Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies最新文献

This is the story of David Humphreys' efforts to plan and develop America's first sustained and successful woollen textile mill and village in the United States beginning in 1806. Informed by the debates over the future economic direction of the new nation, his efforts represented a coalescence of the pro-agricultural thoughts and ideas commonly espoused by the Democratic-Republican Party and the pro-manufacturing positions of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists. The Humphreysville experiment showed that America could competitively manufacture high-quality woollen goods; factory-based manufacturing could be undertaken in a healthy, safe, and moral community; and agricultural and industrial interests could be combined for the public welfare. Moreover, Humphreysville was intended to be a model village where economic, social, and cultural aspects of the community were just as important as the economic production of cloth. Many of the elements of the social planning found in Humphreysville were later applied in the Slater-Rhode Island and Waltham-Lowell systems of textile mills and settlements throughout the nineteenth century.

Eschewing the symbolic in favour of commitment to the unmediated replication of exactly that which is actually observed, Hunter's attitude to the images in his Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus embraces a juridical ideal of scientific representation: images should tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Contemporary scholars have questioned this appeal to objectivity, maintaining representation always exists inside culture and arguing gender frequently inflects purportedly neutral scientific vision. I extend that debate via a reading of Plate XXVI, which is frequently misunderstood as representing something completely different to what it actually depicts. Its sequence of images, I argue, chart a narrative of enlightenment wherein folk mythologies of the uterus are subdued by the controlling scientific gaze. I also suggest a previously unrecognised correspondence between Plate XXVI and one of the plaster casts of the dissected bodies preserved in the University of Glasgow's Anatomy Museum.

Astronomy, a paradigmatic observational discipline of early modern ‘science’, relied on epistolary communication for coordinating practitioners across the world, publishing discoveries and theories, and seeking their confirmation from other virtuosi. Epistolary form ‘travelled’ from an individual exchange between scholars, via the print publication of such letters for the benefit of a wider readership, to the framing of bespoke isagogic textbooks. This article explores the affordances of Restoration printed astronomical letters, contrasting their performance of familiarity between sender and recipient with the public nature of the communication. By reference to letters published in the Philosophical Transactions, individual print letters, and letter-books, including Christiaan Huygens's Cosmotheoros, the article shows how each type utilizes the familiar and the formal aspects of the letter form differently. The print letter emerges as a form uniquely suited for performing individual authority and fashioning an expert community, as well as communicating expert knowledge to non-specialists.

The relationship between real and fictional letters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has been the source of much critical debate. Disagreement surrounds the extent to which the increasingly popular genre of the epistolary novel drew on the practices and techniques of actual correspondence. On the one hand are those who see epistolary fiction as developing out of real-life letters, with some literary-stylistic additions. On the other hand are those who reject this teleological approach in favour of one that emphasizes the functional versatility of the letter in the period, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of drawing a distinction between its real and fictional incarnations. This relationship between real correspondence and epistolary fiction is brought into sharp focus by the genre of the letter-writing manual, which rose sharply in popularity from the last two decades of the seventeenth century onwards. Concentrating on John Hill's The Young Secretary's Guide (1689), Thomas Goodman's The Experience's Secretary (1699), and G. F.'s The Secretary's Guide (1705), in particular, in this article, I suggest that the style of the letter-writing manual from this period can, with caution, be compared with that of the epistolary novel. I pay particular attention to the ways in which letters in these manuals respond to and quote from each other and the often subtle ways in which they thus incorporate different voices. This polyvocality is taken further in Samuel Richardson's manual Familiar Letters (1741), which, as is well known, provided the raw material for his first novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1741). I demonstrate that some of the stylistic techniques which would prove crucial to the great epistolary novels of the later eighteenth century, including Richardson's, can be found, at least in embryonic form, in the letter-writing manuals of the Restoration period.

Epistolary periodicals associated with English coffee house culture have often been associated with Jürgen Habermas' model for the rise of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’. Habermas proposed this ultimately gave rise to the free articulation of public opinion and the emergence of democratic values. Written at a time of socio-political upheaval, John Dunton's serial publications relied upon anonymous authorship, particularly his most famous periodical, the Athenian Mercury (1691–97), which pioneered the question-and-answer format and gave rise to many imitations. In the present era, we are witnessing democracy imperilled by the proliferation of AI-driven ‘fake news’. This paper proposes that the origins of this phenomenon may be found in epistolary periodicals which normalized giving and receiving offence in print. The pernicious quality of anonymous print, free from personal accountability or consequences, embedded from its inception a fatal flaw in the project of constituting a democratic public sphere.

The early modern age witnessed a number of revolutionary changes in the ways people communicated with each other. Within the shifting balances between oral and print cultures following upon Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, epistolarity played a crucial role in how written language was perceived as a source of reliable information. The highly dynamic cultural environment of Restoration England, existing as it did in various forms of intellectual exchange with other European and international spheres, brought forth a sizeable increase in various forms of literary practice.

This essay discusses the use of epistolarity in a pamphlet controversy that played out over a published sermon by the Bishop of Exeter and a critical response by Benjamin Hoadly. While the political, religious, and social aspects of the resulting pamphlet war are substantial, the present article discusses how the form of the letter was employed by the various authors who contributed to this controversy. It argues that the writers drew on readerly expectations about letters that reveal much about the role played by epistolarity within literary culture in Restoration England, in particular, how letters negotiated a contested space between factuality and fictionality that was shaped also by contemporary notions of novelistic writing.

Charles Gildon (1665–1724) is known today as the ultimate hack writer of Restoration England. Nonetheless, his two fiction collections in the ‘rifled mailbag’ genre — The Post-Boy Rob'd of His Mail (1692) and The Post-Man Robb'd of His Mail (1719) — contain insights concerning the structures and practices of information gathering in early modern Europe. This essay places these fictions by Gildon in their historical and literary contexts, including his repurposing of the Italian Il Corriero svaligiato by Ferrante Pallavicino, the relation to John Dunton's Athenian Mercury, and the use of addresses and occupations of letters to describe the geopolitics of Restoration London and its surround.