Abstract:Despite the legal tradition of primogeniture and the laws of coverture in eighteenth-century England, women did in fact inherit and transmit money, land, and property. This essay illuminates female-to-female inheritance in wills, courts, and fiction. It examines cases of women inheriting money and property from other women in novels, such as in the work of Charlotte Smith and Charlotte Lennox, and also instances where they gift their patriarchal inheritances to other women, as depicted in the work of Frances Burney and others. We know that women willed property in the period, but are these fictional cases just imaginative fantasies of female economic independence and power? Utilizing regional case studies of wills and courts, this essay argues that women wielded their economic agency by directing portions of their wealth to deserving daughters, nieces, and friends. I then examine this practice in fiction, comparing the types of female relatives and friends involved in the transmission of property, the kinds of property willed and inherited, and the legal stipulations involved with inheritance in order to extend and complicate our understanding of women's roles in the transmission of property. My larger claim is that in both actual and fictional cases, women's financial legacies and bequests could successfully navigate the patriarchal economic structures that often disenfranchised them.
{"title":"Matriarchal Economies: Women Inheriting from Women in Eighteenth-Century Wills, Courts, and Fiction","authors":"Jolene Zigarovich","doi":"10.1353/sec.2023.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2023.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Despite the legal tradition of primogeniture and the laws of coverture in eighteenth-century England, women did in fact inherit and transmit money, land, and property. This essay illuminates female-to-female inheritance in wills, courts, and fiction. It examines cases of women inheriting money and property from other women in novels, such as in the work of Charlotte Smith and Charlotte Lennox, and also instances where they gift their patriarchal inheritances to other women, as depicted in the work of Frances Burney and others. We know that women willed property in the period, but are these fictional cases just imaginative fantasies of female economic independence and power? Utilizing regional case studies of wills and courts, this essay argues that women wielded their economic agency by directing portions of their wealth to deserving daughters, nieces, and friends. I then examine this practice in fiction, comparing the types of female relatives and friends involved in the transmission of property, the kinds of property willed and inherited, and the legal stipulations involved with inheritance in order to extend and complicate our understanding of women's roles in the transmission of property. My larger claim is that in both actual and fictional cases, women's financial legacies and bequests could successfully navigate the patriarchal economic structures that often disenfranchised them.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43214536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In the wake of the European invasion, the pre-colonial Native South underwent a fundamental transformation. The pre-colonial Mississippian chiefdoms fell, and the people restructured themselves into new kinds of societies adapted to living on the edge of an expanding European empire. We call these new societies "coalescent societies" because they were all coalescences of varying people, languages, and so on. This essay takes a close look at the origins of the coalescence of the Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this essay, I collate the most recent archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence into a single, coherent account of the Creek coalescence.
{"title":"The Origins and Coalescence of the Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy: A New Synthesis","authors":"R. Ethridge","doi":"10.1353/sec.2023.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2023.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the wake of the European invasion, the pre-colonial Native South underwent a fundamental transformation. The pre-colonial Mississippian chiefdoms fell, and the people restructured themselves into new kinds of societies adapted to living on the edge of an expanding European empire. We call these new societies \"coalescent societies\" because they were all coalescences of varying people, languages, and so on. This essay takes a close look at the origins of the coalescence of the Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this essay, I collate the most recent archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence into a single, coherent account of the Creek coalescence.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46378583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:As scholars who work in literary biography, and especially as scholars who are interested in women's literary biography, many of us are used to working with fragments, ephemera, and the scraps that have somehow survived the centuries. On the one hand, it seems clear that if we want a better picture of the past (if we want a better understanding of how women lived and worked in the eighteenth century), then it is not enough to focus only on the well-known or the clearly exceptional. On the other hand, the impulse towards recovery for recovery's sake brings with it its own set of methodological challenges and assumptions. For example, much recovery is rooted in archival work—in the attempt to find and piece together the fragments of the past into a coherent account. And yet, those of us who do archival work know that the archive often actively resists coherence; it is instead filled with gaps, with incomplete traces of lives that can never be fully tracked. In other words, in writing the lives of the women of the past we need to look past recovery and reconstruction as an end in itself and begin to think productively about how we interact with and represent the archives themselves, the information they contain, and especially the gaps in the archival record. In this essay, I explore the case of Sally Wesley—the Methodist and poet—in order to suggest that archives have affects and that in order to better read them and better reconstruct women's lives, we must become more comfortable with living within these archives of feelings.
