Project MUSE®: The Eighteenth Century - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Eighteenth Century.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 47 (2006) through current issueLatest Articles: The Eighteenth CenturyTWOProject MUSE®The Eighteenth Century1935-02010193-5380Latest articles in The Eighteenth Century. Feed provided by Project MUSE®"Where is Earth?": Reading Global Vision and the View from Nowhere in Edward Young's Night Thoughts and William Blake's The Four Zoas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987267
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On several occasions in his nine-book poem The Complaint: Or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (published in series between 1742 and 1746), Edward Young imagines viewing the terrestrial globe from afar. The poem comprises a series of desultory musings on death, morality, and Christianity, apparently occasioned by the deaths of three of Young's loved ones. Young's frequent projections of global vision hinge on a cognitive leap brought about by a shift in spatial scale, as the poem's speaker courts an abstract "view from nowhere" from which to reappraise the condition of earthly existence. The phrase "view from nowhere" was coined by philosopher Thomas Nagel in his influential book by this name. Nagel's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmall"Where is Earth?": Reading Global Vision and the View from Nowhere in Edward Young's Night Thoughts and William Blake's The Four Zoas2026-04-07text/htmlen-US"Where is Earth?": Reading Global Vision and the View from Nowhere in Edward Young's Night Thoughts and William Blake's The Four Zoas2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®976242026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Textual Resurrection: Suicidal Women in Eighteenth-Century Media
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987268
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In the eighteenth century, a particular confluence of literary and sociopolitical trends contributed to a profusion of texts depicting, anticipating, exculpating, and condemning one of the most singularly human acts: suicide. The topic captured the public's attention, manifesting in texts that range from Joseph Addison's Cato, a Tragedy (1713) to Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), and achieved a sort of aesthetic culmination in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774, translated into English in 1779). While fictional and philosophical accounts of suicide may have dominated the public discourse in ways that strike the modern critic's attention, actual suicide notes functioned
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallTextual Resurrection: Suicidal Women in Eighteenth-Century Media2026-04-07text/htmlen-USTextual Resurrection: Suicidal Women in Eighteenth-Century Media2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®1038852026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Poor Humor Will Prevail: Coping with the Cruel Comedy of The Rape of the Lock
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987269
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If the structure of The Rape of the Lock (1712–17) as mock-epic involves the "comic inflation" of emotional situations to make visible how said situations are "already inflated … beyond [their] true value," the question is how to think of the gendered violence against Belinda when it is depicted through and within this confounding structure.1 Does the comedy necessarily bracket the assault within a jeering mockery of her "overreaction"?2 Or do its epic overtones more sympathetically admit a "new definition of female heroism"?3 Implicit in both interpretations is the assumption that humor is incompatible with sympathy—a reasonable assumption, given that one particular cruelty to rape jokes is how the trivialization
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallPoor Humor Will Prevail: Coping with the Cruel Comedy of The Rape of the Lock2026-04-07text/htmlen-USPoor Humor Will Prevail: Coping with the Cruel Comedy of The Rape of the Lock2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®1185622026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Credible Simulations: Translation, Fictionality, and Realism in Defoe's Fictions
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987270
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Early in his travels, Robinson Crusoe finds himself on a nameless island somewhere off the coast of West Africa where he encounters an odd spectacle, leaving him momentarily unable to distinguish if it is "usual" or "strange." As he and Xury near the shore, he observes
two mighty creatures one pursuing the other, (as we took it) with great fury, from the mountains towards the sea; whether it was the male pursuing the female, or whether they were in sport or in rage, we could not tell, any more than we could tell whether it was usual or strange but I believe it was the latter.1
This brief experience of bewilderment is quickly followed by another instance of momentary disorientation: when one of the animals begins
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallCredible Simulations: Translation, Fictionality, and Realism in Defoe's Fictions2026-04-07text/htmlen-USCredible Simulations: Translation, Fictionality, and Realism in Defoe's Fictions2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®1311282026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07The Will and Representation: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987271
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In a 1977 BBC interview, the philosopher Bryan Magee asked Iris Murdoch to reflect on her dual vocations as novelist and philosopher, and to discuss, more broadly, her understanding of the relationship between literature and philosophy. Murdoch responded that literature and philosophy are related but distinct activities. They are both "truth-seeking and truth-revealing," but "Art is cognition in a different mode."1 Philosophy, she elaborated, "aims to clarify and explain," while literature "is full of tricks and magic and deliberate mystification." When Magee observed that Murdoch's prose style was markedly different in her literary and philosophical writings, Murdoch agreed. The novelist, she argued, "has an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallThe Will and Representation: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives2026-04-07text/htmlen-USThe Will and Representation: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®323952026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07The True, Blazing History of the Porter Sisters
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987272
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A triumph of archival patience and perseverance over more than a decade, Devoney Looser's Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës (Bloomsbury, 2022) draws from thousands of letters and more than two dozen literary works to tell a remarkable story of the once internationally celebrated writing lives of Jane and Anna Maria Porter. Looser crafts a compelling narrative of the intertwined and mutually dependent careers of these two ambitious women whom we quickly come to see as brilliantly talented, psychologically complex writers whose loving and supportive sisterhood provides the deepest core commitment of their shared lives. Near constant drama emerges from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallThe True, Blazing History of the Porter Sisters2026-04-07text/htmlen-USThe True, Blazing History of the Porter Sisters2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®142712026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Revising Botanical Narratives
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987273
