Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies最新文献

Mary Hamilton's relationships and networking practices are central to this special issue. In this article, we present an innovative method for reconstructing social networks around Hamilton during five key periods of her life, connecting not just correspondents but also persons frequently mentioned in The Mary Hamilton Papers. We explain our methodology and present visualizations of the networks. By tabulating Hamilton's strongest relationships in each phase of her life, we can trace a selection of relationships over time. We reflect on the benefits and limitations of our approach, inviting expert judgement on its results and its potential for wider use.

William Shakespeare ascended to the status of English national poet over the course of the eighteenth century. His literary work entered the cultural imagination not only through theatrical performances and printed texts, but the playwright's corpus was also represented visually — in painted and printed media, and as or on material culture objects. Privileging Shakespearean themed printed fans and snuff boxes, this article probes the capability of Shakespeare's works (as their decoration) to act as emotive and expressive mechanisms in gendered social exchanges. It evaluates the way in which the ornamentation of these gestural objects informed extra-linguistic forms of communication, mediating and shaping contemporary users' engagement with and experience of the playwright and his corpus.

This article contextualizes Jane Austen's depictions of musicians and instruments within contemporary philosophical perceptions of music as a means of ‘unvirtuous’ corporeal stimulation in order to examine Austen's attitude towards female sexuality. It outlines music's relationship to visual sexual consumption through investigating music's function as an art of specifically visual pleasure and the female musician's empowering position as the public generator of such pleasure. Examining the spatial and visual interactions between a heroine, her musical instrument, and her body presented within each of Austen's novels, this article suggests that, given this musicological context, Austen's mildly musical heroines represent a rejection of the publicized and sexually active (as opposed to sexually passive) female musician.

Taking as its starting point Angelica Kauffman's portrait of Sir William Fordyce MD, who cared for her ailing father in 1780–81, this article investigates the cultural performances generated by Kauffman's friendship with William, James, and Henrietta Fordyce. Collectively described by Kauffman as ‘the all harmonious Triad’, this article examines the performances relating to each individual — paintings, portraiture, poetry, engravings, letters, and gift-giving. Exploring how these intersected with contemporary gender ideology, literature and print culture, it considers Kauffman's nuanced relationship with and import to each individual, demonstrating the value of this friendship to the histories of eighteenth-century British art and culture.

The aim of this article is to return to a small number of historically significant first-person testimonies of the Marseille epidemic of 1720 in order to analyse in detail their construction and depiction of human exceptionality as a form of life in a time of plague. We are specifically interested in how this sense of early modern human selfhood is compromised and problematized by its various interactions with other animals in the plague-infested city and, by extension, how plague reconfigures the dynamic forms of socio-ecological agency in eighteenth-century Marseille.

In mid-eighteenth-century Europe, anonymous authors produced parodic satires masquerading as earnest exemplars of the chronicle form. Couched in an antiquated, quasi-biblical register, these mock chronicles drew flimsily fictional portraits of modern life. Their debt to the historical chronicle lent them an authority which legitimized their subversion of the political systems under which they appeared, yet the ambiguity of their existence as ‘parodies’ enabled their use, in the hands of others, for the purposes of panegyric. The very existence of this ephemeral genre, long overlooked, testifies to the chronicle's enduring cultural valence and highlights the exchange of literary forms across borders, languages, and cultures that took place in the eighteenth century.