditional English pudding. What did the eighteenth-century Polynesian and English puddings have in common that justified this naming? After reviewing the great antiquity of both types of pudding, this paper will discuss their shared characteristics-social significance, texture, and material culture-and their transformations in the twentieth century.
Ms. Caitlyn Lehmann, University of Melbourne
Eighteenth-century ballet dancers have traditionally been presented in a variety of unflattering guises, often resulting from accounts of their lives derived from bon mots, anecdotes, and nineteenth-century sources which tacitly regarded ballet as an art of dubious integrity. Many dancers are portrayed as impetuous individuals, prone to violent passions and consumed with their own self-importance. Their aristocratic patrons are often depicted with equal irreverence as extravagant personages all too ready to indulge-or exploit-the ambitions of their favourite performers. This paper seeks to challenge conventional representations of eighteenth-century ballet by exploring the ways in which dancers contributed to the practices of fashionable society. The paper will examine how members of the ballet were employed to lend exclusivity to public events, and how the popularity of ballet was implicated in the commercialisation of fashionable sociability. The subject of analysis is a fete held at the Pantheon in 1779, at which several well-known dancers from the opera house formed part of the evening's staged entertainment.
As a key site for commercialised urban sociability, the Pantheon differs significantly from the exclusive domain of the opera house with which dancers of the period are usually associated. As such, it offers a valuable context in which to test the extent of ballet's fashionable status, as well as assumptions about social status of professional dancers. By focussing on the dancers' participation in the fete and the reasons for their involvement, this presentation seeks to offer an alternative view of dancers' relationships with their patrons and members of the social elite. In the process, the paper will consider how the links between ballet and fashionable society may have contributed to the dramatic increase in ballet's popularity during the final decades of the eighteenth century.
Dr. Kate Lilley, University of Sydney
'Tis true it looks at distance fayr; But when we doe approach, The fruit of Sodom will impayr, And perish at the touch. -Katherine Philips, "Against Pleasure"
Fruits of Sodom or Sodom-apples, the fruits of conscious feminine disobedience and fair-seeming impersonation, signify the abortive issue of Eve's perverse desire and her criminal intent. They raise the spectre of a pleasure that is original and originating, aspiring but also terminal, located at the intersection of the shameful and the shameless, the fruitful and the fruitless, the auto and alloerotic. Sodom-apples are paradoxically genealogical: of the line of Eve.
That line, I want to argue, is not only reflexively figurative but constitutionally intellectual, even scholarly. These criminal fruits of retirement figure pervasively in early modern women's poetry and its reception, turned in many ways but always within an epideictic and genealogical economy which transvalues elegiac knowledge and weighs its burdens. In tracing this line I want to take the measure of propinquity and distance within and between Restoration women poets and their readers, then and now. There is a critical magnetism, a ready fit, between this poetics of reading backwards from interdiction and the revisionist practices of feminist and queer literary histories. Nonetheless, it is not simply the formally self-conscious and historically propitious aspects of these intersections which interest me, but their figurative, affective and ideological overdetermination and undoing. My focus here will be the poetry of Jane Barker.
Prof. Harold Love, Monash University
The connection between satire and wells is an ancient one, arising from a belief that they were an avenue for communication with the spirits of the underworld. This chapter will examine satires written about the two primary medicinal wells of Restoration England, Tunbridge and Bath, with special attention directed to Rochester's "Tunbridge Wells" and "Say heav'n born muse" and Francis Fane's "The wonders of warm water." The curative powers of Tunbridge water were seen as arising from chemical properties and satire about the place is likewise written in a rationalistic spirit, concerned with the analysis of character types and empirical accounts of behaviour.
Bath water on the other hand, because of its far greater antiquity and closeness to the sacred wells of Celtic Britain, was more likely to be credited with magical properties, as in the "miraculous"fecundity bestowed in 1687 on Mary of Modena. Correspondingly, the two most remarkable Bath satires of the period (Rochester's "Say heav'n born muse" and Fane's "Iter occidentale") confront the reader in a quite different mode involving surreal exaggeration and transgressive intertextuality.
Dr. Erin Mackie, University of Canterbury
As a self-consciously literary personal journal, James Boswell's London Journal has interested eighteenth-century scholars investigating the interplay between life-writing and fiction, between autobiography and the novel1. Recording the first encounters between Boswell and Samuel Johnson, this journal is significant in the genesis of Boswell's masterpiece of biography, The Life of Johnson. As the diurnal record of the social life of a genteel young man in London from 1762-1763, this journal provides a detailed picture of one sort of highly social and well-connected life in the mid-eighteenth century. To historians of gender and ideology, Boswell's self-reporting lays tantalizingly open the uneven psyche of a young man struggling to find himself within and against familial expectations and socio-cultural conventions. It is this aspect of Boswell's London Journal that primarily concerns me here.
Here, I examine Boswell's relation to two of the most divergent ideals he emulates: the rakish highwayman, Macheath, and the arbiter of taste and architect of the autonomous realm of the imagination, Mr. Spectator. Rather than seeing these figures simply as emblems marking polar points on some sort of moral spectrum across which Boswell swings or along which he advances, I examine how they both serve together to accommodate Boswell's notion of his own manliness. Rather than charting a progressive narrative through which, as David Weed has it, Boswell undergoes "a steady conversion of the dissipated man of pleasure into the dignified retenu," I see the London Journal laying bare the ways in which the rakish man of pleasure and the dignified gentleman are mutually constitutive positions and so more or less simultaneously available in Boswell's psyche2.
Looking at how Boswell's relation to these two figures reveals the dominance in his own psyche of the commonplace juxtaposition of criminal and gentleman. While this juxtaposition certainly participates in the wider cultural logic of concordia discors, the union of opposites, it is so heavily conventionalized both by the habitual misconduct of elite men and by popular cultural representation, as in The Beggar's Opera, that the status of its terms as oppositional starts to seem compromised3. The mock-heroic, the modal form that most perfectly encapsulates this juxtaposition of opposites, realizes this compromise in its doubled logic which holds high and low in equilibrium, momentarily suspending value hierarchies and so allowing the criminal and the gentleman to occupy a single register of representation. As William Empson writes, "it makes Macheath seem like the heroes and swains no less than the heroes and swains like Macheath.4" In relation to eighteenth-century notions of masculinity, this, I believe is the ultimate fantasy presented by The Beggar's Opera and one in which James Boswell, along with much of polite British society, eagerly participated.
As the father-figure of neoclassical economics, Adam Smith often gets a bad press from cultural critics, feminists, and revisionist historians. Typically, he is treated as an apologist for a rationalized, abstract economics that subordinates the laboring classes to the impersonal demands of an increasingly complex market. In this paper, I challenge this default view of Smith, arguing that his descriptions of the "laws" of economics are marked by a different conception of materialism from Marx's re-envisioning of the labor theory of value. Materialism, for Smith, is at once anthropological and ecological-and his comments on the complex relations among natural resources, population density, agricultural and manufacturing technologies, and trade paradoxically resist both progressivist-Eurocentric-histories of industrialization and the analytical assumptions and values which underlie traditional Marxian economics. Drawing on the work of historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz, R. Bin Wong, Jeng-guo Chen, Brian Fagan, and others, I argue that Smith does not share Eurocentric fictions of the superiority of western economic practices to what Marx termed the "Asiatic mode of production." Consequently, his analyses of the economies of early modern China and India reveal his fascination with non-progressivist views of human interaction with the natural world. His cyclical view of economic development and his pessimistic description of the fundamental antagonisms between labor and capital reveal his skepticism about what we might call the sublime object of modernity-the belief in the open-ended nature of "surplus" value.