{"title":"The Space in Between: Affect, the Archive, and Writing Women's Lives","authors":"Andrew O. Winckles","doi":"10.1353/sec.2023.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2023.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:As scholars who work in literary biography, and especially as scholars who are interested in women's literary biography, many of us are used to working with fragments, ephemera, and the scraps that have somehow survived the centuries. On the one hand, it seems clear that if we want a better picture of the past (if we want a better understanding of how women lived and worked in the eighteenth century), then it is not enough to focus only on the well-known or the clearly exceptional. On the other hand, the impulse towards recovery for recovery's sake brings with it its own set of methodological challenges and assumptions. For example, much recovery is rooted in archival work—in the attempt to find and piece together the fragments of the past into a coherent account. And yet, those of us who do archival work know that the archive often actively resists coherence; it is instead filled with gaps, with incomplete traces of lives that can never be fully tracked. In other words, in writing the lives of the women of the past we need to look past recovery and reconstruction as an end in itself and begin to think productively about how we interact with and represent the archives themselves, the information they contain, and especially the gaps in the archival record. In this essay, I explore the case of Sally Wesley—the Methodist and poet—in order to suggest that archives have affects and that in order to better read them and better reconstruct women's lives, we must become more comfortable with living within these archives of feelings.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45486091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay investigates the sociocultural and diplomatic impact of gunpowder on Creek communities between the end of the Seven Years' War and the beginning of the American Revolution. It argues that access to gunpowder, a non-renewable commodity that could not be produced locally, shaped the ways in which Creek headmen navigated the geopolitical shifts of this period in order to protect existing beliefs and practices surrounding authority and power. Placing Creeks at the center of the narrative allows for the deployment of ethnohistorical methodologies that facilitate a deeper exploration of how specific European goods could impact Indigenous culture. Separating gunpowder from the existing scholarship on firearms allows scholars to consider how Indigenous peoples both collectively and individually interpreted and shaped the world around them in the Prerevolutionary period.
{"title":"Gunpowder and Creek Diplomacy in the Pre-Revolutionary Native South","authors":"J. McCutchen","doi":"10.1353/sec.2023.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2023.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay investigates the sociocultural and diplomatic impact of gunpowder on Creek communities between the end of the Seven Years' War and the beginning of the American Revolution. It argues that access to gunpowder, a non-renewable commodity that could not be produced locally, shaped the ways in which Creek headmen navigated the geopolitical shifts of this period in order to protect existing beliefs and practices surrounding authority and power. Placing Creeks at the center of the narrative allows for the deployment of ethnohistorical methodologies that facilitate a deeper exploration of how specific European goods could impact Indigenous culture. Separating gunpowder from the existing scholarship on firearms allows scholars to consider how Indigenous peoples both collectively and individually interpreted and shaped the world around them in the Prerevolutionary period.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48805723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The recent racial reckoning with white supremacist practices within institutions has produced a discourse of how institutions can "decolonize" themselves. This essay specifically scrutinizes how academic organizations like the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) have mined the lived experience and scholarly expertise of its BIPOC and other historically marginalized members as a way to insulate themselves from their own complicity. Giving these members a platform to think through their own painful experiences can be an exploitative practice without meaningful subsequent action that directly acknowledges those experiences. Inspired by Indigenous epistemology, "relational ecology" reimagines the ways in which organizations can begin to transform themselves by centering an ethics of care through responsive acts of listening and through adequate compensation for leadership positions.
