Studies in Eighteenth-century Culture

The latest groundbreaking work in eighteenth-century studies.

The essays in Volume 54 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture demonstrate a renewed interest in the variety of ways in which emotions interact with artistic, cultural, literary, and scholarly conventions.

The volume opens with three essays that linger on the affective experiences both occluded and afforded by genre. Chloe Summers Edmondson traces the posthumous reception of Madame de Sévigné's letters and finds that they established a style of "seeming sincerity." Robert Stearn follows by uncovering the relationships between household labor and emotional experiences in the diary of the Manchester wigmaker Edmund Harrold. And Joani Etskovitz examines how the slow narrative style of Charlotte Smith's writings for young people aimed to imbue adolescent girls with a spirit of curiosity that could forestall the perils of a hasty marriage.

Robert W. Jones and Fauve Vandenberghe next take up the political and affective resonances of queer performance. For Jones, cross-dressed casting in a 1786 production of Richard Coeur de Lion constituted a sexualized means of opposition to the royalist politics of its French source; for Vandenberghe, the figure of the spinster in popular periodicals offered a mode of resistance to the genre's otherwise heteronormative impulses.

Wendy Wassyng Roworth's Presidential Address, "Close Encounters and Stranger Things: Angelica's Kauffman's First Years in London," documents two critical years in the painter's career, paying particular attention to the scandal caused by her secret marriage to a man pretending to be a Swedish Count. Brontë Hebdon's essay uncovers the appeals to antiquity and the beau ideal that characterized civil uniform designs in Revolutionary France. Yan Che concludes this section with a careful reading of the small accumulations of money and recognition that fail to add up in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative.

Allison Y. Gibeily initiates a trio of essays on empire in the long eighteenth century. Focusing on an anonymous travelogue included in Thomas Sprat's The History of the Royal Society of London, Gibeily thinks carefully about archival silences and the Indigenous control of knowledge. Sanjay Subrahmanyam's Clifford Lecture, "The Question of I'tisam ud-Din: An Indian Traveler in Eighteenth-Century Europe," recovers the writings and experiences of Shaikh I'tisam-ud-Din, one of the earliest South Asian authors to compose a first-person account of the West. Vincent Pham's essay concludes this section with a study of the imperial conflicts registered by a late eighteenth-century musical automaton depicting a tiger in the act of devouring a European.

Nan Goodman's essay concludes the volume by suggesting that the principle of neutrality in early American domestic and foreign policy helped create forms of conspiratorial thinking that continue to vex and polarize us today.

Contributors: Yan Che, Chloe Summers Edmondson, Joani Etskovitz, Allison Y. Gibeily, Nan Goodman, Brontë Hebdon, Robert W. Jones, Vincent Pham, Wendy Wassyng Roworth, Robert Stearn, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Fauve Vandenberghe

George Boulukos is a professor of English, with an affiliate appointment in Africana Studies, at Southern Illinois University. He is the author of The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture and the editor of Memoirs on the Life and Travels of Thomas Hammond, 1748–1775.