Dr. Lisa Marr, University of Otago
In the latter pages of The Year of the French, the English character Mr. Matthews jests that 1798 would be remembered more for the publication of the Lyrical Ballads than the United Irish uprising, adding that, to the best of his knowledge, "there were no poets among the Mayo rebels." Elsewhere in the novel, Thomas Flanagan belies this claim. Utilising his extensive knowledge of Irish history and literature, he centres his narrative around the figure of Owen MacCarthy, a Gaelic poet who reluctantly is drawn into the insurrection. By choosing MacCarthy as the focal point, Flanagan uncovers a previously "hidden" story of the rebellion, revealing an Irish perspective that was often omitted from the official record of 1798. As well as questioning the self-privileging nature of colonial history, he examines the way in which the written word is privileged over oral traditions and the English language over Irish.
While Flanagan imaginatively explores the role played by poets both in the rising and in the lives of the Gaelic people, he attempts to explain why the 1798 rebellion failed to inspire Ireland's poets. MacCarthy is heir to Ireland's "bardic" tradition and jealous of his craft. He serves as the "tongue" and "voice" of the Irish people, articulating their experiences, aspirations, visions, and sufferings. His is a noble and beautiful art, one he repeatedly refuses to debase. Conscious of the disparity between this muddle and murder and the grand images generated by the poets' words, MacCarthy is impelled not only to interrogate the subject matter of his poetry, but to reassess his art's long-cherished symbols. As the rebellion nears its end, MacCarthy is left with a sack of broken and unwanted images, images forced upon him, none of which he could call "his own" (326).
Dr. Matthew McCormack, University of Northampton, UK
This paper will examine crucial changes in the meaning and function of
"loyalty" that took place over the course of the eighteenth century in England. Political historians today employ the term in a functional way to connote-variously-obedience, nationalism, conservatism and/or monarchism. This finds its expression in the phenomenon of "loyalism" that has come to dominate accounts of the century, and which supposedly reached its apogee in response to the French Revolution. In the eighteenth century, however, "loyalism" was not a current term and "loyalty" had specific meanings. In the early modern world, it was understood politically in a fairly narrow sense to mean allegiance to one's rightful sovereign (consistent with its common linguistic roots with the notion of "legality"). Over the course of the eighteenth-century, this paper will argue, the political notion of "loyalty" acquired a greater allusive richness as the basis of the citizen's place in the state was rethought. In particular, greater connections were made between personal and political loyalty, as the male subject's attachment to his governors and political system was given an affective basis. By examining a range of political, personal and literary sources, I will explore how discourses and practices of emotional authenticity, chivalric masculinity, national identity and active citizenship served to enrich the Georgian notion of "loyalty". This was a key period in the development of the idea, and which contributed in a large degree to the heterogeneous (and somewhat confused) understanding of loyalty that is current today.
Dr. Elaine McGirr, Royal Holloway, University of London
When the characters in Frances Burney's The Wanderer decided to put on a play, they naturally turned to Colly Cibber, choosing The Careless Husband. This perennially popular play had been in standard repertory for the entire eighteenth century. But Elinor and her friends did not respond to Cibber's sentimental comedy in the same way as had the original audience. Far from considering the ideal lovers as central roles, she dismisses them as unimportant and old-fashioned. "She had pitched upon Mr. Scope and Miss Bydel, two famous, formal quizzes, residing in Lewes, to compliment them with the forgrum parts of Manly and Lady Grace; characters which always put the audience to sleep, but that, as they were both good sort of souls, who were never awake themselves, they would not find out" (144-45).
Modern readers' tastes and sympathies tend to be aligned with the feisty, feminist anti-heroine's and agree whole-heartedly that the "good" couple, Manly and Lady Grace, are insipid. For Romantics and Revolutionaries like Elinor, modest feelings kept in decorous check were more risible than heroic, and for post-modern readers raised on irony and detached cynicism, earnestness like Manly's and Lady Grace's calls forth sniggers, not respect.
Yet Manly and Lady Grace were ideals, as their trait names suggest, and early eighteenth-century audiences adored them. Is it possible to look at these early-eighteenth-century characters with unjaundiced eyes and take them seriously again? This paper will argue that the sentimental "set pieces" of Cibber's early comedies ill-accorded with the increasingly "natural" acting style championed in mid-century by Garrick and still in vogue today. I will also question the assumption that characters like Manly are "unnatural" and "unheroic" because they are neither Byronic nor Herculean, concluding that Cibber's sentimental heroes prefigured the floppy-haired "new man" of the British romantic comedy.
Ms. Karen McLean, University of Otago
I will examine Coleridge's developing feelings towards emigration and travel, particularly in relation to the three main periods in which he thought about transplanting himself into another culture-his intention to build a pantisocratic community in Pennsylvania, his trip to and extended time of employment in Malta, and his tour of Germany and parts of Europe with Wordsworth.
I wish to examine how Coleridge writes of his motivations for travel and transplantation in his notebooks, letters and certain poems, specifically in regards to the dynamic between public and private space, and how he thought this dynamic might transform one's personality in transit. For example, Coleridge anticipates that his pantisocratic journey will be a very public one, partly to encourage society to consider egalitarianism, either through transforming itself at home or, in the case of those members of society who could afford it, emigrating to reinvent and reconstitute itself in a "new world."
In relation to the two travel events that he did manage to accomplish, I will describe Coleridge's meditations upon the necessary intermingling of public and private space when one is in transit. Coleridge was particularly interested in this and how it would transform one's personality in relation to other passengers and traveling companions. I point out how Coleridge writes unflinchingly of the very public illness that occurs while he is in transit to Malta, and discuss how such travel events prompt him to examine the issues of privacy, publicity and personality. I conclude by comparing the pantisocratic plans and Maltese journey to the major travel event of Coleridge's later life, to examine the way he writes of the transformation of his and Wordsworth's personality via interactions with Germans, other Europeans and each other as sometimes-incompatible traveling companions.
Dr. Thomas McLean, University of Otago
The significance of Russia in the British Romantic era is immense, but only recently has it received much attention among literary scholars. Catherine the Great and her grandson, Czar Alexander, are among the most important political figures of the era, and they figure prominently in the works of (among others) ST Coleridge, Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore. Lord Byron's characterization in Don Juan of Catherine the Great's Russia is well known, but I want to argue that Byron's 1821 Sardanapalus: A Tragedy is also shaped by recent Russian history. Peter Manning and Susan Wolfson describe Sardanapalus as "a pacifist and pleasure-lover in a culture that values military imperialism," a description that could also describe Alexander, who was haunted by memories of the power and the horrors of his grandmother, Catherine the Great, just as Sardanapalus is haunted by his ancestor Semiramis. Significantly, Catherine the Great was regularly caricatured by Britons (including Walpole and Coleridge) as "Semiramus of the North," and she expanded the Russian empire south almost as far as Assyria. It seems significant, too, that Byron borrows the named Zarina from another account in Diodorus Siculus's historical work that was the basis for Byron's play. Though doing so seems historically objectionable, Byron's decision adds credence to my argument that Sardanapalus is at least partly Byron's imaginative representation of Alexander, who deplored the violence of recent Russian history but nevertheless became a warrior figure after Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
Dr. Jennifer Milam, University of Sydney
This paper explores issues of nationalism and cosmopolitanism as they relate to the theory and practice of garden design in eighteenth-century Europe. It addresses the tensions between a cosmopolitan outlook and nationalistic language in which foreign approaches and influences are seen as the most fashionable and highly desirable, yet for both practical and ideological reasons need to be tempered by native interests and aims. The paper looks specifically at garden theorists who assert local objectives in France, Russia, Germany and the Veneto, at the same time that they embrace the influences of England and the Orient.
Mr. Tim Milfull, Queensland University of Technology
Thomas (Buck) Whaley, MP for Enniscorthy, dies at Knutsford, apparently on his way from Liverpool to London. It is rumoured 'that he was stabbed in a fit of jealousy by two sisters to whom he was paying marked attentions at a time when each of them was in ignorance of his concealed attachment to the other. Sarah, or Sally Jenkinson is stated to have been the lady from whom he received his death wound.' She is said to have been won by Whaley from the Prince of Wales in a wager. Chronology of Ireland-www.chirl.com
Born in 1766 and dying under dubious circumstances at the turn of the nineteenth century, Irish libertine Thomas Whaley led a rich and extraordinarily profligate life, carving out a reputation as a wild and impetuous dandy who was prone to accepting outrageous wagers on a whim. He proudly carried on the anti-Catholic, Bacchanalian traditions forged so effectively by his cruel and ruthless father, Richard "Burn-Chapel" Whaley-founder of the Dublin Hellfire Club, an establishment infamous for the despicable behaviour of its members. Travelling extensively through Europe and the Middle East, Thomas Whaley gathered a remarkable list of experiences that informed his memoirs, which were lost for almost a century and then rediscovered, edited and published in 1906 by Edward Sullivan.