{"title":"Rebuilding Eighteenth-Century Studies as a Relational Ecology","authors":"K. Alves","doi":"10.1353/sec.2023.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2023.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The recent racial reckoning with white supremacist practices within institutions has produced a discourse of how institutions can \"decolonize\" themselves. This essay specifically scrutinizes how academic organizations like the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) have mined the lived experience and scholarly expertise of its BIPOC and other historically marginalized members as a way to insulate themselves from their own complicity. Giving these members a platform to think through their own painful experiences can be an exploitative practice without meaningful subsequent action that directly acknowledges those experiences. Inspired by Indigenous epistemology, \"relational ecology\" reimagines the ways in which organizations can begin to transform themselves by centering an ethics of care through responsive acts of listening and through adequate compensation for leadership positions.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42070860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In the eighteenth century, issues of gender aroused great interest, particularly in the field of education. Leading pedagogues of the era came to believe that girls and young women could perform wonders of learning, if only they were trained in the right way. A Wunderkind was being redefined as someone who exhibited a prodigious natural talent that had been decisively enhanced by a refined Enlightenment education. This cluster examines both the educational methods used to teach female wunderkinder and their fate as adults in the eighteenth century, given the obvious gaps between their great prospects for learning and the constraints of their gender. Many girls displayed extraordinary talents that their fathers presented to large audiences, but their own high hopes often ended in frustration and disappointment when they had to marry and live in provincial seclusion.
{"title":"Introduction: The Female Wunderkind in the Eighteenth Century","authors":"J. Overhoff","doi":"10.1353/sec.2023.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2023.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the eighteenth century, issues of gender aroused great interest, particularly in the field of education. Leading pedagogues of the era came to believe that girls and young women could perform wonders of learning, if only they were trained in the right way. A Wunderkind was being redefined as someone who exhibited a prodigious natural talent that had been decisively enhanced by a refined Enlightenment education. This cluster examines both the educational methods used to teach female wunderkinder and their fate as adults in the eighteenth century, given the obvious gaps between their great prospects for learning and the constraints of their gender. Many girls displayed extraordinary talents that their fathers presented to large audiences, but their own high hopes often ended in frustration and disappointment when they had to marry and live in provincial seclusion.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44411011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay revisits the 1980s debate between Nancy K. Miller, who was in favor of examining an author's biography, and Peggy Kamuf, who argued against it. In 2008, Toril Moi called for renewed theoretical engagement with their positions. I propose instead that we use what I call the Miller-Kamuf Test to evaluate how much relative weight biography and textual analysis have been given in the scholarship on a particular woman author and then use our own scholarly projects to contribute toward a better balance. Because a balanced approach can help us remember the difficulties women faced in publishing and even writing in the first place, without imposing the very stereotypes on women's literature that keep it marginalized, it can combat the destructive assumption that because eighteenth-century women authors were often inadequately educated, they were capable of writing about their own experiences, but not of offering prescriptions for changing society. In this essay, I consider two case studies. Nothing is known about the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's correspondent, Henriette ***, and studies of her work have relied on textual analysis alone, but imagining possible biographies for the author opens up a new range of readings. On the other hand, setting aside Louise d'Épinay's biography, which has overshadowed the textual analysis of her epistolary novel, L'Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, results in our being able to reclassify that work as first and foremost a novel of education and reveals d'Épinay's previously hidden contributions to Enlightenment thought. The two cases demonstrate the valuable new insights that can come from balancing biography and textual analysis and ultimately demonstrate the interdependence and necessity of both Miller's and Kamuf's positions.