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Melissa Bailes's Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750–1830 (Virginia, 2023) is a deft and insightful study of the intersections of scientific and literary discourse during the transitional years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With a capacious approach to scientific literature, Bailes assesses an impressive diversity of texts, authors, and genres of production to examine the connections between sensibility, botany, and literary authority—thus building remarkably upon her first monograph, Questioning Nature (Virginia, 2017).By examining naturalist tracts, poetry, prose fiction, personal correspondence, aesthetic and literary theory, as well
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallRevising Botanical Narratives2026-04-07text/htmlen-USRevising Botanical Narratives2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®170522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Paying Attention to the Small Things
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987274
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In Bill Lepp's children's book, the greedy King Normous finds his dreams of expanding his empire foiled by a revolt of all things small, by "lights unlit, scarves unknit." Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin's collection of seventeen essays, Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature (Cambridge, 2022), may have a very different audience and fewer rhymed couplets, but it too reminds readers "that small things are all too frequently overlooked" and we should recognize their power, or, in academic terms, we must "grapple with the contours of their intimate and political complexities" (1). As the introduction outlines, it is important to think not of small objects
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallPaying Attention to the Small Things2026-04-07text/htmlen-USPaying Attention to the Small Things2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®129202026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Coauthoring the Enlightenment: China, Occult Sciences, and Global Modernity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987275
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With the convergence of postcolonialism and the cultural studies of science and technology since the 1980s, much critical attention has been paid to the cross-cultural exchanges of scientific knowledge and their impact on global modernity. To deconstruct the myth of "Western science," many critics believe it is crucial to dismantle the Enlightenment as both a cornerstone of European modernity and a monument of human progress. In recent decades, scholars have explored the global genealogies of Enlightenment sciences to mount a critique of Eurocentrism inherent in the production of scientific knowledge. Given China's prominent presence in eighteenth-century Europe, critics have examined China's contributions to the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallCoauthoring the Enlightenment: China, Occult Sciences, and Global Modernity2026-04-07text/htmlen-USCoauthoring the Enlightenment: China, Occult Sciences, and Global Modernity2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®232252026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07The Metropolitan Origins of Transatlantic Racial Slavery in the Late Seventeenth Century
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987276
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Scholars of transatlantic slavery have relied on newspaper advertisements as the main evidentiary basis for reconstructing the otherwise unknowable lives of the runaway African slaves described in them. That medium is both a blessing and a curse: it offers a unique snapshot on how the enslaved resisted violent racist regimes, even as these stories of resistance are mediated by the dehumanizing discourse of lost property, theft, and bounty rewards. Because such ads proliferated after the development of printing in colonial Virginia, Carolina, Jamaica, and Barbados, with Boston cited as the earliest to print an escaped slave notice in a 1704 newspaper, the scholarly consensus has been that these places were where the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallThe Metropolitan Origins of Transatlantic Racial Slavery in the Late Seventeenth Century2026-04-07text/htmlen-USThe Metropolitan Origins of Transatlantic Racial Slavery in the Late Seventeenth Century2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®164632026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Tailored Swift: Taking the Measure of the Man
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987277
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Thomas Lockwood's remarkable new biography The Life of Jonathan Swift (Wiley Blackwell, 2023) begins not on page one but in the opening lines of his preface with a shockingly mundane and almost embarrassing portrait of Swift stripped of his writings: "Swift was an Irish Protestant clergyman of indifferent origins who rose up to the middle chambers of power in state and church—but as he himself would stipulate—no higher. He was born in Dublin and spent most of his life in Ireland, with only a few years in England. He never traveled elsewhere. The outward marks of his life would not distinguish him from many another secular clergyman belonging to this age of black gowns mingling comfortably in coffee houses and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallTailored Swift: Taking the Measure of the Man2026-04-07text/htmlen-USTailored Swift: Taking the Measure of the Man2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®157432026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Dour Postsecularism: Calvin and the Novel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987278
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When I taught at the University of Western Ontario, I would often joke with my students about their status as the "frozen chosen." Many of them came from local communities that had been settled by Scottish Presbyterians. When talking about Calvinism and eighteenth-century Britain, I let students know that they might be Calvinists at heart, whether or not they had attended church as children. In making these jokes, I was halfway to confirming the thesis of David Mark Diamond's study, Reading Character After Calvin: Secularization, Empire, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Virginia, 2024), which argues that secular culture is defined not by its rejection of religion but rather by its reconfiguration of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallDour Postsecularism: Calvin and the Novel2026-04-07text/htmlen-USDour Postsecularism: Calvin and the Novel2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®148872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987279
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LANCE BERTELSEN is Iris Howard Regents Professor in English Literature Emeritus at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture 1749–1764 (Clarendon, 1986) and Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). His essays appear in such journals as ELH, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Modern Philology, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Life, The Mariner's Mirror, and Southwest Review.ALISON CONWAY is Professor of English and Cultural Studies/Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Her most recent monograph is Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/364/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2026-04-07text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2026-04-072026TWOProject MUSE®80462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-07