While some may question my choice to adapt these memoirs into literary form, I argue that their bulk concerns Whaley's travels in the Middle East, whereas his truly fascinating experiences exist in a much condensed form as interlinking anecdotes. My challenge is to flesh these stories into a narrative. My conference paper will detail the creative process of adapting parts of Whaley's memoir into a work of historiographic metafiction. Specifically, I will outline the challenges in appropriating the most effective historical voice to propel my narrative, referring especially to the elements of the voice and point-of-view in the context of narratology, and the work of commentators including Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman and Gerard Genette and creative practitioners John Fowles and Gary Crewe.
Ms. Olivia Murphy, University of Oxford
Jane Austen's responses to her own reading became the early foundations of her fiction. Her characteristic fondness for challenging, mocking and selectively re-presenting the forms and flaws of eighteenth-century fiction in her own writing, in which she persisted throughout her career, has its origins in her first juvenile sketches. Austen's allusive and tantalisingly elusive incorporation of eighteenth-century themes, plots and characters into her fiction is more easily traced in the juvenilia than in her later writing, so analysing the processes at work in these early burlesques is useful to developing the skills as a reader which are essential to understanding Austen's uses of literature in her adult novels. The juvenilia also demonstrate that from the very beginning Austen used literary allusion, as Jocelyn Harris has written, "neither by chance nor merely for embellishment," but for important literary and political aims (Jane Austen's Art of Memory, ix). Moreover, any investigation of Austen's habitual intertextuality has implications for our readings not only of Austen's works but also of those books that she herself read. This paper will include an examination of Austen's responses to a variety of eighteenth-century texts as they are exhibited in the short work "Jack and Alice: a novel" from Volume the First. The principles of reading drawn from "Jack and Alice" will then be applied to Austen's last completed work, Persuasion. By comparing two works at either end of Austen's career, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which she incorporated aspects of her early eighteenth-century reading into her evolving art, even in her last, most Romantic novel.
Dr. Nancy November, University of Auckland
The modern-day reception of Haydn's early string quartets is chequered. Professional performers tend to avoid the quartets prior to Op. 20 (1772). Scholars, meanwhile, tend to compare these works to genre ideals-especially equality of part-writing and unity of form-finding them wanting. Essential features of "Classical" string quartets are typically thought to arise at the earliest with Op. 20, but more usually with Op. 33.
This criticism has been based not so much on a detailed study of this music, or its original context, as on assumed aesthetic ideals and historical narratives of chamber music. This paper contributes to a critique of these assumptions, and offers an alternative view of these works. I focus on the slow movements in particular, which, with their solo "arias" for first violin, have been considered especially problematic. From an historical perspective, these movements can be understood to exemplify a fundamentally new mode of expression that was extolled by mid-eighteenth-century theorists: that of the tableau. The concept of tableau was discussed by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, and was brought to the stages of Vienna and Esterh‡za in the ballets of Jean-Georges Noverre, and the operas of Haydn and Gluck among others. As sonic tableaux, or instrumental "arias," movements from Haydn's early string quartets represent a high point in mid-century music, and they epitomize a dramatic mode that was crucial to later classical music.
Dr. Bridget Orr, Vanderbilt University
In the course of the eighteenth century, many more serious plays based on episodes drawn from English (or Scottish) history appeared on the London stage than had been the case in the Restoration theatre. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, dramatists mostly explored the attractions and dangers of empire in plays set in ancient, exotic or Peninsular settings: after 1714 or so, domestic subjects provide much more compelling contexts in which to define a specifically British imperial nation. Ever more favoured topics included episodes from early British history, such as the Roman occupation, as well as dramatizations of the Arthurian legends and Anglo-Saxon conflicts and conversions. Tragedies and dramas of state which focused on the Plantagenets, the Tudors and even the Stuarts also appeared in significant numbers. While not ignoring the plays' capacities to provide commentary on contemporary political events, I analyze how the choice and treatment of these national themes contributed to a consolidating imperial ideology, as serious plays increasingly showed a novel capacity to celebrate the nation's past struggles to achieve liberty, defeat tyranny and extend the country's power.
Dr. Dianne Osland and Dr. Marea Mitchell, University of Newcastle
This paper derives from a larger collaborative project, Reading Sidney's Arcadia and Richardson's Pamela, which investigates changes in reading practices in early modern fiction. One of the reasons for focusing a study of reading practices on these two texts was that both were extensively rewritten, not only by their authors but also by their readers. Commenting on Anna Weamys's continuation of Arcadia, Patrick Cullen argues that "perhaps the most important evidence" for how an author was read is to "be found in how he was rewritten" (1994: xxxv), though there are, of course, major problems in interpreting this "evidence". This paper explores the possibility of studying reading practices through rewriting, focusing on the problems of using Shamela as evidence of the way Pamela was read, not only by Fielding but also by the "like-minds" among whom it might find a market. The problems in using rewritings as evidence of the way a book was read might seem daunting, but many are different only in scale, not in kind, from the concerns raised by any written record of the reading experience, including comments in letters, diaries and marginalia (and literary criticism and conference papers). Readers who write about their experience, as H. J. Jackson argues, "are writers, subject to conventions and expectations that govern this responsive kind of writing, and influenced by many of the motives that drive other writers" (2001: 99-100). Rewritings generally have more overt agendas than the kind of anecdotal evidence of the reading experience on which histories of reading commonly depend, and an examination of the factors mediating between reading and rewriting in the transformation of Pamela into Shamela can help us not only to evaluate the usefulness of rewritings as evidence of reading practices but also to understand some of the problems of using written commentary in general to explore the history of reading.
Dr. Ali Uzay Peker, Middle East Technical University
The memoirs of the Western travelers have long been at the center of debates on the image of the Orient and exotic for the reason that these texts provided eye-witness knowledge, albeit distorted in some respects. While enhancing European vision of eastern lands, the texts written by writers, adventurers or diplomats and drawings made by artists manipulated the approach to non-European. In similar fashion, Ottoman travelers, mainly envoys sent by the Sublime Port to Europe, provided a picture of partly-misrepresented, partly-realistic Europe for the Ottoman literate. Their experience and observations were presented in the form of embassy reports to the intelligentsia and in some instances to the public and influenced Ottoman perception of the West, which regarded the West as the Other of its own sphere. Studies on these reports and their authors have recently increased but still lag behind an academically agreeable stage. This paper will attempt to elucidate the approach of the Ottoman traveler of the eighteenth century to the man-made environment of Europe. His response to European urban and architectural setting and making of an image of the Western life through them will be the main points of discussion.
Prof. Clive Probyn, Monash University
This paper will examine Edward Said's concept of the Writer as Public Intellectual, and will consider Said's reading of Jonathan Swift as an example of writing back to power, and also consider how Said's reading of Swift "misreads" the satirist though the lenses of Gramsci and Orwell, among others.
Ms. Gillian Prowse, Harvard University
Responding to a reader's inquiry after his proper name, Samuel Johnson's Rambler quotes the man who was asked what he concealed beneath an ostentatious cloak: "I carry it there that you may not see it." Rather than providing an attribution that was never a secret, Johnson's response draws attention to the act-not the object-of concealment. Despite his contemporary celebrity (Johnson's Dictionary, Johnson's Lives), and later scholarship's emphasis on the "Age of Johnson," Johnson suppressed his famous name with surprising frequency. Beyond generic or editorial demands, he championed an authorial anonymity that operated by unspoken rules: insiders would know the identity, and intelligent readers could work it out, while the author retained a moral "right" to evade direct questions and answers.