摘要:本文回顾了20世纪80年代南希·k·米勒(Nancy K. Miller)和佩吉·卡穆夫(Peggy Kamuf)之间的争论，前者赞成审查作者的传记，后者反对。2008年，Toril Moi呼吁重新与他们的立场进行理论接触。相反，我建议我们使用我所谓的米勒-卡穆夫测试来评估传记和文本分析在某一位女性作家的学术研究中所占的相对权重，然后用我们自己的学术项目来实现更好的平衡。因为一种平衡的方法可以帮助我们记住女性在出版甚至写作中首先面临的困难，而不会给女性文学强加使其边缘化的刻板印象，它可以对抗一种破坏性的假设，即因为18世纪的女性作家往往受教育不足，她们有能力写自己的经历，但不能为改变社会提供处方。在这篇文章中，我考虑两个案例研究。我们对让-雅克·卢梭的通讯员亨丽埃特的生活一无所知，对她作品的研究也只依赖于文本分析，但想象这位作者可能的传记，开辟了一个新的阅读范围。另一方面，撇开路易斯·d'Épinay的传记，它掩盖了对她的书信体小说《蒙布里扬夫人的历史》的文本分析，结果是我们能够将这部作品重新分类为首先是一部教育小说，并揭示了d'Épinay之前对启蒙思想的隐藏贡献。这两个案例展示了有价值的新见解，这些见解可以从平衡传记和文本分析中得到，并最终证明了米勒和卡穆夫立场的相互依存和必要性。
{"title":"Using the Miller-Kamuf Test to Evaluate the Role of Biography in Scholarship on Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing","authors":"Rebecca Crisafulli","doi":"10.1353/sec.2023.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2023.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay revisits the 1980s debate between Nancy K. Miller, who was in favor of examining an author's biography, and Peggy Kamuf, who argued against it. In 2008, Toril Moi called for renewed theoretical engagement with their positions. I propose instead that we use what I call the Miller-Kamuf Test to evaluate how much relative weight biography and textual analysis have been given in the scholarship on a particular woman author and then use our own scholarly projects to contribute toward a better balance. Because a balanced approach can help us remember the difficulties women faced in publishing and even writing in the first place, without imposing the very stereotypes on women's literature that keep it marginalized, it can combat the destructive assumption that because eighteenth-century women authors were often inadequately educated, they were capable of writing about their own experiences, but not of offering prescriptions for changing society. In this essay, I consider two case studies. Nothing is known about the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's correspondent, Henriette ***, and studies of her work have relied on textual analysis alone, but imagining possible biographies for the author opens up a new range of readings. On the other hand, setting aside Louise d'Épinay's biography, which has overshadowed the textual analysis of her epistolary novel, L'Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, results in our being able to reclassify that work as first and foremost a novel of education and reveals d'Épinay's previously hidden contributions to Enlightenment thought. The two cases demonstrate the valuable new insights that can come from balancing biography and textual analysis and ultimately demonstrate the interdependence and necessity of both Miller's and Kamuf's positions.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44302803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Scholars in recent years have attempted to complicate understandings of Robinson Crusoe as an economic man. This essay joins in such efforts by studying how Crusoe actively seeks out and forms close, tight-knit communities with those he meets in order to survive. In particular, I examine the Crusoe trilogy against the backdrop of the trading guilds of eighteenth-century London, tracing how Crusoe employs similar strategies to those employed by the guilds to grow and maintain his membership. Contrary to Ian Watt’s influential claim that Crusoe stands as an emblem of individualism, I propose that Crusoe is more akin to the leader of a group or commune who builds and maintains filiative and affiliative relations through the use of coercion and violence. In the uncertain world that Daniel Defoe has crafted, the production and exchange of goods and the destruction of life and property all count as rational, economic decisions, for these decisions are all made in a bid to ensure the survival of the groups to which Crusoe belongs.
