Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire is a provocative intervention that extends considerably the parameters of on-going dialogues about British identity during the Enlightenment. Thoughtfully interdisciplinary and with an allegiance to the culture which literary production engenders, this book describes how British identity emerges not despite of but due to its fluid, volatile, and subversive impulses and expressions. The imperial establishment—codified in the logics of the corporation, the academy, the cathedral, the theater, as well the private parlor or garden—derives its power and sustainability from scripting and then championing a solid resistance to precisely those subversive elements which threaten or undermine the foundations of order and liberalism in civil society. Choudhury argues that imperial Britain can best be understood in terms of this culture’s investment in spatial alignments which celebrated a radial interface with remote points of commercial interest. The volume contends Daniel Defoe, Arthur Onslow, David Garrick, Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, Hans Sloane, Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson, Charles Burney, George Frideric Handel were not merely part of a dazzling line-up of the architects of empire. In retrospect, their contributions and various engagements reflect remarkably modern patterns of the corporatization of culture and this culture’s dependence on, and thus its collusion with, commerce.

The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world.

This book interrogates and historicises eighteenth-century British women writers’ responses to India through the novel and travel writing to bring out the polyvalent space arising out of their complex negotiation with the colonial discourse. Though British women enjoyed their privileged racial status as the utilisers of colonial riches, they articulated their voice of dissent when they faced the politics of subordination in their own society and identified them with the marginalised status of the colonised Indians. This brings out the complicity and critique of the colonial discourse of British women writers and foregrounds their ambivalent responses to the colonial project. This book provides detailed textual analysis of the works of Phebe Gibbes, Elizabeth Hamilton, Lady Morgan, Jemima Kindersley and Eliza Fay through critical insights from the idea of the Enlightenment, postcolonial theory and feminist thought. It also foregrounds new perspectives to colonial discourse vis-à-vis the representation of India by locating the dialogic strain within the British narratives about India.

1650-1850 combines fresh considerations of prominent authors and artists with searches for overlooked or offbeat elements of the Enlightenment legacy. Volume 27 expands around a landmark special feature on worlds and worldmaking--on the imagining of new, exotic, unexplored, ideal, and utopian worlds ranging from south sea islands to polar utopias to zones of intercultural encounter to the conjectural territories of interpretive cartography. Enlivening the volume is a cavalcade of full-length book reviews.

This book relocates the long life and literary career of the poet, playwright, novelist, philanthropist and teacher Hannah More (1745-1833) in the wider social and cultural contexts that shaped her, and which she helped shape in turn. One of the most influential writers and campaigners of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, More’s reputation has suffered unfairly from accusations of paternalism and provincialism, and misunderstandings of her sincerely-held but now increasingly unfamiliar evangelical beliefs. Now, in this book, readers can explore a range of essays rooted in up-to-the-minute research which examines newly-recovered archival materials and other evidence in order to present the fullest picture yet of this complex and compelling author, and the era she helped mould with her words.

This is the first collection of essays since George Sherburn’s landmark monograph The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934) to reconsider how the most important and influential poet of eighteenth-century Britain fashioned his early career. The volume covers Pope’s writings from across the reign of Queen Anne and just beyond. It focuses, in particular, on his interaction with the courtly culture constellated round the Queen. It examines, for instance, his representations of Queen Anne herself, his portrayals of politics and patronage under her reign, his negotiations with current literary theory, with the classical tradition, with chronologically distant yet also contemporaneous English poets, with current thought on the passions, and with membership of a religious minority. In doing so, it comprehensively reconsiders anew the ways in which Pope, increasingly supportive of Anne’s rule and mindful of the Virgilian rota, sought at first to realise his authorial aspirations.

Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice argues that Riccoboni is among the most significant women writers of the French Enlightenment due to her "epistolary feminism". Locating its source in her first novel Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757), between fact and fiction, public and private, Marijn S. Kaplan provides new evidence supporting both the novel’s autobiography theory and de Maillebois hypothesis. Kaplan then traces how Riccoboni progressively develops a proto-feminist poetics of voice in her epistolary fiction, empowering women to resist patriarchal efforts to silence and appropriate them, which culminates in her final novel Lettres de Milord Rivers (1777). In nineteen relatively unknown letters (included, with translations) written over three decades to her publisher Humblot, several editors, Diderot, Laclos, Philip Thicknesse etc., Riccoboni is shown similarly to defend her oeuvre, her reputation, and her authority as a woman (writer), refusing to be manipulated and silenced by men.

Eliza Haywood was one of the most prolific English writers in the Age of the Enlightenment. Her career, from Love in Excess (1719) to her last completed project The Invisible Spy (1755) spanned the gamut of genres: novels, plays, advice manuals, periodicals, propaganda, satire, and translations. Haywood’s importance in the development of the novel is now well-known. A Spy on Eliza Haywood links this with her work in the other genres in which she published at least one volume a year throughout her life, demonstrating how she contributed substantially to making women’s writing a locus of debate that had to be taken seriously by contemporary readers, as well as now by current scholars of political, moral, and social enquiries into the eighteenth century. Haywood’s work is essential to the study of eighteenth-century literature and this collection of essays continues the growing scholarship on this most important of women writers.

This essay collection examines one of the most fearsome, fascinating, and hotly-discussed topics of the long eighteenth century: masculinity compromised. During this timespan, there was hardly a literary or artistic genre that did not feature unmanning regularly and prominently: from harrowing tales of castrations in medical treatises, to emasculated husbands in stage comedies, to sympathetic and powerful eunuchs in prose fiction, to glorious operatic performances by castrati in Italy, to humorous depictions in caricature and satirical paintings, to fearsome descriptions of Eastern eunuchs in travel narratives, to foolish and impotent old men who became a mainstay in drama. Not only does this unprecedented study of unmanning (in all of its varied forms) illustrate the sheer prevalence of a trope that featured prominently across literary and artistic genres, but it also demonstrates the ways diminished masculinity reflected some of the most strongly-held anxieties, interests, and values of eighteenth-century Britons.

Between 1660 and 1820, Great Britain experienced significant structural transformations in class, politics, economy, print, and writing that produced new and varied spaces and with them, new and reconfigured concepts of gender. In mapping the relationship between gender and space in British literature of the period, this collection defines, charts, and explores new cartographies, both geographic and figurative. The contributors take up a variety of genres and discursive frameworks from this period, including poetry, the early novel, letters, and laboratory notebooks written by authors ranging from Aphra Behn, Hortense Mancini, and Isaac Newton to Frances Burney and Germaine de Staël. Arranged in three groups, Inside, Outside, and Borderlands, the essays conduct targeted literary analysis and explore the changing relationship between gender and different kinds of spaces in the long eighteenth century. In addition, a set of essays on Charlotte Smith’s novels and a set of essays on natural philosophy offer case studies for exploring issues of gender and space within larger fields, such as an author’s oeuvre or a particular discourse. Taken together, the essays demonstrate space’s agency as a complement to historical change as they explore how literature delineates the gendered redefinition, occupation, negotiation, inscription, and creation of new spaces, crucially contributing to the construction of new cartographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.