Such open secrecy invites us to rewrite the centrality of the author in eighteenth-century studies. Johnson directs attention away from the "who" of anonymity, by which a proper name indexes an historical personage. Instead, his open anonymity generates case studies of how an author can claim public and professional relevance and responsibility without employing the increasingly common identifying mark of his proper name. This complicates the more obviously name-dependent legal and market rights by which eighteenth-century scholarship has inscribed agency on the author.
Yet Johnson, like his contemporaries, knew that namelessness might signal evasion or scurrility. Without terms like "author-function" or even "anonymity" to differentiate his particular uncoupling of name and person from common fraudulent practices, Johnson's defense of anonymity often becomes mired in inherited structures of authorship that depend on a vocabulary of "lies," "promises," and "secrets." Johnson's difficulty in reformulating absence as an authorial strategy foreshadows scholarship's persistent difficulty with anonymity: how we rewrite the eighteenth century still relies heavily on our naming who wrote it in the first place.
Mr. Neil Ramsey, Australian National University
Since the publication of Linda Colley's Britons, commentators have increasingly come to stress the importance of warfare as an influence on British culture of the long eighteenth century. Whilst work has now appeared on a range of eighteenth-century cultural responses to war in art and literature, there has to date been little attention paid to one of the period's key genres for writing about war, the autobiographical military memoir. Such memoirs appeared in Britain in ever-increasing numbers from the mid-eighteenth century and were predominantly written by army officers in the wake of British military campaigns. They provided broad historical outlines of the various campaigns, and, taken together, form what Tim Travers has described as a significant campaign narrative tradition of military writing.1
By the end of the century, however, these memoirs were increasingly coming to include the personal feelings and observations of the author. Whilst this shift towards more personal stories of war can be traced back to the late eighteenth century, the Peninsula War (1808-1814) represents a particularly crucial moment in this development. Traditional campaign narratives would continue to be published, but increasingly, military campaigns would be rewritten from a personal perspective; the focus would thus move away from the campaign itself and on to accounts of the individual and personal experiences of war. This paper will argue that these changes reflected wider cultural shifts through the long eighteenth century, in which a far greater range of individuals, particularly after the volunteer movements of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, were coming to have a personal role to play in the nation's wars. By helping to reconfigure the relationship between the individual and war, the military memoirs played an important role in enabling the representation of national war.
The art of dancing, also ballet, is a field, thanks to which, the distinct and unique character of each nation can be easily depicted. (For instance, a well-known choreographer Gottfried Taubert in his work Rechtschaffener Tanzmeister from 1717 points out that Polish folk dance was fundaments for all other dancing compositions. Therefore, from that source we have not only polonaise, mazur, kujawiak and krakowiak, but what is even more interesting some aristocratic choreographic compositions from other European courts). In short, dance created a certain stylized and disciplined mode of conduct that marked the educated person. Dance offered pleasure and sociability amidst the rigid and often tedious etiquette of the court. The history of Enlightenment Terpsichore is strictly connected with the name of the great choreographer Jean Georges Noverre, the author of Lettres sur la Danse.
However, we can have the full picture of how "old-time" dancing art was when we sum up dancing performances, the choreographic interludes in the operas and occasional dances in which the splendour and allegorical allusions were used mainly to praise the name of the ruler. But also all kind of dance sources: theoretical works, pieces of literature and finally ballet prints as a significant genre in the tradition of the drama (the French sequence is the richest and most unbroken, but central Europe also offers an interesting works).
Some dance instruction manuals provide historical information on theatrical life, or court life. All of them illuminate the manner in which people have expressed themselves as they dance, and how the art of Terpsichore was perceived. When writing about dance we become aware of the overlapping history. The cultural world was changing and this was reflected in the dance or ballets of the day.
Ms. Fiona Ritchie, McGill University
In addition to completing my PhD on women's responses to Shakespeare in the long eighteenth century, for the past year I have been employed as Deputy Curator at Dr Johnson's House, London. This has given me the unique opportunity to use my academic knowledge in curating a temporary exhibition to be held at the House from April to September 2007 entitled "Behind the Scenes: The Hidden Life of Georgian Theatre, 1737-1784." "Behind the Scenes" aims to elucidate Johnson's links with the theatre: his long relationship with David Garrick; his own attempt at dramatic writing with his play, Irene; his monumental edition of Shakespeare and his friendships with dramatists and performers. The displays will cover the "before," "during" and "after" of a performance on the London stage. The "before" section will take visitors backstage to see how actors prepared for the performance. "During" will look at the performance itself and the experience of the audiences at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. "After" will examine how performances were discussed and reviewed, for example in the social environment of London's coffee houses. This paper will discuss the practical process of planning such an exhibition and the reasons behind the choices made as to theme and content. It will also explore the material culture of the eighteenth-century theatre by examining the collections of the institutions from which the objects displayed in the exhibition will come: the Museum of London, the Theatre Museum, the British Museum and notably, the Garrick Club. The aim of this presentation is to examine the ways in which contemporary cultural institutions rewrite the theatre history of the eighteenth century.
Prof. William Rivers, University of South Carolina
In May of 1727, Nicholas Amhurst, writing as Caleb D'Anvers in the forty-fifth number of the Craftsman, announced that the paper had changed its format, name, and frequency. It would henceforth be known as The Country Journal or the Craftsman, would appear weekly (not biweekly as before), and would no longer just contain political or moral essays-it would also include "a faithful Account of all Occurrences foreign and domestick." With this change Amhurst also assumed major new responsibilities on the paper. In addition to his continuing roles as chief essayist and editor, he became a journalist and took on the responsibilities of collecting, verifying, editing, and often rewriting the news items that appeared in the paper. The Craftsman went on to become the most widely-read and influential paper of the early eighteenth century. With some recent exceptions, those scholars who have written about the Craftsman (e.g., Isaac Kramnick) have given Bolingbroke almost complete credit for its influence and success. Even those few who mention Amhurst's role on the paper have not examined the many ways his work-as writer, editor, and journalist-was central to defining the periodical's agenda, tone, and appeal. In this paper, I will examine the extent and quality of Amhurst's work on the Craftsman during its crucial first few years of existence to argue that he was, more than any other individual, responsible for the weekly and long-term success of that periodical. My paper will thus "rewrite" our understanding of the Craftsman by revealing that Amhurst in a number of key ways played the central role in its success and that Bolingbroke and others in his circle were powerful, influential, but peripheral players. This "rewriting" will also rest the Craftsman's political and cultural significance on a much richer, more complex, and thus far more interesting foundation than earlier scholars have considered.
Dr. Shef Rogers, University of Otago
Norman Ault, Robert Root, David Foxon and James McLaverty have all attempted to account for the absent gatherings Y-Z in Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, 1712, a collection reissued in 1714 with the gap filled in with "Windsor Forest" and the "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day." These arguments have focussed on whether "Windsor Forest" was not yet ready for publication and, in the case of McLaverty, to some degree on appropriateness of context (i.e. "Rape of the Locke" follows Betterton's modernisation of Chaucer's "Reeve's Tale" more appropriately than it would "Windsor Forest").
This paper will argue that we should take Pope's own accounts of what happened with the poem more seriously. He wrote in his correspondence that he composed the poem in only a couple of weeks, and in the dedication of the five-canto Rape of the Lock he claimed to Arabella Fermor that he rushed the poem into print to forestall a surreptitious copy that he'd been told was to be printed. Critics have not really challenged the claim of rapid composition, but most have dismissed the claim of a rival version as Pope's invention to excuse publication of the poem.
Examination of paper, running titles, and ornaments will support the claim that the 1712 miscellany encountered unexpected difficulties and that attempts to smooth out the rough edges in 1714 required some deft printing and insertions that confused binders and readers. I hope also to be able to explain the order of alterations, and perhaps provide a clearer history of the text of Windsor Forest, published in 1713 between the two issues.
