Project MUSE®: Eighteenth-Century Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 29 (1995/96) through current issueLatest Articles: Eighteenth-Century StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Eighteenth-Century Studies1086-315X0013-2586Latest articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Books Received
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981566
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Books for review may be sent to Mark Vareschi, Reviews Editor, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Department of English, Helen C. White Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 600 N Park St., Madison, WI
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallBooks Received2026-02-03text/htmlen-USBooks Received2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®125552026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981565
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In her return to the essay form for the first time since A Map to the Door of No Return (2001) over two decades ago, Dionne Brand considers the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, which laid bare the fragility of whiteness as a longstanding cultural project of Western mythmaking. The fiction of "we," Brand notes, depends quite literally on the canonical literary fiction "we" consume, "a certain set of Euro or Anglo-American texts … that coalesces into whiteness, or the genre of the human whose precondition is whiteness" to which "we" turn in times of crisis (10). Salvage performs what Brand describes as a "forensics of how a reader is made" and "unmade"—an interrogation of "a reading life" salvaged from yet always
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallSalvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USSalvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®97472026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Prolific Ground: Landscape and British Women's Writing, 1690–1790 by Nicolle Jordan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981564
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Adorning the cover of Nicolle Jordan's book on landscape and British women's writing is a gloriously elegant landscape. Edward Haytley's Extensive View from the Terraces of Sandleford Priory (1754) depicts two of Prolific Ground's subjects—novelist Sarah Scott and her more famous sister, the Bluestocking hostess Elizabeth Montagu. Haytley depicts the two genteel women enjoying their pastoral leisure while some color-complementary laborers toil at a distance (there's a ha-ha between the ranks, to ensure no physical proximity). Visually pleasing but expressing problematic rank distinctions, Haytley's image illustrates perfectly the intersection of ownership, landscape aesthetics, and women's empowerment explored in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallProlific Ground: Landscape and British Women's Writing, 1690–1790 by Nicolle Jordan (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USProlific Ground: Landscape and British Women's Writing, 1690–1790 by Nicolle Jordan (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®106912026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Mere Bagatelles: Women's Diaries from Ireland, 1760–1810 by Amy Prendergast (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981563
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In this important monograph, Mere Bagatelles: Women's Diaries from Ire-land, 1760–1810, Amy Prendergast offers a detailed and meticulously researched account of personal diaries by an impressively extensive selection of elite Irish women of principally Anglo-Irish and Quaker religious backgrounds. Several of the diarists on whom Prendergast focuses will be familiar to researchers of eighteenth-century Ireland, either because they were also authors of published literary works (Dorothea Herbert, Mary Shackleton Leadbeater, Mary Tighe), or because their diaries and other papers were published after their deaths (Anne Jocelyn, Dorothea Johnson, Melesina Trench). Others will be familiar by association, as in the case of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallMere Bagatelles: Women's Diaries from Ireland, 1760–1810 by Amy Prendergast (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USMere Bagatelles: Women's Diaries from Ireland, 1760–1810 by Amy Prendergast (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®105792026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Writing Through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century: Age, Gender, and Work by Chantel Lavoie (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981562
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Chantel Lavoie's Writing Through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century: Age, Gender, and Work presents a variety of kinds of boyhood, where these different kinds of boyhoods serve as representatives of the various ways "boy" was defined based on their utility and complexity. Because of their unique proximity to patriarchal power, "Boys are a particular kind of currency, both valuable and expendable—valuable because of gender, expendable because of youth" (11). Ranging from the phases of boyhood (breeching and going away to school) to the various ways boys and boyhood were put to work (education, sweeping chimneys, criminality, and printing) Lavoie compellingly ranges through, as her title suggests, the cultural
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallWriting Through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century: Age, Gender, and Work by Chantel Lavoie (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USWriting Through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century: Age, Gender, and Work by Chantel Lavoie (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®99932026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children's Literature, 1762–1860 by Elizabeth Massa Hoiem (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981561
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In The Education of Things, Elizabeth Massa Hoiem invites us to take children's play seriously as a form of political action and as a practice of worldmaking. As her book compellingly shows, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British thinkers who wrote for and about children took this approach. The Education of Things offers new insight into the oft-theorized braiding of instruction with delight in Enlightenment pedagogies by attending to the central place of children's embodied engagement with the material culture of everyday life. By identifying this through-line in educational texts and developing the concept of "mechanical literacy" to interpret it, Hoiem offers generative ways of understanding children's
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallThe Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children's Literature, 1762–1860 by Elizabeth Massa Hoiem (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USThe Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children's Literature, 1762–1860 by Elizabeth Massa Hoiem (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®106752026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy: The Feminist Critique of Commercial Modernity by Catherine Packham (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981560
