Project MUSE®: Eighteenth-Century Fiction - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1988) through current issueLatest Articles: Eighteenth-Century FictionTWOProject MUSE®Eighteenth-Century Fiction1911-02430840-6286Latest articles in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Re-Matriating Cockacoeske: Indigenous Resistance, Bacon’s Rebellion, and Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986005
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Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter; or, The History of Bacon in Virginia (1690) is one of the first English plays set in the empire’s American colonies.1 Like much of Behn’s prolific oeuvre, the play depicts the challenges faced by English women within a patriarchal society, featuring two cross-dressed heroines. In this play, however, racial and class hierarchies within the colony add further tension to Behn’s standard gender politics. While the play was not a success in its day, this article builds on Heidi Hutner’s claim that The Widow Ranter represents a “crucial point of analysis for race and gender studies of the Restoration and early eighteenth century.”2 In the play, Behn’s nascent feminist theatrical techniques
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324/image/coversmallRe-Matriating Cockacoeske: Indigenous Resistance, Bacon’s Rebellion, and Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter2026-03-21text/htmlen-USRe-Matriating Cockacoeske: Indigenous Resistance, Bacon’s Rebellion, and Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®845252026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21“I shall leave my reader to Judge”: The Female Spectator as an Interpretive Model for The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986006
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In book XII of Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746), a letter from a reader criticizes the amount of time that English women spend with their “Milliners, Mantua-makers, and Tire-women.”1 Several issues later, in book XV, another reader responds with a counter-example shifting the focus to men, asking, “If we have our Milliners, Mantua-makers, and Tire-women to take up our Time, have they not their Taylors, Barbers; aye, and their Face-menders too, to engross as much of theirs?”2 The narrating eidolon of the periodical, the Female Spectator, takes the first letter, in book XII, seriously, saying that it makes a “just” proposal and responding to it at length (2:418). In contrast, she states that the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324/image/coversmall“I shall leave my reader to Judge”: The Female Spectator as an Interpretive Model for The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless2026-03-21text/htmlen-US“I shall leave my reader to Judge”: The Female Spectator as an Interpretive Model for The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®696052026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Satirizing British Diplomacy: Peter Pindar and Representations of Anglo-Chinese Encounter
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986007
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Dear Kien Long,At length an opportunity presents itself for conversing with the second Potentate upon earth, George the Third being most undoubtedly the fi\rst, although he never made verses. Thy praises of Moukden, thy beautiful little Ode to Tea, &c. have afforded me infinite delight; and to gain my plaudit, who am rather difficult to please, will, I assure thee, be a feather in thy imperial cap.1Writing on the eve of George, Lord Macartney’s embassy to China, satirist John Wolcot—better known by his pseudonym Peter Pindar—dedicates a series of poems to the Qianlong emperor.2 Yet, as the epistolary opening of Odes to Kien Long, The Present Emperor of China (1792) makes evident, Pindar obscures the directionality
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324/image/coversmallSatirizing British Diplomacy: Peter Pindar and Representations of Anglo-Chinese Encounter2026-03-21text/htmlen-USSatirizing British Diplomacy: Peter Pindar and Representations of Anglo-Chinese Encounter2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®1077152026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture by Dale Townshend (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986008
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Like the Gothic genre he shaped so profoundly, Matthew “Monk” Lewis was often snubbed by the literati of his day. The picture that emerges from Dale Townshend’s meticulous and fascinating study is of a great talent (so much so that even his fiercest critics tended to acknowledge it) reluctantly out of step with his time. As chapter 2, “The Accidental Provocateur,” details, the twenty-year-old author was so far from intending to scandalize the public with his explosive entry onto the literary scene that he spent the rest of his career trying to counter and atone for the accusations of irreligion, obscenity, and political radicalism that plagued The Monk (1796). For “high” Romanticism, Lewis’s work epitomized the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324/image/coversmallMatthew Gregory Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture by Dale Townshend (review)2026-03-21text/htmlen-USMatthew Gregory Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture by Dale Townshend (review)2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®109422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Gone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Nora Gilbert (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986009
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In Gone Girls, 1684–1901, Nora Gilbert centres the ubiquitous figure of the runaway female within the development both of the novel and of modern feminism. While Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction cogently argued that the private, middle-class domestic sphere depicted in fiction established that a woman’s place was in the home, Gilbert points out that these same novels frequently featured women who fled the home and sought agency beyond its walls. While, for decades, scholars have been writing about the trope of the “fallen women,” Gilbert turns our attention to “female characters ... who manage to run without falling” and novels that “paint female rebellion, resistance, and dissent in a daringly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324/image/coversmallGone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Nora Gilbert (review)2026-03-21text/htmlen-USGone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Nora Gilbert (review)2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®89112026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Writing Through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century: Age, Gender, and Work by Chantal LaVoie (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986010
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This book begins with a wonderfully understated definition from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: “Boyhood: The state of being a boy; the part of life in which we are boys. This is perhaps an arbitrary word.” Through six chapters focused on literary authors, including Laurence Sterne, Ellenore Fenn, and Jonathan Swift, and historical figures, including schoolboys, convicts, chimney sweeps, printer’s devils, and a Swiss automaton, Chantal Lavoie surveys boyhood in England in the long eighteenth century. In an important sense, the book’s central claim is that “boyhood” in all these forms is not in fact “an arbitrary word” but rather a coherent object of study—and one that will reward further investigation.It may seem
