Enfilade

While there’s plenty to relish in the latest issue of ECS, I’m glad to highlight, in particular, this important article by Paris Amanda Spies-Gans. I’ve also listed all three single title book reviews; while none of them deal specifically with the visual arts, it’s easy to see (perhaps particularly with the first two) points of methodological relevancy for art history. –CH

Eighteenth-Century Studies 51.4 (Summer 2018)

A R T I C L E S

• Paris Amanda Spies-Gans, “Exceptional, but not Exceptions: Public Exhibitions and the Rise of the Woman Artist in London and Paris, 1760–1830,” pp. 393–416.

From 1760 to 1830, more than 1,300 women exhibited more than 6,000 works of art in London and Paris’ premier art exhibitions—an unprecedented surge in female artistic activity and its public reception. This article traces that transformation, which strikingly mirrors the progress of the French Revolutionary Wars, and contends that the Revolutionary era opened vital opportunities for female artists on both sides of the Channel despite cultural differences. It thus argues for a recasting of period’s historical narrative to integrate women’s omnipresence in the public, professional art world, and a reevaluation of their hitherto dominant categorization as ‘amateur’ artists. It also challenges the historiographical argument that the Revolutionary era was principally a defeat for women in Britain and France.

R E V I E W S

• Kristina Straub, Review of Susan Lanser, The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (The University of Chicago, 2014), pp. 479–82.
• Renee Bryzik, Review of Katrin Berndt, Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 (Routledge, 2017), pp. 483–85.
• Nancy Vogeley, Review of Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 485–87.