Michelle Burnham - Böcker

Transoceanic America offers a new approach to American literature by emphasizing the material and conceptual interconnectedness of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. These oceans were tied together economically, textually, and politically, through such genres as maritime travel writing, mathematical and navigational schoolbooks, and the relatively new genre of the novel. Especially during the age of revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, long-distance transoceanic travel required calculating and managing risk in the interest of profit. The result was the emergence of a newly suspenseful form of narrative that came to characterize capitalist investment, political revolution, and novelistic plot. The calculus of risk that drove this expectationist narrative also concealed violence against vulnerable bodies on ships and shorelines around the world. A transoceanic American literary and cultural history requires new non-linear narratives to tell the story of this global context and to recognize its often forgotten textual archive.

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture reflects new and highly promising directions of research in the field. The latest volume contains essays by Paula R. Backscheider on theatrical spectacle and by April London on anecdote in Sarah Fielding, as well as considerations of translation in Dennis by Sarah B. Stein, of family in Defoe by Ann Campbell, of ideology in Fantomina by Patricia Comitini, of popular music in Rousseau by Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden. In addition, readers will find studies of the body in Berkeley by Joanne E. Myers, of prostitution in Restif de la Bretonne by Rori Bloom, of ruins in Lazzaro Spallanzani by Sabrina Ferri, of Arthur Murphy's female characters by Barbara Mackey King, and of recent film adaptations of the century's masterworks by Karen Gevirtz.

Volume 44 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture acknowledges recent changes in the field of eighteenth-century studies while reaffirming SECC's commitment to interdisciplinary approaches that unite the wide array of fields in history, literature, art history, women's and gender studies, political science, musicology, dance, theater, and religious studies. With contributions from Kelly E. Battles, Adam R. Beach, Samara Anne Cahill, Jonathan Blake Fine, Lucas Hardy, Julie Candler Hayes, Paul Kelleher, Rachael Scarborough King, Heidi E. Kraus, Teresa Michals, Andrew M. Pisano, and Yann Robert, this collection of essays highlights new research in disability studies, debates on slavery and literary history, and analyses of literary genre and form.

The volume's first section treats the politics of genre: Maria Soledad Barbon on the colonial politics of panegyric in Peru; Amanda Johnson on Thomas Jefferson's use of Ossianic romance; Catherine M. Jaffe on the gender politics of translation in a Spanish novel; Cecilia Feilla on French Revolutionary politics in London harlequinades; and Rebecca Tierney-Hynes on the economics of comedic form in Susanna Centlivre's plays. The volume's second section, on textual materialisms, includes Daniel Leonard on fetishism and figurism in Charles de Brosses; Beth Fowkes Tobin on the notebooks of the naturalist Dr. Richard Pulteney; Betty Joseph on capitalism and early English fictional treatments of China and India; Dwight Codr on hairs and sneezes in Pope's Rape of the Lock; John Greene on magic lanterns and peepshow boxes in Rousseau's Reveries; Sara Munoz-Muriana on mirrors and gender in Spanish comedy; and David Mazella on cultivation and improvement in Swift's Gulliver's Travels.