Enfilade

Eighteenth-Century Studies 46 (Summer 2013)

A R T I C L E S

Patrick C. Fleming, “The Rise of the Moral Tale: Children’s Literature, the Novel, and The Governess,” pp. 463–77.
Sarah Fielding’s The Governess has been called the first children’s novel. But by conflating two separate genres, critics risk oversimplifying both the novel and children’s literature. This article brings together children’s literature studies and novel studies in order to address the narrative form of The Governess, and to suggest that the term “moral tale” better captures the complex origins of the eighteenth-century children’s novel.

Mark Koch, ” ‘A Spectacle Pleasing to God and Man’: Sympathy and the Show of Charity in the Restoration Spittle Sermons,” pp. 479–97.
In the 1670s the long-standing Spittle sermons became almost exclusively charity sermons, many of which argued that almsdeeds are accompanied with a sensual pleasure and articulated principles of sympathetic response involving an affective theatricality. This paper considers the place of these sermons and their ancillary children’s processions in the London public sphere, how they worked as spectacle to evoke pity from spectators, and how, despite the Latitudinarian tendency toward rationalism, they often contained elements of what was deemed an empirically nebulous “show” or “fiction.”

Catherine Packham, “Cicero’s Ears, or Eloquence in the Age of Politeness: Oratory, Moderation, and the Sublime in Enlightenment Scotland,” pp. 499–512.
This paper argues that Hume’s essay, “Of Eloquence,” should be read as part of a Scottish Enlightenment attempt to accommodate the sublime to commercial modernity. Hume inherits the sublime of ancient oratory not as a matter for narrow stylistic regulation—to be rejected in a new age of politeness, as some have argued—but as a moral problem at the heart of modern subjectivity. Hume looks to taste to regulate and contain the sublime, but it is Adam Smith who solves the problem of the sublime by recouping its excess as a mark of the possibilities for virtue in the modern age.

Lisa T. Sarasohn, ” ‘That Nauseous Venomous Insect’: Bedbugs in Early Modern England,” pp. 513–30.
Bedbugs were perceived as a new entry in the rich range of vermin that plagued eighteenth-century England, and the way they were viewed and treated reveals much about the mentality, prejudices, assumptions and aspirations of society at that time. Their presence increasingly elicited repugnance and even hysteria. The reaction to bedbugs during the eighteenth century serves as an indicator of modernity and emerging attitudes towards the body, class, nature and science.

Ryan Whyte, “Exhibiting Enlightenment: Chardin as tapissier,” pp. 531–54.
This essay addresses the work of Jean-Baptiste Chardin as tapissier to show his design of the Salon du Louvre functioned as an ideological system that derived meaning from Enlightenment discourses of epistemology and taxonomy. First, this essay explores how the Salon design answered the Académie’s need to represent its structure to the Salon public, and to guide the public in judging the individual works comprising it. Second, this essay examines points of contact between Chardin, the Académie, Carl Linnaeus and the authors of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert as intellectual context for the Salon design.

Abigail Zitin, “Thinking Like an Artist: Hogarth, Diderot, and the Aesthetics of Technique,” pp. 555–70.
In The Analysis of Beauty, William Hogarth advocated an unusual kind of formalism based in artistic practice: not form distilled into a rule for judgment but rather derived from the artist’s techniques for perception and composition. Denis Diderot, too, embraced an aesthetics of technique, particularly in the Paradoxe sur le comédien, in which he contends that what appears impassioned in an affecting dramatic performance is in fact calculated. Diderot, however, had the extra burden of reconciling the ideal of illusion with his demystification of the practitioner’s perspective, a reconciliation he could only conceive as a paradox.

R E V I E W S

Mark K. Fulk “Travel And/As Enigma: Review of Ian Warrell, ed., Turner Inspired in the Light of Claude (National Gallery Company, 2012) and Yaël Schlick, Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment (Bucknell University Press, 2012),” pp. 571–73.
Recent work on travel by scholars Nicola Watson (The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain [2008]), Zoë Kinsley (Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812 [2008]), and Ann C. Colley (Victorians in the Mountains [2010]) has added markedly to our understanding of British travel in the latter eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries through its foregrounding of issues of class, gender, and the changing understanding of landscape aesthetics and theories of the sublime. The books in this review supplement this discussion by their emphasis on Anglo-French experiences of travel in the period. . .

Jennifer Milam, “Review of Michael Yonan, Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011),” pp. 575–77.
. . . Thanks to Yonan’s interpretive approach, Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art is a ground-breaking study in the history of Austrian art and architecture. His book is a substantial contribution to the study of women as powerful agents in the production and reception of visual culture in European court circles during the eighteenth century. Moreover, Yonan’s wide-ranging choice of material—portraiture, decorative objects, architecture, interior decoration, and garden sculpture—provides the reader with a comprehensive understanding of Maria Theresa’s individualized approach to the representation of her personal authority in the visual arts. This is complemented by a number of quality illustrations that allow readers to consider the details of many works that are rarely discussed in depth. . .

Mark K. Fulk, “Review of Adrian J. Wallbank, Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute: Literary Dialogue in an Age of Revolution (Pickering and Chatto, 2012),” pp. 578–79.
In his postscript, Adrian J. Wallbank explains that his project was meant to “open up multiple avenues for further research . . . into this seriously neglected literary genre” of the written dialogue, gesturing toward the beginnings of a history of “dialogic didacticism” in the Romantic era (217). The book meets these expectations well by revealing in elaborate detail this overlooked genre, and suggesting ways that Wallbank’s readings can help complement our approach to already canonical markers of the period. . .