Dr Mary Rooks,
This paper examines the ways Sarah Fielding's novels complicate contemporary theories of the rise of the novel. This project will focus particularly on The Cry, The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, and The Countess of Dellwyn-three non-canonical texts posing a range of challenges to conventional definitions of the eighteenth-century novel. I will situate Fielding as a member of a literary discourse community including such canonical authors as her brother Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson in order to facilitate an exploration of her status in the canon. Questioning theoretical approaches that marginalize playful or experimental productions, emphasis will be placed here on the gap between Sarah Fielding's more conventional novels and those mentioned above. I will also argue for a new consideration of Fielding's novels in the canon and classroom.
In addition to raising questions about generic conventions, her works are invaluable to feminist studies of, for example, female authorship, women's friendships, gender and sexuality, marriage, and the exercise of power. Her prefatory writings, in particular, demonstrate her evolving understanding of the theory and function of literature (and, to some degree, moral philosophy) and a rather Richardsonian desire to mold her audience. Tracing the development of her theoretical observations provides new insight into her sometimes extravagant experimentation with form and genre. I would argue, for example, that her deliberate challenges to what she perceived as constrictive rules are driven by a relatively atypical vision of the potential functions of literature in culture. Fielding's works provide a rich perspective for cultural studies that is, sadly, largely ignored.
Dr. Sarah Ross, Massey University
Since coming to prominence twenty-odd years ago, Mary Astell has been widely discussed as a "proto-feminist," a distinctly Augustan apologist for women in her prose tracts A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) and Some Reflections on Marriage (1700). Her High Church allegiances and Tory conservatism differentiate her stance from that of much modern feminism-her "Tory feminism" has been seen as a strange hybrid of radical and right-wing stances-but this has not dented her reputation as a woman addressing the place of women in the newly emergent political and economic culture of eighteenth-century England.
Less commonly considered is her Collection of Poems, a volume of religious verse which she wrote before the age of 22 and presented in manuscript to Archbishop William Sancroft in 1689, in an attempt to secure ongoing patronage. The poetic merit of the manuscript's contents is limited, but the poetic enterprise that the volume represents-the writing of religious verses which deny the value of worldly patronage, and the presentation of them to a figure capable of dispensing such patronage-is significant in itself. Astell's poems and her act of presentation locate her in a culture, deeply conservative and yet potentially radical, of religious versification and presentation in manuscript or limited print editions, in which women had participated since the beginning of the seventeenth century.
This paper will explore Astell's religious verse and her manuscript presentation by looking back to earlier seventeenth-century models. It will examine her poetic language and define her poetic enterprise through comparison with female and male religious poets such as Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Southwell and John Bourchier, and it will seek to determine what is old and what is new in her Collection of Poems.
Dr. Scott Roulier, Lyon College
John Locke-whose three major works were published in 1689 and who persevered into the eighteenth century (deceased, 1704)-is one of the most influential figures of the "long eighteenth century." Indeed, it is difficult to name any prominent philosopher or political thinker of the period (pace Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Smith, Jefferson, Burke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Bentham) who is not heavily indebted to Locke.
Yet, as my title suggests, when it comes to our twenty-first century attitudes toward property rights and natural resource management, our Lockean heritage is detrimental. In my paper I will describe Locke's theory of property and his ideas about a money-based economy, paying attention to Locke's classically-inspired natural law theory and his critique of royalist, Robert Filmer. Having located his ideas in their proper historical frame, I will proceed to a critique demonstrating, first, that contemporary liberal political and economic theory share many assumptions with Locke and, second, that continuing to act (in terms of economic and public policy choices) on these assumptions will lead us to an unsustainable future-the rapid depletion of natural resources and demise of nature's filtering (or "sink") function.
Though Locke's theory of property begins auspiciously-with a natural law prohibition on "spoilage" or wasting nature's resources and a concomitant guarantee of subsistence to each person-he fashions loopholes and exceptions that allow these limits to be circumvented. What is needed, in our day, is the application of ecological reason to creatively reconstruct these original Lockean boundaries.
Ms. Laura Ruch, Macquarie University
Attempts to interpret The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless beyond the surface-level didactic reformed coquette story may flounder when it comes to explaining Betsy's ultimate marriage to the "right" man. I contend that an examination of communicative exchanges, including Betsy's self-reflective "conversations with herself," reveal a progression in Betsy that suggests a different type of reformed coquette-one who develops her own mind, leaving "thoughtlessness" behind, while also effecting change in those around her.
While Betsy does renounce coquetry, she does not simply learn to do as she was originally told. Instead, Betsy learns to articulate her own opinions and to act on them. While she has always been able to state her view, her developing reflections add substance and authority to her opinions, a shift that others begin to respect. When Betsy rejects Trueworth's adulterous offer, she is acting as her newly empowered self. The novel's turning-point is Betsy's conclusion that she need not honour a marriage contract that her husband has already violated, a conclusion upon which Betsy acts. She will be confirmed in this action, first by her brother and then by Lady Loveit. Betsy is then in control of her own destiny, able to define the parameters of her relationship with Trueworth, eventually electing to marry him without input from her advisers.
I contend that Betsy is a progressive heroine who charts new territory. Ultimately, I believe she demonstrates some of the popular views of women writers of the time, including the moral superiority of women over men and the questioning of "divine-right patriarchy." Betsy's increasing power can be examined through her status in communicative exchanges. These exchanges will also be briefly compared to communicative exchanges in other works by Haywood, checking for other progressive heroines who might also be advocating the changes Betsy demonstrates.
Dr. Gillian Russell, Australian National University
In March 1798 Sarah Siddons appeared in one of the most controversial roles of her career, that of the adulteress Mrs. Haller in The Stranger, a translation of August von Kotezbue's Menschenhass und Reue (1789). The production of this play at Drury Lane theatre took place at the height of the 1790s' "panic" over the increase in adultery cases, identified by numerous commentators as a sign of corrupt public morals that rendered the nation as whole vulnerable to Jacobin infidelism.
In 1799 Hannah More explicitly attacked The Stranger as defending a "crime" which "cuts up order and virtue by the roots," linking the figure of Mrs. Haller with Mary Wollstonecraft's "vindication of adultery" in Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman. Taking the role of Mrs. Haller was therefore a considerable gamble for Siddons, an actress who throughout her career had cultivated a reputation for quasi-regal sanctity.
In this paper I explore Siddons's response to the controversy that followed The Stranger, specifically in relation to the histories of Harriet Pye Esten and Charlotte Twisleton. The former was a well-known actress and theatre manager who was mistress of the Duke of Hamilton; the latter, a relation of Jane Austen, had caught the infection for acting as performer in private theatricals. Both women were involved in well-publicized adultery cases in March and April 1798 that frame Siddons's appearance as Mrs. Haller. By examining The Stranger in these contexts I hope to cast new light on the links between adultery, theatricality and gender in late Georgian Britain.
Prof. Peter Sabor, McGill University
Frances Burney's court journals and letters (1786-1791), which she left in manuscript on her death in 1840, were first published in the Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay (1778-1840), edited by her niece and literary executor Charlotte Barrett in 1842-1846 and reprinted with additional notes by Austin Dobson in 1904-1905. The Barrett-Dobson edition is textually corrupt, heavily abridged and bowdlerized There are some 3,000 surviving manuscript pages of Burney's court journals and letters, less than half of which have yet been published. To compound the problem, Barrett cut up letters with scissors and pasted fragments onto other letters, disregarding chronological order in order to fabricate documents that, she felt, did more honour to the author. Burney herself attempted to obliterate many hundreds of lines of this material beneath heavy black curling lines; happily, with the aid of strong light and a powerful magnifying glass, almost all of the concealed text can be recovered.
In a review essay, "Like Father, Like Daughter" (1992), John Wiltshire writes that "It remains a pity, and something of a scandal, that for some of the most interesting years of Fanny Burney's life-the years at court from 1786 to 1791-we still have only the unreliable, much censored text of the Diary and Letters sent into the world by Charlotte Barrett. One hopes it won't be much longer before they are republished." I am the general editor of a new edition of Burney's court journals, now in progress, to be published by Clarendon Press in six volumes. These volumes contain much important unpublished material, such as accounts of a lawsuit brought by Burney's publishers over an unauthorized edition of her second novel, Cecilia (1782) and of illustrations for the novel displayed, in 1786, "in all the shows in London." This paper will discuss these and other findings in the forthcoming Clarendon edition.
