Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies最新文献

This article reads Anna Letitia Barbauld's affective encounter in ‘The Caterpillar’ (1825) in the light of her broader entomological writing for both adults and children. It investigates the recommendations for attention to the small and the particular in her didactic work alongside the narratives of insect subjectivity and insect metamorphosis in her occasional and lyric verse to assess the poet's contribution to an ecological mode of writing in this period. This uncovers a key tension in Barbauld's communication of insect worlds, reflected in the conclusion of ‘The Caterpillar’, where the affective encounter exposes the inescapable otherness of the human observer.

This article understands how women and girls in the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach negotiated core issues in the Age of Revolutions: early industrialization and political representation. The baroness Julie von Bechtolsheim (1751–1847) leveraged war, widowhood, courtly connections, and poetry to pursue a public ‘career’ as First Principal of Eisenach's Women's Association (Frauenverein) from 1814 to 1831, establishing a material link between her private estate and the political estate. The Association itself was contrived as a polity in microcosm. Accusations of Bechtolsheim's ‘despotic’ governance prompted a majority bourgeois managerial staff to establish electoral conventions. Not all women had equal claim to citizenship, however. The Association's records reveal a Romantic theory of labour that reinforced a social order built on women's work, and its ‘Industry School’ sustained a supply of female labour into the state's predominant industry, linen manufacture, as into the servant's quarters of its affluent homes.

This article explores how music publishers recruited the gendered expectations of musical practice to market their scores to male and female audiences. It shows how the graphic and textual elements of title pages and prefaces were used as promotional material and reveals how publishers encoded gendered representations of music making into their printed editions in order to navigate the social worlds in which they were consumed. The opening section will discuss how music publishers appropriated images of courtship scenes on the title pages of keyboard tutors (to market their scores towards young women) and explain how prefaces could be used to placate the feminine associations of musical practice to help publishers sell to a male audience. The discussion will then turn to the concept of gift giving, explaining how graphic imagery could be used to place the score at the centre of elite romantic interactions, modelling expected commercial behaviours.

1793 saw the emergence, vogue, and decline of ‘the pad’, a fashionable false belly worn by women under their outer garments. At the time, the pad was most explicitly condemned as a disguise for illegitimate pregnancy and as a distorter of the ‘natural’ female shape — the slender waist. However, as this article will uncover, underpinning these more common critiques of the pad was the suspicion that it concealed and imitated the ‘fat’ female belly. Indeed, as I argue, the unsettling effect of the pad was notably due to the way in which it rendered the female wearer's body illegible, particularly to those who wished to police it.

Scholars have long recognized the significance of the concept of ‘enthusiasm’ in eighteenth-century British culture. Its association with melancholy made it a powerful tool for dealing with religious and political dissent by dismissing enthusiasts' claims to divine inspiration as the delusions of their troubled minds. However, the medicalization of enthusiasm also meant that many Christians felt the need to defend their own faith against accusations that it caused melancholy. By examining and contextualizing Robert Blakeway's essay on religious melancholy, this article explores this latter concern. It suggests that such a preoccupation was related both to the fear of enthusiasm and to the fear of irreligion. Blakeway's essay is presented as an example of a broader effort by Anglican clergy to define an ‘orthodox sorrow’ as a middle way between enthusiastic melancholy and lukewarm indifference. Finally, the article emphasizes the polemical dimension of the vocabulary of sorrow in eighteenth-century England.