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Catherine Packham's study of Mary Wollstonecraft begins with the thought-provoking reminder that, upon its publication in 1792, the Analytical Review classified A Vindication of the Rights of Women as a work of political economy. This observation serves as a foundation for Packham's innovative and interdisciplinary exploration of Wollstonecraft's engagement with economic thought. As Packham notes, the term "political economy" was coined in 1615 by the French economist Antoine de Montchrétien; Enlightenment political economy often linked the study of economics with happiness, morality, and virtue. Fast forward to the very end of the eighteenth century, and as disciplines became more specialized, economics
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallMary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy: The Feminist Critique of Commercial Modernity by Catherine Packham (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USMary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy: The Feminist Critique of Commercial Modernity by Catherine Packham (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®99182026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Singing by Herself: Lonely Poets in the Long Eighteenth Century by Amelia Worsley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981559
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Singing by Herself echoes, and Amelia Worsley crafts echo chambers for the poems and for the affective states that are her subjects. In this study of long eighteenth-century poetry, defining the literary period from Milton to Keats, Worsley historicizes loneliness. Being lonely did not always denote our modern sense of alienation, a self-referential and solipsistic feeling, but rather could refer to a state of "expansiveness, disembodiment, dispersal, and an echoic multiplication of voices that allowed for an openness to imagined community with other lonely figures and voices across space and time" (x). This redefinition, Worsley finds, is an echo of a specifically poetic tradition of female complaint and can be
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallSinging by Herself: Lonely Poets in the Long Eighteenth Century by Amelia Worsley (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USSinging by Herself: Lonely Poets in the Long Eighteenth Century by Amelia Worsley (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®96882026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Heather Meek (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981558
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Heather Meek's Reimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain situates the lives and works of six literary women in the medical dialogues and debates of the long eighteenth century. Each chapter focuses on a single writer and a corresponding category of illness: Jane Barker and hysterical affliction, Anne Finch and melancholy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and smallpox, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi and maternity-related illnesses, Mary Wollstonecraft and consumption, and Frances Burney and breast cancer. Not only do these narratives of illness in the genres of poetry, fiction, autobiography, and epistolary writing give insight into the gendered experience of suffering, they also demonstrate
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallReimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Heather Meek (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USReimagining Illness: Women Writers and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Heather Meek (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®93642026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03The Apothecary's Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity by Karen Bloom Gevirtz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981557
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Karen Bloom Gevirtz's The Apothecary's Wife is a delightful read; while argument driven, it manages to be both informative and entertaining. Gevirtz provides a clear account of how what we now accept as a market-driven medical world full of experts, chemically-derived medications, and a hard distinction between physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists came to be. This is a book everyone should read in our current moment of waning confidence in medical care and eugenic thinking, which is sometimes presented under the guise of "alternative" approaches to health. Contemporary dissatisfaction with the medical world we inhabit has its roots, as Gevirtz demonstrates, in the creation of medicine as a proprietary commodity
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallThe Apothecary's Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity by Karen Bloom Gevirtz (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USThe Apothecary's Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity by Karen Bloom Gevirtz (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®97132026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear, and Accessories in the Late 18th-Century Atlantic World by Elisabeth Gernerd (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981556
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Elisabeth Gernerd's The Modern Venus is an engaging and insightful study of eighteenth-century fashion from the perspective of the items we often overlook due to their size or due to their unseen presence beneath folds of fabric. Shifting our view away from the greater gown, The Modern Venus draws our eyes to how accessories and underwear, which are typically ranked as secondary in the hierarchy of fashion, were essential to the material and cultural conventions of fashion. Taking its title from Mary Hoare's drawing of A Modern Venus—or—a Lady of the Present Fashion in the State of Nature (1785), which depicts a naked white woman with the large breasts, tiny waist, and large buttocks that her fashionable
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallThe Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear, and Accessories in the Late 18th-Century Atlantic World by Elisabeth Gernerd (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USThe Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear, and Accessories in the Late 18th-Century Atlantic World by Elisabeth Gernerd (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®88832026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Novels, Needleworks and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Chloe Wigston Smith (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981555
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What does it mean to make a world out of cloth and thread? The question is both a literal (and literary) and figurative one in Chloe Wigston's Smith's creative, provocative Novels, Needleworks and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Smith places handicrafts made by women and girls of diverse backgrounds within the same interpretive frame as works of fiction that circulated in the early modern Atlantic. Positing that these "entangled" cultural forms at once reflected and produced the entanglements of slavery, colonialism, and empire within domestic settings, she exposes the "mutual and overlapping conversations" (27) between novels and needleworks, just as the title indicates. By
