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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 310-314 Timothy Erwin & Ourida Mostefai, eds., Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 30. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001; 301 pp.; ISBN: 080186674X, ISSN: 03602370 (hbk.); $40.00 In 1987, the editors of The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, politics, English literature (ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown. NY: Routledge, 1987), threw down the gauntlet, challenging scholars of eighteenth-century studies to address the field's resistance to theory while declaring their own commitment to a "critical and political self-consciousness" (4). The editors noted that while the field had declared its commitment to the idea of interdisciplinarity over the years, it continued to refuse to take theory on board, in part because it failed to undertake "a systematic questioning" (21) of the methodologies governing eighteenth-century studies' favourite disciplines, particularly history and aesthetics. The publication of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 30 suggests that eighteenth-century studies achieved the goal of a "revised and radical interdisciplinarity" that the editors of The New Eighteenth Century set for the field sixteen years ago (22). Indeed, this collection of essays might well be said to represent a second-wave generation of the "new" eighteenth-century studies, for two reasons. First, it expands the parameters of eighteenth-century studies — in particular, moving beyond national boundaries — toward a new focus on the global communities that both shaped, and were shaped by, English and Continental traditions in the long 18th century. In doing so, it replaces the "English Literature" of the The New Eighteenth Century's title with a broader perspective. Laura Laffrado, for instance, writes on Dutch Suriname plantation culture and establishes links between its representations of slavery and those of the African-American tradition. Second, the collection's writers demonstrate great theoretical dexterity, one that takes for granted a methodological self-awareness and the advances made in "first-wave" theoretical readings of eighteenth-century culture. Thus Cynthia Richards can refer both to Elizabeth Bohls's 1995 study, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1718, as well as to Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel writing and transculturation (1992) to advance her reading of Mary Wollstonecraft. The "Editor's Note" introduces the volume's core essays, grouped under the title "The Geography of Enlightenment," as expressive of a number of practical and theoretical developments in the field: a move away from the "heroic nationalism" characteristic of earlier accounts of England's and Europe's early modern histories; an investigation of topics that in past decades would not have appeared on any disciplinary radar; and a widening of scholarly communities to include a broader range of national and regional locales. [end page 310] The first of these essays, Heather I. Sullivan's "Ruins and the Construction of Time: Geological perspectives in the age of Goethe," examines the chronotope, to use Bakhtin's term, of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geology, mapping the intersection of conceptions of earth's history as cyclical or linear and spatial ideas of the earth's surface as "a conglomeration of ruins" (1). Drawing together literary and scientific discourses enables Sullivan to explore the temporal revolution that occurred in this period, and to consider the paradox that appears when "time and space themselves become solidly material (rather than a godly construct)... and yet are exploded out into dimensions of deep time and space that were previously unimaginable" (17). The impact of this revolution was far-reaching, Sullivan suggests, extending later in 19th century to include a vision of the human mind perceived "as if it had a 'geological depth' with a fragmented surface, a heap of ruins from the past, below which powerful forces seethe in their production of personal narratives" (21). Laura Laffrado's "Constructing the Subaltern: White Creole culture and raced captivity in eighteenth-century Dutch Suriname" performs a timely intervention in the literary history of captivity narratives, which traditionally has trained its lenses on the figure of the white New England woman. Through her examination of Pieter Van Dyk's The Life and Business of a Suriname Plantation Manager, with the Slaves, on a Coffee Plantation (c. 1765), Laffrado seeks to give voice to those captives whose voices "are muted and silenced" (31). Van Dyk's play, Laffrado observes, understands slavery "as a liminal and temporary captivity." The play's implicit acknowledgement of the slave's diasporic experience, she suggests, importantly brings a global perspective to bear on the Americas, most generally, and the experiences of slaves in Suriname, more particularly (44). This essay makes apparent an important connection between the colonial American captivity narrative and the slave narrative of 19th century. In doing so, Laffrado offers a new perspective on these genres, outside of the framework of traditional American studies. In "Gendering the 'Union of Hearts': Irish Politics between the public and private spheres," Mitzi Myers examines how conventional understandings of politics and citizenship have prevented scholars from both recognizing and theorizing women's "informal" political activity (51). Intimately tied to the process of understanding, the kinds of political agency women did assume — in this case, around the Irish Act of Union (1800) — is the deconstruction of genre boundaries, particularly those that separate the categories of public and private, history and fiction. Myers goes to the archives to reread literary structures and make visible "women writers' oblique political engagement" (59) in the unfolding of Irish history. [end page 311] In her reading of Maria Edgeworth's yoking of political commentary and fiction, Myers suggests that we consider