An ECF article from Material Fictions just because it's Tuesday: "Puppets, Waxworks, and a Wooden Dramatis Personae: Eighteenth-Century Material Culture and Philosophical History in William Godwin’s /Fleetwood/," by Emma Peacocke muse.jhu.edu/article/704848
#ReadECF #18thCentury
Abstract: This article links Samuel Richardson's final novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753) to the twenty-first-century Proud Boys in order to examine seriously the implications of two often overlooked aspects of both: Grandison's virginity and the Proud Boys' "No Wanks" policy. This policy, which limits members' masturbation, can serve to elucidate the sexual politics of Grandison, as both the modern-day men's rights group and the eighteenth-century novel valorize male sexual restraint as a form of domestic dominance. This article argues that Grandison's idealization of male sexual restraint reinforces the portrait of male virility for which Richardson's earlier novels were criticized, rendering the virile male protagonist palatable to readers of the domestic novel's courtship plot. The valorization of restraint exhibited by Richardson's hero and the Proud Boys advances a sublimated understanding of male virility that works to solidify the fiction of sexual essentialism ...
Another exciting new ECF article in the special issue:
"Eighteenth-Century Proud Boys; or, Why Sir Charles Grandison Is (a) No Wanker," by Rachel Gevlin
muse.jhu.edu/pub/50/artic...
ECF 36.2, April 2024, pp. 233-250
#18thCentury
#ReadECF at Project MUSE. #C18th #18thC
In a new UTP blog post, ECF author Tracy Rutler, Penn State, reflects on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, drawing parallels to the societal inequalities highlighted in Isabelle de Charrière’s novel.
bit.ly/ECFBlog
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@utpjournals
ABSTRACT: This article explores the variable meanings and effects of gothic architecture across Ann Radcliffe’s three most important novels —The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797). With her variable portrayal of the gothic edifice, Radcliffe presents a distinctively immersive version of the sublime that significantly challenges the aesthetic philosophies of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant in its capacity to coexist with real, immediate fear. Radcliffe presents and encourages a markedly democratic aesthetic of terror designed to empower even disenfranchised individuals. This article argues that Radcliffe’s novels teach readers how to achieve the sublime in the most difficult circumstances, thus making widely available both the sublime and also what the sublime represents—freedom. Within the walls of the gothic edifice, Radliffe demonstrates that individuals have the potential for, and indeed the right to, the power to define ...
Here's a suggestion for a weekend read:
"Sublime Luxuries" of the Gothic Edifice: Immersive Aesthetics and Kantian Freedom in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe, by Kristin Girten
muse.jhu.edu/article/622351
ECF 28.4 (2016)
#ReadEcf at Project MUSE.
#18thcentury #19thcentury #C18th
Detail from William Hogarth’s engraving called Gin Lane (1751). An inebriated woman sits on some stairs. She wears a grin on her face, but her baby is tumbling over the railing to the street below.
Abstract: The most memorable figure of the London “Gin Craze,” a furor over cheap spirits from approximately 1720 to 1751, is the woman in the foreground of William Hogarth’s Gin Lane (1751), so deep in stupor that she fails to notice her tumbling child. Hogarth draws on a longer tradition throughout the Gin Craze of using individual drinkers—particularly women—to rhetorically invoke a drug crisis. This essay asks how such figures of individual drinkers come to betoken a larger crisis, and how they establish gin as the cause of that crisis, rather than a symptom of underlying dispossession. I explore how various portrayals of drinkers in Gin Craze discourse each work to exemplify the crisis and to posit gin as its cause. Further, I offer formal as well as historical explanations for why these figures are so often women: how the cultural institutions of eighteenth-century femininity, including maternity and coverture, convinced artists, authors, and readers that women were ...