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallNovels, Needleworks and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Chloe Wigston Smith (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USNovels, Needleworks and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Chloe Wigston Smith (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®95082026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981554
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To read Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes is to linger in quiet acts of regard—to linger with the everyday moments and scenes in Black life, the singular words and phrases of Black study, the moments and possibilities of Black beauty in spite of anti-Black violence. Organized across eight sections structured as examples, definitions, and responses to "ordinary" and "note," the book includes 248 notes that range in length from several paragraphs to a single sentence. In spare and haunting prose, she probes a series of topics, always framed by what In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) calls "the continuous and changing present of slavery's as yet unresolved unfolding" (14). Put differently, Ordinary Notes
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallOrdinary Notes by Christina Sharpe (review)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USOrdinary Notes by Christina Sharpe (review)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®100472026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Four Feminist Principles for Teaching and Editing Eighteenth-Century "Content" in a Capitalist Ruins (1755–2026)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981553
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"Amidst the present glut of … papers, it may seem an odd attempt in a woman to think of adding to the number; but as most of them, like summer insects, just make their appearance, and are gone; I see no reason why I may not buz[z] amongst them a little.""And when their eyes eventually adjusted to the dark, … they saw … thousands and thousands of bees … they made a home in there, they're making honey in the dark, she said."We begin this essay in true periodical form: with a temporal and semiotic juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is a powerful tool that eighteenth-century and present-day literary journalists, editors, and teachers use when creating gentle provocations that we hope may lead others to new ideas or different
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallFour Feminist Principles for Teaching and Editing Eighteenth-Century "Content" in a Capitalist Ruins (1755–2026)2026-02-03text/htmlen-USFour Feminist Principles for Teaching and Editing Eighteenth-Century "Content" in a Capitalist Ruins (1755–2026)2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®381262026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Early Social Media, Women, and Teaching the Eighteenth-Century Magazine
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981552
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It has been fourteen years since Manushag Powell offered an important and incisive assessment of the state of eighteenth-century periodical studies by asserting that "the field desperately requires a major expansion of its canon; the disparity between the enormity of periodical subjects and the paucity of periodical titles that come in for regular study is untenable."1 While scholarly writing continues to widen its focus, expanding both the range of periodicals to be taught and the ways in which those periodicals are integrated into courses that aim to introduce students to this varied and vibrant period in British literature will continue these efforts. Discovering the roles that women and non-binary people played
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallEarly Social Media, Women, and Teaching the Eighteenth-Century Magazine2026-02-03text/htmlen-USEarly Social Media, Women, and Teaching the Eighteenth-Century Magazine2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®273432026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Diversity is a Commitment, Not a Checkbox
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981551
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This essay is about the gap between stating a commitment to diversity in teaching and actually committing. My argument is deceptively straightforward: works by women and historically marginalized writers ought to be central to our literature courses. By "central," I mean that these works must not constitute simple diversity checkboxes, but rather should be embedded in the structure and unfolding of our courses. Moreover, they should be made integral to introductory and survey courses rather than just appearing in specialized seminars (though such seminars remain important as correctives to historical underrepresentation).I say "deceptively" because although this argument is straightforward, one still encounters
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallDiversity is a Commitment, Not a Checkbox2026-02-03text/htmlen-USDiversity is a Commitment, Not a Checkbox2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®246422026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Conversations that Shape Identity: What Eighteenth-Century Italian Salonnières Can Teach Modern Students
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981550
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Why would twenty-first-century students be interested in eighteenth-century salonnières and salon culture? This question arose when students enthusiastically answered my call for an undergraduate research assistant to work on my book manuscript "Fashioning Italian Women, Fashioning a Nation (1780s–1860s)." Florida State University (FSU) has an established Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) that allows selected first- and second-year students to help faculty members with their research projects. By shadowing a faculty member, they learn how to develop their research agenda and skills. The year-long experience culminates in the UROP symposium, where students showcase their research in poster format.My
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallConversations that Shape Identity: What Eighteenth-Century Italian Salonnières Can Teach Modern Students2026-02-03text/htmlen-USConversations that Shape Identity: What Eighteenth-Century Italian Salonnières Can Teach Modern Students2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®323162026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03The Eighteenth-Century Musical Salon Hostess as a Model for Academic Leaders
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981549
