Introduction

In this issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, we are pleased to publish four ground-breaking articles that offer new findings based on careful research and deft critical reading. Each of the four articles explores English texts and contexts, ranging in time from the years leading up to the English Civil War to the early eighteenth century. Novels, secret histories, letters, and economic tracts are all discussed and analyzed using a variety of cultural studies approaches. These scholarly contributions will all be of interest to specialists in the long eighteenth century and, in particular, to those who are interested in the intersection of political, economic, and literary concerns during that time.

Lauren Miskin’s article, “‘True Indian Muslin’ and the Politics of Consumption in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey,” extends its contextualizations beyond the shores of Britain to reveal a crucial linkage between Austen’s novel and the imperial economy that connected British consumers to the textile industry in India. Miskin’s innovative interpretation of Northanger Abbey (1817) asks us to consider the social signification of muslin in ways that reveal fascinating connections between the policing of both gender and empire. In particular, Miskin demonstrates how, in Austen’s novel, Henry Tilney’s “paternalistic surveillance of women’s fashion . . . replicates the British Empire’s regulation of India’s textile industry” (page 5).

The next contribution to this issue also makes apparent the interconnections between economics, gender politics, and sexuality in early modern British culture. Sharon Smith, in “Defoe’s The Complete English Tradesman and the Prostitute Narrative: Minding the Shop in Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn, Sally Salisbury, and Roxana,” argues that, following the South Sea Bubble collapse in 1720, British cultural production exhibited an insecurity about trade that Defoe attempts to address in his Complete English Tradesman (1726). Smith reveals the ways in which Defoe’s compensatory construction of a masculine mercantile ideal relied on a popular literary genre, the prostitution narrative, and in doing so, built that masculine ideal on a feminine foundation. This astonishing gender shift came about, according to Smith, when Defoe took an archetype of of feminine moral corruption and turned it into the figure of the male tradesman who must learn to cope with a risky economic environment by properly “minding the shop.” This unstable gendering of the commercial subject came about when certain characteristics of the prostitutes found in texts like Defoe’s own Roxana (1724) (mainly their ability to attain self-mastery, but also the constant threat posed to that self-discipline by the potential for passion) became the basis for a masculine model.

Erin Keating’s article, “In the Bedroom of the King: Affective Politics in the Restoration Secret History,” also pays attention to trangressive sexual behavior— this time, the amatory exploits of the British aristocracy as they were represented in secret history texts like Sébastien Brémond’s Hattigé and the anonymous The Perplex’d Prince that were written during the 1670s and 1680s at the time of the Exclusion Crisis. Keating’s analyses do not simply connect romance plot to political event. Rather, they show how the secret histories of this era functioned more broadly to produce, within a community of their readers, a new understanding of the British subject’s relationship to their rulers. Keating skillfully demonstrates that “surface propaganda” was perhaps not as important as the deeper political effects of these works— in particular, how they encouraged readers to judge their political leaders in new, more intimate ways.

The fourth and final article in this issue is Jennifer Heller’s “Material Goods in Brilliana Harley’s Letters,” a detailed look at the material practices of letter-writing and gift-giving, as carried out by Brilliana Harley during the initial phase of the English Revolution. While her son, Edward Harley, was attending Oxford University, he received many letters from his mother that were accompanied by material goods, including meat pies, books, gloves, and other tokens. Heller reconstructs the complex political and affective signification of this dual correspondence in words and things, making it clear that these objects were imbued with moral and familial meanings and purposes. Heller’s astute account...