Ms. Nina Serebrianik, University of Texas at Dallas
Mozart is essential to the study of the "long eighteenth century," and his last opera, Die Zauberflöte, is recognized as an important part of the German Enlightenment and the culture of the time. For years, it has been debated by musicologists, critics, and historians, giving rise to many interpretations. Most scholars stress the great significance of literature as a source of Die Zauberflöte. Although they emphasize the influence of fairy tales on Schickaneder and Mozart, they discuss the new genre of literary fairy tale. However, Die Zauberflöte's connection with folklore is especially strong, and the libretto's structure is closest to the folktale. This presentation will examine this close connection between Die Zauberflöte and folklore and place this opera into a new context.
Two classic studies of folklore make this connection obvious. The first is Axel Olrik's essay "Epic Laws of Folk Narrative," included in the accepted canon of cultural anthropology and folkloristics. Olrik's Law of Opening and the Law of Closing, the Law of Repetition and the Law of Contrast, and other laws and characteristics of folktales separating them from the literary fairy tale, fully apply to Die Zauberflöte.
Another scholar considered one of the founding fathers of folkloristics is Vladimir Propp, whose book Theory and History of Folklore, lays the ground for distinguishing between the folk and the literary tales. His most famous work, Morphology of the Folktale, discusses his method for studying folktales through functions, or acts "of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of action" (Propp 21). This makes possible the study of the opera according to the functions of its dramatis personae.
In the end, this presentation will extend the traditional boundaries of discussion of Die Zauberflöte and place it in a larger literary and cultural context.
Dr. Douglas Simes, University of Waikato
Scholars differ as to the exact significance of the fall of the Wellington Government in 1830. For JCD Clark it heralds the end of the ancien regime and the long eighteenth century. Those who differ from him, such as Professors Jupp and O'Gorman, nevertheless view it as a major turning point. Discussion of the role of the press in destabilising the Wellington administration, and the Tory ascendancy, has tended to focus on the creation of a general sense of malaise and crisis by the mainstream press, and the 'desacrilising' tendencies of the marginal productions of 'the radical underworld'.
In this paper I propose to argue that the press did, in fact, denigrate, divide, and demoralise a well-entrenched government with a charismatic leader and open the way for the accession of the Whig minority to power. However, I intend to suggest that the primary reason that this occurred is not to be found in the endeavours of either Whig or radical newspapers, but in the scurrilous in-fighting of the Tory journals after Roman Catholic emancipation divided the party into Wellingtonians and Ultras, and in the consequential governmental attempt to repress Ultra prints by prosecutions for seditious libel.
It is my contention that this internecine press warfare, touching as it did on adultery, suicide, financial corruption, and allegations of unconstitutional ambitions and actions, helped destroy both the credibility and viability of the administration, and the reputation of the alternative Tory leadership, and this so opened the way for the return to power of the Whigs, which was otherwise unlikely, and the constitutional 'revolution' which followed, and which arguably ended the old regime and the long eighteenth century.
Ms. Christina Smylitopoulos, McGill University
Thomas Babington Macaulay's much repeated description of a "nabob" as a man with "an immense fortune, a tawny complexion, a bad liver, and a worse heart"1 certainly captures the imagination, but does little to articulate the complexities of this despised eighteenth-century figure. During the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth centuries, nabob was merely an Anglicised version of the Persian term nawab and referred to the Muslim officials of the Mughal Empire. By the 1760s, however, the term was applied to the servants of the East India Company who had returned to Britain equipped with ill-gotten prosperity, an insatiable appetite for luxury, and a desire to climb into elite spheres of power and influence. 2 Horace Walpole's 1761 complaint that "West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and admirals" were overwhelming every parliamentary borough in the general election, may well have been the first application of the derogatively modified term. 3 Subsequent literary references, exemplified by Samuel Foote's play The Nabob (1772); 4 Timothy Touchstone's Tea and Sugar: or the Nabob and the Creole (1772); 5 and Richard Clarke's The Nabob: or, Asiatic Plunderers… (1773) 6 firmly established Walpole's rewritten version of the nabob in the British colloquy.
The nabob was a significant, visible subject in the long eighteenth century, represented through an immediate and highly effective method of censure-graphic satire. The years between 1776 and 1832 in particular marked the peak of British print culture; thus, the nabob could be described as a favoured character of a medium at its zenith. The nabob represented one set of an "assumptive gentry" making their appearance during the final third of the eighteenth century-a faction that included West India planters and British manufacturers who were collectively perceived as hazardous to the socio-political status quo.7 Targeted for ruling class patronage, nabob prints spoke to a class with a vested interest in his condemnation. Graphic satirists were not, however, required to invent a visual language to represent the nabob; rather, artists used pre-existing visual idioms and tailored them to fit the emblematic needs of the nabob. This paper will situate the nabob within an eighteenth-century visual context by examining his representation through the artistic conventions of graphic satire. This approach exposes a pre-existing visual language of upstart iconography-a mode of satirical representation that immediately identifies the subject as socially or politically presumptuous. Through the examination of the works of James Gillray, James Sayers, and a host of Anonymous artists, the nabob is revealed as the progeny of this satirical convention. The nabob had been rewritten, the visual language reused.
"Every voice portrays, so to speak, a member of a family, who share mutually their secrets, their sorrow with such warmth, that every listener must think himself transported into a time of innocence and honesty." Johann Baptist Schaul's verdict of 1809 on Boccherini prompts us to consider the nature of the textures in the composer's string chamber music and how they might relate to practices elsewhere, in particular those of the Austro-Bohemian realm. If Schaul hints at an idyllic, pastoral reading, he more directly suggests an understanding of music as speech, as verbal discourse. Language models increasingly dominated the reception of instrumental music through the eighteenth century, and so by association did models of social behaviour; both are implicit in the frequently invoked metaphor of a musical conversation. The idea of chamber music as a conversation existed well before the eighteenth century, but such attributions became more frequent and "domesticated," eventually focussing particularly on the medium of the string quartet. More broadly, such repertoire may enact the contemporary ideal of sociability, involving qualities like reciprocity, politeness and accessibility, and often leading to a tone that is popular, humorous, witty. Strangely enough, although such sociability has frequently been assumed, it has rarely been investigated or demonstrated in any depth. Attempting to do just this is the novelty of my approach here. Part of the task will involve questioning the extent to which the string chamber music of Boccherini does in fact share such ideals. The frequent assertion that the composer was above all concerned with sonority in its own right might seem to suggest a rather different artistic focus, one that is less concerned with the agency of the individual players and more with their corporate ability to produce what Momigny called "a thousand agreeable sensations;" this would imply more a hedonistic than a discursive orientation. A comparison between the textural procedures of Boccherini's Op. 32 and Haydn's Op. 33, both published in the early 1780s in Vienna, will provide a focus for this study.
Dr. Peter Swaab, University College London
The idea of "patriotism" was a disputed one for the greater part of the long eighteenth century. We all know Johnson's "apophthegm, at which many will start," as Boswell called it: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." This was uttered in 1775, in the context of Wilkes and civil unrest, and Boswell went on promptly to add a caveat: "But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest." Many such distinctions between true and false patriotism are proposed in the eighteenth century, notably in the "patriot" opposition to Walpole, which arrogated to itself the Bolingbrokean idea of a defence of the common weal against governmental factionalism and corruption.
