Editor’s Note

Absence and Presence and Categories Between

What is in or not in a text or a visual experience? And what is the relationship between what is present and what is absent? These questions may seem more productive for the self-reflexive and theoretical projects of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries than the eighteenth. Yet, in fact, a range of questions about what is present, what is absent, what exists between the text and its context, what appears and disappears through movement, what is inside the frame and outside it, and what audiences make of the apparent, the absent, and the implied are among the themes that serendipitously and subtly link the eleven essays in this forty-first volume of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. While some of the authors in this collection explicitly employ theoretical models that address presence/absence, all of the contributors rely on and strongly enrich the historical, the material, the contextual, and the concrete. This is a collection that engages significant and sophisticated interpretive questions, but each essay does so, first and foremost, by examining texts, objects, other material phenomena, and historical conditions on their own terms.

This volume’s subjects are far-ranging, stretching from the Habsburg and Celtic fringes to London, Paris, and the early American Republic, representing work in art and architectural history, intellectual and cultural history, literature, media studies, gender studies, and more. Each essay of course offers fresh insights into its particular topic, whether Jonathan Swift or the German rococo, and each will naturally appeal to its respective specialist audience. But, perhaps by chance or by the power of the zeitgeist, these eleven essays, selected from a competitive pool of contenders, have become a coherent whole that is ultimately interconnected by shared methodological and thematic concerns that speak to a broad audience of eighteenth-century scholars.

Volume 41 is particularly fortunate to include three essays in visual studies. In her examination of the under-studied French female painter Marie-Éléonore Godefroid, whose group portrait of the Ney brothers illustrates this volume’s frontispiece, Jennifer Germann argues that visual cues and biographical clues can provide information that has the power to complicate or even subvert the overt subject matter of an image. Godefroid’s depiction of the Ney boys—presumably an obvious example of nascent male bonding through strictly masculine pursuits of militarism and political life—is, according to Germann, not simply or only a record of male homosocial relations. It is, surprisingly and paradoxically, evidence of female homosocial relations. By tracing familial, social, and institutional relationships in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, Germann uncovers the pivotal role that women played together when they forged alliances as artists and patrons, assistants and hostesses. Though visually absent from this portrait of men, women are pivotal in the construction of this painting and many others through their own homosocial ties, according to Germann.

Michael Yonan’s analysis of the Wieskirche, a pilgrimage church in southern Bavaria (constructed, 1745–1754), examines absence and presence as essential experiences in an intertwined architectural and theological strategy. Typically written off as gaudy and derivative of finer French examples, central European rococo churches, argues Yonan, were innovative and creative. The Wieskirche, for one, used the ornate, elaborate rococo as an essential, dynamic component in worship, spiritual renewal, and theological argument. While the Wieskirche’s seemingly derivative rococo may initially appear an overwhelming and meaningless display of everything all at once, Yonan reveals how everything is not entirely visible. Rather, components appear and recede in relation to one another as humans move through architectural spaces and view paintings, friezes, sculptures, and decorations framed, revealed, and occluded by one another. As one example, when worshipers walk through the ambulatories of the Wieskirche, paintings of miracles appear and disappear in relation to the rococo framing devices and architectural structures. The process of “walking and looking” that allows imagery to present itself and then disappear, Yonan argues, visually and experientially complements and embodies the Christian message and Catholic liturgical practices.

Sandro Jung’s work on the English illustrator, Thomas Stothard, explores a greatly over-looked textual form—the pricey illustrated pocket-diary of the late eighteenth...