Editor’s Note

The forty-second volume of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture gathers together articles on material culture, the visual arts, science and ecology, letter writing, literature, opera, and the stage from the 1660s to the 1820s in Britain, Europe, the Americas, and China. Particular topics range widely, from Don Giovanni and the Jesuits to Chinese depictions of Europe, from French scenes of anthropomorphic animals to English Restoration dramas of Aztec warriors sporting feathered crowns, from Chateaubriand’s ecological reveries in North America to Jane Austen’s usage of land enclosure as a gendered metaphor.

Working with such a broad and diverse array of topics is one of the pleasures of editing annual volumes for scholarly societies. And though a volume of such breadth and diversity may initially seem a collection of thirteen separate concerns, in the process of receiving readers’ reports and culling submissions, thematic and interpretive connections emerge that link the essays together in multiple ways. Many articles share topical concerns as their titles indicate, including gender, literature, visual culture, and the stage. Several reference the same figures of the long eighteenth century, whether Rousseau or Chateaubriand, the restored Stuart monarchs or Jane Austen. But in addition to the explicit shared concerns from essay to essay, there are also intriguing and more subtle underlying themes and concerns that link the essays to one another.

Several authors here share an interest in cultural encounter and exchange. Ana Elena González-Treviño analyzes the depiction of monarchy, including the symbols of the crown and of headdresses, in Restoration “Indian” plays. Fascinated by the seeming exotic nature of Aztecs and other indigenous American civilizations, John Dryden and other playwrights invoked American “others” to imaginatively depict the returned Stuart kings. While linking noble, feathered kings to Charles II and James II might establish Stuart rule as “natural,” it also had the power to raise questions about how civilized—or savage—the restored monarchy might be. Kristina Kleutghen, an art historian of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) explores the rise of “European” style gardens, paintings, and theatrical stages in the Chinese court. Though the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione introduced such western European techniques as linear perspective and illusionistic visual devices to his Qing patrons, the Chinese adopted these techniques and depicted Europe on their own terms. Whereas lessons in western visual and theatrical techniques might lend themselves to asserting European authority, Kleutghen illuminates how instead the Qing emperors used the western “other” to reinforce the centrality of Chinese values and visions.

Annie Smart analyzes cultural contact by exploring François-Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand’s depictions of American flora and fauna. While his contemporaries scrutinized whether he had actually witnessed firsthand what he described, later historians and literary critics emphasized Chateaubriand’s poetic, but ultimately exotic and alien depictions of the North America wilderness. Smart takes a different approach here by applying E. O. Wilson’s concept of “biophilia”—the deep human attraction to the natural world—to explore Chateaubriand’s narrative position as rooted in rather than alienated from the natural world. She finds that “the North American wilderness might be exotically other, but it is an otherness that envelops us: an otherness that brings us to one-ness, instead of accentuating the division between European self and exotic other.” (146)

González-Treviño, Kleutghen, and Smart share an interest in the problem of not only cultural contact, but also translation, as do others authors in this volume who interrogate eighteenth-century questions of whether a concept or experience can be understood fully across linguistic, cultural, and temporal divides. Laura Miller, for example, explores the several English-and French-language translations of the Italian popular book for women: Il Newtonianismo per le Dame. In addition to analyzing how English translators dealt with the text’s Italian features—for instance, the use of love and romance as metaphorical examples—Miller also examines the more fundamental problem of translating Newton’s theories into everyday spoken languages, especially when eighteenth-century publishers and editors presumed that a female audience could best understand such Newton laws of “attraction” through the language of love and romantic desire.

Hector Reyes analyzes...