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324/image/coversmallWriting Through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century: Age, Gender, and Work by Chantal LaVoie (review)2026-03-21text/htmlen-USWriting Through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century: Age, Gender, and Work by Chantal LaVoie (review)2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®91402026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704–1894 by Louis Kirk McAuley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986011
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Louis McAuley’s fascinating study of empire writing from 1704 until, ostensibly, the present, centres on the idea of the transoceanic, adding it to the transatlantic in ways that offer compelling readings of key, if marginalized, colonial texts. McAuley’s work builds on the work of other environmental writers, including Rachel Carson, Michael Niblett, Tobias Menely, and Laura Wright, centring our gaze on invasive species of animals and plants as actuality and as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of the transoceanic world.In his readings of both Robinson Crusoe and the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, the focus on invasive species is profound. After perusing Defoe’s source texts for the novel, McAuley argues
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324/image/coversmallThe Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704–1894 by Louis Kirk McAuley (review)2026-03-21text/htmlen-USThe Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704–1894 by Louis Kirk McAuley (review)2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®99462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century by Ellen Malenas Ledoux (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986012
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Building on the established notion that elevating motherhood offered eighteenth-century women a socio-cultural authority otherwise denied them, Laboring Mothers explores both rhetorical constructions and real experiences of motherhood in the long eighteenth century. Ledoux traces two “vital, but perplexingly sometimes parallel, conversations about eighteenth-century women’s biological reproduction and economic production” (8). As is amply demonstrated throughout this comprehensive work, the labour of reproduction is often diminished and devalued in an increasingly capital-focused society, which required, and requires, women’s public participation to function. The book exhibits a fine attention to detail that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324/image/coversmallLaboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century by Ellen Malenas Ledoux (review)2026-03-21text/htmlen-USLaboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century by Ellen Malenas Ledoux (review)2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®90812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Reading with the Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, Performance by Sophie Coulombeau (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986013
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An obstacle for many histories of reading is a sparsity of material evidence. When evidence of readership does exist, it may be limited or even performative, yielding an incomplete picture of how a book might have been used. Should we trust a male reader whose correspondence swears disinterest in romance novels? Should we suppose that patrons of a circulating library obeyed documented rules prohibiting the altering or inscribing of loaned books? How does one rectify conflicting accounts of readership, even for the same reader?In Reading with the Burneys, Sophie Coulombeau proposes a way forward with what she calls “3D reading” (1). This interdisciplinary approach combines archival studies, literary criticism, book
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324/image/coversmallReading with the Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, Performance by Sophie Coulombeau (review)2026-03-21text/htmlen-USReading with the Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, Performance by Sophie Coulombeau (review)2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®97792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21Les Mémoires du Sieur Gaudence de Lucques [The Memoirs of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca, 1737] by Simon Berington (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986014
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M. Jean-Michel Racault has set himself no small task in newly translating and presenting the intelligent and ingeniously contrived utopian novel of Simon Berington (1679/80–1755), The Memoirs of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca. Broadly speaking, he assumes as translator—especially as first translator into French for over two hundred years—three responsibilities: first, to render Berington with complete accuracy and, in doing so, add nothing and take nothing away; second, to capture the spirit and tone of his work so that none of that shall be lost; and, third, to preserve not only the upper register but also the elegance of the language so that there shall be no diminution of literary merit. The overarching object must
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324/image/coversmallLes Mémoires du Sieur Gaudence de Lucques [The Memoirs of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca, 1737] by Simon Berington (review)2026-03-21text/htmlen-USLes Mémoires du Sieur Gaudence de Lucques [The Memoirs of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca, 1737] by Simon Berington (review)2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®111202026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21The Foresters by Elizabeth Gunning (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986015
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Elizabeth Gunning has not been a beneficiary of the renewed scholarly interest in Romantic-era women’s writing that began taking off in the 1990s. Although moderately successful in her own day (between 1794 and 1815, she published more than a dozen works, including novels, translations, plays, and children’s stories), The Foresters is the first of her books to appear in print since her lifetime. Edited by Valerie Grace Derbyshire for the University of Wales Press’s Gothic Originals series, this edition situates the novel in the context of Gunning’s career and, through detailed notes, shows how it draws on and contributes to the literary fashions of the day.The Foresters, originally published in 1796, was the third
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/324/image/coversmallThe Foresters by Elizabeth Gunning (review)2026-03-21text/htmlen-USThe Foresters by Elizabeth Gunning (review)2026-03-212026TWOProject MUSE®80912026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-03-21