women not only in context of their relationships with political men, but as active participants in public debates of the period. Cynthia Richards's close-reading skills and theoretical acumen cast new light on Wollstonecraft in "Fair Trade: The language of love and commerce in Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark." Drawing on the history of the conquest narrative, Richards traces the imbrications of romantic drama and commercial enterprise in Wollstonecraft's text. "If we detect a greater confidence, relaxation, or even seeming vulnerability here," Richards asks, "to what extent is it enabled by the 'imperialist' perspective she is required to adopt on her commercial commission?" (78). Richards explores the author's status as both conqueror and commodity. When Wollstonecraft is forced to confront her own marginality, she closes the gap between herself and the people she surveys. In these moments, however, the new world she inhabits "no longer reflects back an image she can be proud of" (86). To identify herself as, or with, the Other, is both to "recover some of the affective possibilities of her more radical prose" and to confirm her alienation from the world of both her intended reader (in this case, her soon-to-be ex-lover, Gilbert Imlay) and the English reading public (86). Of the remaining essays in this volume, three strike the reader as particularly powerful in their meditations on very different configurations of, and responses to, the problem of desire. Jenny Davidson traces Swift's use of the terms "livery" and "hypocrisy" across two very different works, the Project for the Advancement of Religion (1709) and Directions to Servants (1745), to talk about Swift's efforts to contain the lower classes' desires for social mobility. By placing these works in the context of eighteenth-century attacks on bad servants, Davidson demonstrates how Swift structures his argument around class differentiation in order to guarantee the upper-class's claims to hypocrisy by setting the practices of the elite against a backdrop of a lower class culture figured as depraved. Critics have long noted Swift's commitment to the regulation of human nature (seen as mostly abhorrent) by institutions, but are less likely to identify Swift with the eighteenth-century discourse of "manners" as a form of political virtue, a discourse that, as Davidson points out, "must almost of necessity celebrate hypocrisy as a leading value" (109). In his Project, Swift allows "livery" to stand for hypocrisy as a formal construct that keeps "the interests of religion close to its heart" (113). When, in the satirical Directions to Servants, Swift embarks on his tirade against servant abuse of real, as opposed to metaphorical, livery as disguise and deception, the [end page 312] question arises: "how does the groom's concern for appearances ultimately differ from the Project's plea for an interested hypocrisy?" (113). Through a policy of "strategic containment" (121), Davidson concludes, Swift is able to save hypocrisy as a virtue for some even as he castigates it in the lower classes, overcoming, through the forward momentum of his writing, the kind of "rhetorical failure" that, more often than not, trouble eighteenth-century representations of servants (120). David Paxman's "Lancashire Spiritual Culture and the Question of Magic" draws an intriguing portrait of Lancashire as the 18th century's hotbed of dissent and magic. Even as the culture of magic died out, Lancashire Nonconformists, Methodists, and nonjurors remained committed to a spiritualism capable of producing "visions, prophecy, and promptings" (233). Because spiritualism occupied a liminal space between superstition and legitimate religion, Paxman observes, it could be used both to attack and defend dissenting practices, appearing as witchcraft or as inspiration, depending on which side was speaking. Defenders of the Church of England charged Lancashire's religious rebels with inappropriate spiritual practices; dissenters replied by pointing out that the impulses disparaged in their own practices lurked in the heart of orthodoxy. At the core of the controversy, Paxman notes, was the regulation of desire: "English reform movements such as Anglican evangelicalism and Methodism show that mainstream Anglicanism did not satisfy everyone's yearning for contact with the divine through religion" (240). In "Addison's Aesthetics of Novelty," Scott Black notes the critical habit of slighting the third term of Addison's "great, beautiful, novel" triad in accounts of the history of eighteenth-century aesthetics. In his turn to the category of "novelty," Black directs our attention to the way that this category stands apart, as the sign of an emergent "urban and urbane public space," from an aesthetics organized by the sublime in Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination" essays (271). The Spectator essays, Black argues, both describe and demonstrate the idea of novelty, inciting the reader's active participation to achieve novelty's effects. Revising Michael McKeon's account of the aesthetics' relation to religious discourse in the 17th and 18th centuries, Black argues that Addison produces novelty in order to allow his readers to displace, rather than replace, theology in their discovery of the divine as the "ordinary" — a kind of "extra-theological" knowledge rooted in the pleasures of the social (280). If the beautiful gestures toward the presence of the divine behind the everyday, the novel represents the divine as the everyday. Encouraging us to relinquish our desires for transcendence, Addison directs our attention to the pleasures we take in his essays' acts of creation, and the sociable world they enable. [end page 313] The range and diversity demonstrated by this collection's essays suggest that theoretical and methodological novelty has been good for eighteenth-century studies. To use Scott Black's words, "sometimes there is new wine in new bottles" (271), and we can be glad of the vitality demonstrated by critics teaching and writing in the field today.
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