The ECF editors support a very broad definition of "fiction":
"Mother Gin and the Bad Examples: Figuring a Drug Crisis, 1736–51," by Nicholas Allred
muse.jhu.edu/article/787458
#ReadECF @ProjectMUSE #18thCentury #C18th #18thC
Submit your work for consideration:
mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/ecf
Front Cover of the ECF journal October issue: The image on the front cover is Mujer indígena con cempasúchil (Indian Woman with Marigold) (1876), by Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez (Mexico, Texcoco, 1824–1904). LACMA: Gift of Ronald A. Belkin. This artwork is in the public domain. The digital reproduction is provided courtesy of LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).
Table of Contents Articles Singing through the Pain: Murat Riffing on Montaigne By Scott M. Sanders Mercier's Clinic: Public Health Utopianism in L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais By Andrew Billing Reflections essays: Troubling White Femininity: Revisiting Delarivier Manley's The Wife's Resentment (1720) By Kirsten T. Saxton Fictions of Character By Nicola Parsons and Amelia Dale Flash essays: Abolitionist Visions and the Spectre of Enthusiasm By Rachael Isom Sexualized Racial-Colonial Grotesque in the Company Archives By Shruti Jain Eighteenth-Century Literary Fragments: Queering the Fiction of "Finished" Work By Lucien Darjeun Meadows, Leia Lynn Deconstructing Reliance on Enlightenment Methods in Feminist Book Historical Scholarship By Micaela Rodgers Click the Project MUSE link to see the list of book reviews.
Table of Contents Articles Singing through the Pain: Murat Riffing on Montaigne By Scott M. Sanders Mercier's Clinic: Public Health Utopianism in L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais By Andrew Billing Reflections essays: Troubling White Femininity: Revisiting Delarivier Manley's The Wife's Resentment (1720) By Kirsten T. Saxton Fictions of Character By Nicola Parsons and Amelia Dale Flash essays: Abolitionist Visions and the Spectre of Enthusiasm By Rachael Isom Sexualized Racial-Colonial Grotesque in the Company Archives By Shruti Jain Eighteenth-Century Literary Fragments: Queering the Fiction of "Finished" Work By Lucien Darjeun Meadows, Leia Lynn Deconstructing Reliance on Enlightenment Methods in Feminist Book Historical Scholarship By Micaela Rodgers Click the Project MUSE link to see the list of book reviews.
A little good news for your Monday reading:
ECF October 2023 is now available to read at Project MUSE!
muse.jhu.edu/issue/51263
See the pictures for part of the table of contents.
Click the link to see the list of book reviews.
#18thCentury #WhatWeDo #ReadECF #C18th #18thC
An 18th-century engraving, a portrait of Colley Cibber. He sits in a chair with his left elbow reading on a side table. He holds a paper in his left hand and a quill in his right hand. He wears a white curly wig on his head and a velvet overcoat with many buttons. A young woman stands on his right side and she has her right hand on the feather quill pen in his hand.
Abstract: While eighteenth-century actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber is most frequently discussed within the context of sentimental comedy, this article addresses the comedian’s writing for and about the tragic stage. The neoclassical establishment consistently argued for the propriety of tragedy; however, actor and manager Cibber in his 1740 autobiography makes a case for the ludic qualities of successful tragic performance which, he insists, produces pleasure not tied to moral improvement. Moreover, Cibber embraces, rather than bemoans, the destabilization of social hierarchies that attends confessed generic hybridity. In an analysis of the comic burlesque The Rival Queans, a parody of Nathaniel Lee’s earlier tragedy The Rival Queens, I show how Cibber’s tragic stage was less concerned with categories of masculinity and femininity than in the sheer fluidity of gender...
ECF publishes on theatre too!
Read ECF at Project MUSE online:
"A Comedian on Tragedy: Colley Cibber’s /Apology/ and /The Rival Queans/," by Vivian L. Davis muse.jhu.edu/article/550612
#18thCentury #C18th #18thC
#ReadECF #TheaterStudies
A Wayback Wednesday post to 2014.
I love that #readecf applies to both the amazing @ECFjournal and to me (ECF, AKA Emily Clare Friedman)