This paper looks chiefly to the later moment of the 1790s and 1800s, the point at which the main connotation of patriotism may be thought to shift from dissident opposition to loyal establishment. The main debate in this period is not between party interest and the commonwealth, but between the patria and the wider world. Is it narrow-minded or unphilosophical to be a patriot? Or irreligious? Is patriotism compatible with cosmopolitanism? Burke had famously contended that "to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind." To Burke's followers, sympathy with revolutionary France was a negation of such attachments. Canning, for instance, writing in The Anti-Jacobin in 1798, dubbed the "patriot of the world" no patriot at all, but a creature of spleen and cold ingratitude: "The friend of every country - but his own."
My focus will be on ways in which Coleridge and Wordsworth, responding to attacks like these in the 1790s and 1800s, figured what Burke calls "the series." Aiming to show the compatibility between local attachment, loyalty to the patria, and wider human solidarity, they attempt a difficult reparative undertaking. I will explore some of their arguments for, and figurations of, human connection, for instance in imagery of spider's webs and concentric circles on a lake, and in projections of what we might call the patriotic sublime.
Dr. Paul Tankard, University of Otago
Whilst there is scarcely a word penned by Johnson that has not found its way into print, his friend Hester Thrale is one of the century's great (or greatly) unpublished writers.
In addition to her Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson, and her four other, later and considerably less successful books, she made more notes on Johnson or his writings in the margins of her books. Annotation is clearly a style of composition that suited her. Her marginal annotations in two copies of Boswell have been published (in Fletcher's edition of the Life), as have her annotations to Boswell's Tour, both of which contribute to Johnson's biography. Her annotations to Rasselas have been considered in an essay by Hilaire Belloc, and examined more critically by Heather Jackson in her recent Marginalia. However, the Thralian marginalia in her copies of the essay series The Rambler and The Adventurer are a different order of annotation, less a contribution to biography than a renewal of conversation. These annotated texts, in the Hyde Collection at Harvard, will be the focus of my paper.
Dr. Arbaayah Ali Termizi, Universiti Putra Malaysia
This study investigates the general reception of Shakespeare's tragedy Antony and Cleopatra in the eighteenth century and the focus of this paper will be on the inclusion of illustration in the major editions of the play during the period. In the course of discovering the nature of illustrative interest in Antony and Cleopatra, this study explores the significant factors which influence the pictures inserted within the play. The pictures, as inserted in this paper, represent an unusual reflection of the play from an artist's (or in one case, the editor's) perspectives. The characters, depicted settings, choice of scenes, and models are among the factors variously employed by the illustrators in their visual representations and these factors in the end become the feature of the text visual interpretation. The selection of pictures covers from Rowe's edition in 1709 to George Steevens' grangerised version in 1793. What emerges in the course of the research is that the fascination with Antony and Cleopatra which was manifested in its illustrative representation began to take a different course in the mid to late eighteenth century. Hence this paper argues that the initiative to illustrate the play offers distinctive clues to the interest in the understanding Shakespeare's work and how it affected the eighteenth-century.
Assoc. Prof. Heidi Thomson, Victoria University of Wellington
Coleridge's lifelong fascination with the construction of poetic genius and the status of the poet in society was expressed in many of his writings, perhaps most notably in the Biographia Literaria and in "To William Wordsworth." Coleridge's praise and criticism of Wordsworth's poetic self and vision in particular have been recognized as defining moments in Romantic criticism. The myth of originality associated with Romantic genius and Coleridge's obsession with Wordsworth have obscured, to some extent, the lasting and pervasive influence of the poets of Sensibility on Coleridge's poetics. Apart from a few exceptions (Dekker, McGann, Manning) not much has been written on how Coleridge first started working out his vision of the poetical character in his earlier, eighteenth-century poetry and how these efforts lead up to a complex, affirmative but fraught, vision of Wordsworth as the embodiment of the Romantic poet. This paper revisits I. A. Gordon's seminal 1942 analysis of the successive versions of "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" in which Gordon recognizes the following development: "from schoolboy admiration to romantic melancholy wherein Chatterton becomes to Coleridge a projection of his own frustration; from the young poet's delight in eighteenth-century epithets and diction to the Romantic's disgust with glittering verbiage; and then (the influence of Dove Cottage and Nether Stowey fading into the past) a final surrender to the Augustan manner." In addition to Gordon's more linear reading, I will elaborate on the conflicting elements of "sensibility" in the "Monody" in an effort to clarify Coleridge's poetic construction of Wordsworth.
Prof. Connie C. Thorson and Prof. James L. Thorson, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Narcissus Luttrell is well known to historians as the creator of A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714. After Thomas Babington Macaulay cited Luttrell's work extensively in his The History of England from the Accession of James II (1849-1862), Luttrell's "relation" was published in a mediocre edition in 1857. During his lifetime, Luttrell published A Complete Catalogue of All the Stitch'd Books and Single Sheets Printed since the first Discovery of the Popish Plot,(September 1678.) to January 1679/80 [etc] (1680) based on his own extensive collection of printed ephemera of the era.
What is not widely known is that Luttrell also collected a large number of uncensored manuscript newsletters from the same period. This collection, now known as Manuscript 171, is currently in the Codrington Library at All Souls College, Oxford, and is the subject of our research. The newsletters are an important element of popular culture and are indicative of the shift in political consciousness in the latter half of the seventeenth century.
Our paper will present the provenance of the newsletters and a discussion of Luttrell as a collector. We will look at the place of the newsletters at the historical moment of the late seventeenth century in England as the shift was taking place from manuscript to print culture. We will also briefly mention some of the content of the newsletters. For instance, the newsletter report of the famous Rose Alley ambuscade of John Dryden has been overlooked by scholars arguing about the reasons for the attack on the poet.
Prof. Paul Turnbull, Griffith University
My paper explores the genesis, evolution and impact of English physician Charles White's conception of race in the last three decades of the long eighteenth century. Within late Enlightenment intellectual circles, human natural history was generally understood as essentially the story of humanity's diversification from one ancestral type into a number of distinct races through environmental modification of the bodily economy. White's Account of the Natural Gradation in Man. . . (1799) has generally been regarded as one of several works that challenged this environmentalist orthodoxy, arguing that life and reproduction were in fact processes determined by forces within organic beings that were relatively immune to environmental influence. As such, the tendency has been to regard White as one of a number of thinkers responsible for Enlightenment humanist ideas of a common humanity comprised of unstable varieties being recast so as to naturalize races as tangible markers of the development within differing types of human-like beings of characteristic corporeal and mental differences, quite possibly of primordial origin.
In my paper I want to question this received portrait of White's thought and influence, showing him to have been a more conservative, complex and idiosyncratic thinker about race than we have hitherto appreciated.
Prof. Ann Van Sant, University of California, Irvine
Adopting Anthony Low's view of georgic as "an informing spirit, an attitude toward life, and a set of themes and images" rather than "a four-book, didactic poem of two thousand lines on the subject of agriculture," I will here argue that in non-poetic genres, too, georgic offered conventions, images, and language useful for the manipulation of the idea of labor.
I will suggest that for his rhetorical purposes Locke developed a contrast between the punitive view of labor as curse and the productive view of labor as creative struggle with nature. The unrelenting toil at the heart of Virgil's conception of man's relation with nature underlies Locke's justification of property ownership, but the punitive view of post-fall labor allows Locke to ridicule Filmer's conception of Adam as monarch. In the second treatise, property occurs in the movement from the hand of nature to the hand of man. In the first treatise, however, Locke turns against Filmer the very laboring body that he uses to explain and justify private property. The body at work is important to both conceptions, but the mark of the first is the hand, the mark of the second sweat.
In Robinson Crusoe, a novel with conceptual ties to the labor theory of Locke's Two Treatises, the term "labor" occurs 56 times, variously coupled with "Pains," "difficulty," "hazard," and "invention." With continual attention to the labor of hands, the early survival narrative in Robinson Crusoe should, I am suggesting, be regarded as a mechanic georgic. It "undoes" centuries of bias against hands. From the point of view of many studies of the novel, pastoral and georgic seem rather remote, appearing only in passing references. Of the ancient genres, only epic is important. But I am here suggesting that the opposition between pastoral and georgic offered a framing choice for the new kind of fiction and, further, that a pastoral bias emerged in the novel, which despite its formal inclusiveness, could seldom accommodate work.
