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  • From the Editors
  • Bruce Boehrer, Thomas DiPiero, Devoney Looser, and Daniel Vitkus

The five essays in this issue of JEMCS address in one way or another different strategies for reading the material and social bodies. The first three articles detail approaches to reading and interpreting the human body in familiar and de-familiarized contexts, and the venues made foreign or exotic include the stage, the home, and the diseased human body. Emily Hodgson Anderson's "Revising Theatrical Conventions in A Simple Story: Elizabeth Inchbald's Ambiguous Performance" considers A Simple Story in light of both theatrical conventionality, in which players struck standardized poses to convey discrete emotions, and Inchbald's strategies for redefining emotional complexity. Anderson maintains that Inchbald sought out means to express ambivalence and ambiguity in emotional display, and relied on gesture over word in her narration to convey the density of feelings that have made her work so critically elusive. Geraldine Barnes takes up the shift in meanings of "curiosity" and "wonder" in her article "Curiosity, Wonder, and William Dampier's Painted Prince," in large part by looking at Jeoly, the royalty named in her title. William Dampier, traveler and natural scientist, brought the Spice Islands native back from his voyages, and Barnes considers the manners in which the prince's tattoos allowed him to be read, literally and figuratively, as both a curious commodity and a natural rarity. Embodied sensations and rhetorical slippages concern Elizabeth Goodhue in her essay on Laurence Sterne. "When Yorick Takes His Tea: Or, the Commerce of Consumptive Passions [End Page 1] in the Case of Laurence Sterne" examines how the writer's body appeared to incarnate both disease and sensibility in the eighteenth century. In Sterne's case, Goodhue maintains, the writer's tuberculosis mapped anxieties about consumption, incorporation, and the difficulty of determining what sustains the body and what threatens to destroy it.

Different cultural interpretations of the logic of the gift inform Cynthia Klekar's "'Prisoners in Silken Bonds': Obligation, Trade, and Diplomacy in English voyages to Japan and China." Klekar considers the gifts that English embassies to China bestowed on their hosts in order to initiate commercial relations, and she concludes that the Eurocentric idea of mutually beneficial trade prevented the English from recognizing the subtleties of tribute and subjugation packed into the gifts they bestowed upon the Chinese emperor. Competing conceptions of cultural authority become apparent in what seemed to the English to be a natural step in establishing commercial relations. Jeremy W. Webster brings current work on gender and sexual stereotypes to the eighteenth century in his "The Lustful Buggering Jew: Anti-Semitism, Gender, and Sodomy in Restoration Political Satire." Noting that the Exchange Crisis produced very particular anxieties concerning religion, Webster argues that the "lustful buggering Jew" figured English fears of Catholicism and tyranny, and that the sexually ambivalent Jew served as a metaphor for the court's political corruption, particularly in that such a sexual and religious outlaw could transgress traditional alliances and threaten women and men alike.

A portion of this issue's contents represents the work of winners of the recently established J. Douglas Canfield Award for Postgraduate Scholarship. The award, instituted to recognize excellence in scholarly writing among graduate students who give papers at the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies annual conference, entails a $250 cash prize, as well as publication in this journal. (Please see the notice about the competition on the GEMCS web site: english.fsu.edu/gemcs/awards.htm) The award is named for the late Professor Canfield, who taught English at the University of Arizona, published many books (one of them reviewed in this issue on pp. 130–32), and was a founding member of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies.

Doug—as many of us knew him—was an expert in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama. He was also an unforgettable fixture and friend to many at academic conferences, where his exuberance was as much in evidence as his generosity. Even after he became ill with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, he could be seen moving in and out of conference sessions, his oxygen tank trailing beside him. In addition to being a renowned scholar and...

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