{"title":"Fragile Communities in the Crusoe Trilogy","authors":"L. Peh","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Scholars in recent years have attempted to complicate understandings of Robinson Crusoe as an economic man. This essay joins in such efforts by studying how Crusoe actively seeks out and forms close, tight-knit communities with those he meets in order to survive. In particular, I examine the Crusoe trilogy against the backdrop of the trading guilds of eighteenth-century London, tracing how Crusoe employs similar strategies to those employed by the guilds to grow and maintain his membership. Contrary to Ian Watt’s influential claim that Crusoe stands as an emblem of individualism, I propose that Crusoe is more akin to the leader of a group or commune who builds and maintains filiative and affiliative relations through the use of coercion and violence. In the uncertain world that Daniel Defoe has crafted, the production and exchange of goods and the destruction of life and property all count as rational, economic decisions, for these decisions are all made in a bid to ensure the survival of the groups to which Crusoe belongs.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49416676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815, Daniel O’Quinn uses microhistorical methods to construct a constellatory, rather than a cumulative, history of intercultural communication and representation between Ottomans and Europeans. By reducing the scale of his analysis to a singular event, individual, object, or place, he identifies unexpected moments of dissonance, instances of something that does not quite fit. Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi, both early practitioners of microhistory, called such observations “clues” and used them to complicate grand historical narratives, such as the emergence of modernity. This study proposes that O’Quinn methodologically innovates the use of microhistory by mapping his observations about Ottoman-European intercultural communication in a constellatory field in which each “clue” operates as a dynamic discursive node with many spatial and temporal connections. Throughout his book, he guides readers through this unwieldy spatiotemporal field, from one microhistorical node to the next, and thus models a new approach to tracing the historical and imagined itineraries that linked Europeans and Ottomans across the long eighteenth century.
摘要：丹尼尔·奥奎因在《与奥斯曼帝国打交道：伪装的中介》（Engaged the Ottoman Empire：Vexed Mediations，1690–1815）一书中，使用微观历史方法构建了奥斯曼人与欧洲人之间跨文化交流和代表的总体历史，而不是累积历史。通过将分析的规模缩小到一个单一的事件、个人、物体或地方，他识别出了意外的不和谐时刻，即不太适合的事情。卡洛·金茨堡（Carlo Ginzburg）和乔瓦尼·莱维（Giovanni Levi）都是微观历史的早期实践者，他们将这些观察称为“线索”，并用它们来复杂化宏大的历史叙事，例如现代性的出现。本研究提出，奥通过将他对奥斯曼-欧洲跨文化交流的观察映射到一个星座领域，在这个领域中，每条“线索”都是一个具有许多空间和时间联系的动态话语节点，从而在方法上创新了微观历史的使用。在他的整本书中，他引导读者穿过这个笨拙的时空领域，从一个微观历史节点到下一个，从而为追踪在漫长的18世纪将欧洲人和奥斯曼人联系在一起的历史和想象中的行程建立了一种新的方法。
{"title":"Between Geographic and Conceptual Fields: Mapping Microhistories in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire","authors":"K. Calvin","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815, Daniel O’Quinn uses microhistorical methods to construct a constellatory, rather than a cumulative, history of intercultural communication and representation between Ottomans and Europeans. By reducing the scale of his analysis to a singular event, individual, object, or place, he identifies unexpected moments of dissonance, instances of something that does not quite fit. Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi, both early practitioners of microhistory, called such observations “clues” and used them to complicate grand historical narratives, such as the emergence of modernity. This study proposes that O’Quinn methodologically innovates the use of microhistory by mapping his observations about Ottoman-European intercultural communication in a constellatory field in which each “clue” operates as a dynamic discursive node with many spatial and temporal connections. Throughout his book, he guides readers through this unwieldy spatiotemporal field, from one microhistorical node to the next, and thus models a new approach to tracing the historical and imagined itineraries that linked Europeans and Ottomans across the long eighteenth century.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43188917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay focuses on Daniel O’Quinn’s argument that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letter book can be read as a “counter-epic.” Comparing O’Quinn’s approach to other influential accounts of the role of epic in eighteenth-century literature, it explores how translations of and allusions to Virgil’s Aeneid shape the ways in which intercultural contact can be represented and understood.
{"title":"On Walls, Bridges, and Temporal Folds: Epic, Empire, and Neoclassicism Revisited","authors":"Charlotte Sussman","doi":"10.1353/sec.2022.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2022.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay focuses on Daniel O’Quinn’s argument that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letter book can be read as a “counter-epic.” Comparing O’Quinn’s approach to other influential accounts of the role of epic in eighteenth-century literature, it explores how translations of and allusions to Virgil’s Aeneid shape the ways in which intercultural contact can be represented and understood.","PeriodicalId":39439,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43936880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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