Neither Locke or Defoe could do without their georgic revisions of the Genesis version of work, in part because georgic labor can be made to sidestep the gentility divide.
Prof. Hans-Peter Wagner, Universitüt Koblenz-Landau
For more than four decades, the explication or ekphrasis of William Hogarth's paintings and engravings has been dominated by the powerful voice of the American scholar Ronald Paulson. Although not a trained art historian (his major field of research being eighteenth-century literature), he has given us penetrating studies of Hogarth's oeuvre, and his catalogue raisonnŽ of the engravings (updated in 1989) remains a standard work of reference for scholars all over the world.
The problem with powerful voices, however, is that they tend to suffocate anything that contradicts or questions them-especially voices from outside the USA or Britain (e.g., the work of the German art historian Werner Busch or publications in French which Professor Paulson has generally chosen to ignore). If until this very day the English-speaking scholarly world has not heard or seen of any challenger to Paulson's position vis-ˆ-vis Hogarth (and the publications at the occasion of Hogarth's tricentennial birthday in 1997 did not change that situation in any substantial way), one might see this as a silent acceptance of his theoretical position. But in the context of the changes of paradigms we have witnessed in literary theory and art history, Paulson's position strikes one as surprisingly outdated and, from a post-structuralist viewpoint, even as highly problematical.
In my paper, I shall first analyze Professor Paulson's author-oriented approach, which consistently works with Hogarth's alleged intention. In a second step, I shall put this approach in a historical perspective by looking at ekphrases of Hogarth's graphic art from Trusler and Lichtenberg in the eighteenth century to David Bindman and Werner Busch in our age. Finally, I shall propose some post-structuralist readings of Hogarth's visual satires (partly based on my own publications in English, French and German), readings that have been deliberately ignored by the Žminence grise in Hogarth studies. Thus I hope to open the door to younger scholars and provide a forum for new voices in the sadly neglected and untilled fields of applications of recent theories to Hogarth's paintings and engravings.
Assoc. Prof. Kathryn Walls, Victoria University of Wellington
William Dampier described his Voyage Around the World as "a mixt Relation of Places and Actions, in the same order of time in which they occurred." Later, in his Voyage to New Holland, he referred to his journal-based structure not only self-consciously, but quite defensively-appealing to "such Readers at home as are more desirous of a Plain and Just Account of the true Nature and State of the Things described, than of a Polite and Rhetorical narrative." For anyone interested in Gulliver's Travels, which is so clearly a parody of Dampier's Voyages in many respects, the question arises as to what extent Swift managed in the organization of his material not only to mimic Dampier's self-proclaimed artlessness (which he certainly does), but at the same time to exemplify authorial control, organizing his material with intent. While it is quite clear that his larger sequence of Books is artful (Gulliver's position in Lilliput being reversed in Brobdingnag, and so on), and while each Book taken on its own seems to be governed by the kind of plot that necessarily eludes the true journal, it remains to be seen whether all the descriptions and anecdotes that seem, on the surface, to be thrown rather arbitrarily together (in the style of Dampier) are in fact meaningfully organized. I hope to suggest, from a close reading of Book II, Chapter V (whose apparent arbitrariness is evident from the opening summary ("Several Adventures that happened to the Author. The Execution of a Criminal. The Author shews his Skill in Navigation") that Swift's control over his material is in fact absolute, though multi-dimensional.
Dr. Rowland Weston, University of Waikato
Britain's premier radical theorist of the 1790s William Godwin (1756-1836) is best known today as a political philosopher and novelist. His Political Justice is arguably the first systematic exposition of political anarchism in English and was widely feted upon its publication in 1793. The Jacobin novel Things as they Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) was equally popular and remains a classic in the genres of Gothic, detective and psychological fiction. Godwin also had a longstanding love of the theatre and a misplaced conviction that he could or should write for the stage. While George Colman the Younger had successfully adapted Caleb Williams for the stage, Godwin's own attempts at drama were not well received. His plays Antonio (1800) and Faulkener (1807) ran for one and three nights respectively.
This paper examines Godwin's earlier unpublished and unperformed play Dunstan written in 1790 when, as he later reflected, his "mind became more and more impregnated with the principles afterwards developed in Political Justice." From its publication Political Justice has been castigated for its blanket repudiation of feeling and celebration of the untrammelled operation of disinterested ratiocination. The moral philosophy expressed in Dunstan, however, advocates a more complex, less oppositional relationship between reason and feeling. This paper will explore these transformations in Godwin's moral theory in the light of the volatile discursive context of the 1790s.
Dr. Barbara Witucki, Utica College
Following Amyot's French translation of the Aethiopica of Heliodorus in 1547, this Greek romance became increasingly popular and influential. Frequent new translations were published subsequent to Amyot's, particularly in the eighteenth century. The novel itself not only enjoyed popularity, in the original Greek and in translation, but it also spawned a wide variety of spinoffs. An opera, ThŽag�ne et CariclŽe, with music by Desmarets and words by DuchŽ, was produced, but failed within months of its premiere in 1695. The reasons why the opera failed, including the narrative changes made to accommodate the operatic spectacle, are analyzed in Miettes Historiques (Correspondence ThŽatralŽ du XVIIe Si�cle). A few years later, the characters Heliodorus and Theagenes discuss this same opera in AbbŽ Bordelon's Dialogue dans les Champs ElisŽes, sur l'histoire de Theagene & de CariclŽe. Well into the eighteenth century (1762), Dorat's tragedy, ThŽag�ne, had a successful run. Finally, introductory material to the Biblioth�que Universelle des Romans (1785-89) and that to the individual summaries of translations of ancient novels therein, including Les Amours de ThŽag�nes & de ChariclŽe; Histoire Ethiopique, discuss the characters Theagenes and Chariclea, their story, and the importance of Heliodorus to the narrative tradition.
This paper will survey the similarities and differences in the way in which the original narrative and characters are presented in these widely divergent genres. It will discuss how a single ancient romance, albeit one of enormous popularity, suffuses popular culture for a century and more.
Dr. Eugenia Zuroski, University of Arkansas
This paper offers a reading of chinoiserie, a decorative style popularized in Great Britain in the eighteenth century that waned in the Victorian era, by pairing its initial emergence with its fin-de-si�cle revival. I argue that Oscar Wilde and other prominent figures of the late nineteenth-century aestheticism movement turned to chinoiserie to fashion a form of subjectivity that resided on the surface of rather than being housed within the individual. When the cosmopolitan denizens of early eighteenth-century London decorated themselves and their homes in the Chinese taste, their attention to surface was a new and fashionable take on the early modern convention of displaying one's identity through dress. Fin-de-si�cle chinoiserie, in returning our focus on the subject to the surface, challenged the architecture of modern subjectivity-which located identity beneath the surface and within the individual-that became dominant in nineteenth-century culture. Patterns, fabrics, and objects that appeared "magnificent" to Enlightenment observers appeared "flamboyant" nearly two centuries later, not, as one might guess, because they were exotic or excessively opulent, but because they belonged to a disavowed form of British identity; they were relics of an eighteenth-century cultural regime in which the self is constituted from the outside in rather than the inside out. From a late Victorian perspective, the kind of self-fashioning associated with chinoiserie, which projects the self onto the surfaces of one's body and one's home, casts a shadow of perversion, as the case of Oscar Wilde illustrates all too well. By bringing together these two moments of chinoiserie's flourishing in British culture, specifically by attending to how the style is integrated in literary representations of the British subject, I hope to present a reading of the late Victorian rewriting of the eighteenth century that looks two ways. On the one hand, I suggest that a better understanding of the specific significations of chinoiserie as part of an eighteenth-century cosmopolitan culture enables us to read later forms of aestheticism as belonging to an established tradition of alternative modes of British self-fashioning, rather than an aberration from or perversion of bourgeois subjectivity. On the other, I suggest that we ought to be wary of misreading eighteenth-century chinoiserie and aestheticism in the same way, as somehow denying or distorting a more legitimate kind of subject.