Editor’s Note

The Pageant of Enlightenment

Although mythic tradition has obscured the origins of the cornucopia, with some saying that it owes to the strength of the infant Zeus and others ascribing the icon to a struggle between Hercules and a river god, the symbolic link between the horn of plenty and the earth goddess Demeter, that giver of splendid gifts as the Homeric hymn calls her, remains perfectly clear. Prompted by the joyful return of her daughter Persephone, so goes the myth, Demeter displays her generosity by providing an abundant harvest. Ancient Greece celebrated her yearly bounty with a vast annual procession followed by weeklong rituals of regeneration and renewal. The cornucopia becomes her special attribute as a result, and it also seems an appropriate symbol for the gathering of essays that follow, representing the best work of members of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies as read before the various meetings of the society and its affiliates from 2010 to 2012. Published in the spring to coincide with the annual conference, the collection typically offers a wealth of learning sifted and winnowed by an expert team of editorial readers and overseen by an able editorial board.

Several essays share an interest in popular culture, whether centered in Berkeley’s tar-water panacea, the narrative uses of personal anecdote, the chanson populaire as a focus of crowd consciousness, or contemporary film adaptations of period classics. The opening contribution of Paula R. Backscheider asks readers to entertain a certain continuity between popular pageantry and theatrical stagecraft, much as in the comic print accompanying her essay that shows John Rich entering Covent Garden theatre. The repeated use of sets and machinery in the London playhouses, she argues, provided women playwrights with an unexpected means of calling patriarchal authority into question. Backscheider’s article ranges across a full century of theatrical farce from Aphra Behn, who uses the same scenery earlier employed by Dryden to radically different ends, to Elizabeth Inchbald, who will often stage a mini-procession to launch a political point. The feature is one among many others that the author calls “genre jolts” (22), theatrical moments that suddenly alert an audience to pay particular attention. Other essays share the aim of rescuing neglected authors from hasty critical assessment. In Sarah B. Stein’s recuperative study of John Dennis, for example, the act of biblical translation is understood to bridge a gap between the classical sublime of Longinus and Christian belief. Mediated by passion and reason, Dennis’s theory and practice of translation becomes an interpretive guide to his entire critical program. Ann Campbell next takes up the surrogate family structures of Moll Flanders, where the mercenary adhockery of the heroine stands markedly at odds with the spiritual advice that Defoe gives in The Family Instructor and elsewhere. Campbell goes on to argue that the accumulation of personal capital largely determines the affective arc of the novel. Drawing upon the imaginative pleasures described by Addison in the Spectator, Patricia Comitini addresses the interplay of ideology and aesthetics in Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina. The claim is that the novella activates forms of imaginative pleasure by aligning the senses with the understanding, and textuality with desire, in newly emergent ways, so that Haywood gives us a rare opportunity to catch aesthetic ideology on the rise.

In her essay on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden records a popular festival that Rousseau describes in some detail before turning to Robert Darnton’s Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris, with its influential treatment of the mid-century Affair of the Fourteen. The arrest of ordinary citizens for ridiculing the royal court in song and verse not only reveals popular networks of collaborative composition, she suggests, but also recalls those demotic occasions through which seditious songs would circulate, occasions that in turn inform Rousseau’s writing about music in society. In another treatment of authorial recuperation, Joanne E. Myers invites us to think about Bishop Berkeley’s promotion of tar water in Siris as a complex sign of the bodily mediation of the divine rather than as an aberrant fit of enthusiasm in an otherwise...