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In her writings from the early nineteenth century, Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin, Comtesse de Genlis, reflected nostalgically on her role as a salon hostess before the French Revolution. Her Dictionnaire critique of 1818 outlines the duties that she and all other salonnières had sought to fulfill in performing that role. As she explained there, the maîtresse de maison must
forget oneself, feel absolutely no desire to shine, and put kindness in the place of the desire to please; one must occupy oneself with others, without agitation, without affectation, and know how to set them off to advantage without appearing to protect them; one must, finally, encourage the timid, put them at their ease
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallThe Eighteenth-Century Musical Salon Hostess as a Model for Academic Leaders2026-02-03text/htmlen-USThe Eighteenth-Century Musical Salon Hostess as a Model for Academic Leaders2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®292362026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Professional Issues in Italian Eighteenth-Century Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981548
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In the face of the budget cuts and declining enrollments plaguing the humanities in North America and the United Kingdom, those defending them have sometimes resorted to citing figures on salary and job satisfaction among graduates to show our worth. This kind of response, by attempting to counter utilitarian discourse on its own terms, points to a deeper problem that I discuss in this essay: how to measure value outside of these metrics. Thinking about humanities education only through the lens of employment training and opportunities offers little assistance in safeguarding our disciplines and our scholarship on women and other historically marginalized groups. I suggest that one way to navigate through the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallProfessional Issues in Italian Eighteenth-Century Studies2026-02-03text/htmlen-USProfessional Issues in Italian Eighteenth-Century Studies2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®317652026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Agency as Solidarity in a Time of Backlash
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981547
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One of the complexities with which scholars of women and gender in the eighteenth century regularly grapple is the compromises and unexpected alliances we discover in those we might claim as foremothers. Our students are often particularly alert to these disappointments—and we sometimes struggle between exposing their limitations or seeking signs of secret subversion. We too live in a period of complex demands for advocacy, self-examination, and rethinking what we thought we knew how to address. This is in fact what I take as the baseline of feminist work—to continuously question, to share knowledge both specialized and practical, to seek for different voices and perspectives, and to reassess what we recognize as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallAgency as Solidarity in a Time of Backlash2026-02-03text/htmlen-USAgency as Solidarity in a Time of Backlash2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®292892026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Decolonizing the Gaze in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Spanish and Spanish American Women
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981546
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The study of women in the eighteenth-century Spanish empire can be envisioned as a polyhedron whose different facets show both patterns of continuity and discontinuity. Despite the centralized nature of Spanish rule, women's life experiences differed according to their social and geopolitical circumstances. For example, Aragonese women inherited property, while Castilian women could not; in the Americas, Spanish women subjected to patriarchal control, ruled, in their turn, over enslaved and Indigenous people.1Accounting for discontinuity is central to understanding both women's experiences and the field of women's studies, because it enables the decolonization of the academic gaze, which is often Euro-centric.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallDecolonizing the Gaze in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Spanish and Spanish American Women2026-02-03text/htmlen-USDecolonizing the Gaze in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Spanish and Spanish American Women2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®394392026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Sisters but Not Women? Queer Kinship and Salvific Androgyny in Ephrata's Celibate Sisterhood
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981545
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In 1730, Maria Christiana Saur made a drastic, life-changing decision. Leaving behind her husband, young son, and farm in Pennsylvania's Conestoga Valley, she joined a small nearby community of German Dunker recluses.1 Living in scattered huts, these Christians pursued secluded lives of devotion. For several years, Maria Christiana, now known as Sister Marcella, "lived alone in the wilderness," relying on neighbors for what little food she consumed.2 As their numbers grew, the solitaries formally organized into a celibate Brotherhood and Sisterhood known as the Ephrata Cloister. Marcella embraced cloistered life, severing ties with her past to serve only her Sisters and Jesus Christ, her eternal bridegroom. Decades
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallSisters but Not Women? Queer Kinship and Salvific Androgyny in Ephrata's Celibate Sisterhood2026-02-03text/htmlen-USSisters but Not Women? Queer Kinship and Salvific Androgyny in Ephrata's Celibate Sisterhood2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®974872026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Oroonokos' Rape Cultures
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981544
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In Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), the rape of Imoinda, the novella's West African heroine, is at once a looming specter and an inescapable reality. The repeated threat, experience, and phantom of rape are encoded in the narrative's matrix and the text's afterlives throughout the long eighteenth century. In point of fact, following the revelation of her first sexual encounter with Oroonoko in Coromantien, Imoinda testifies to the king, to whom she has been affianced, that Oroonoko raped her. The white narrator tells us that this accusation is made in the attempt to mollify the king's ire: "He [the king] upbraided her wickedness and perfidy, and threatening her royal lover, she fell on her face at his feet, bedewing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallOroonokos' Rape Cultures2026-02-03text/htmlen-USOroonokos' Rape Cultures2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®888012026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Transforming ASECS: The Difference a Caucus Can Make
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981543
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I attended my first Women's Caucus luncheon in 1984. Trained as a comparatist in the age of theory and specializing in women writers and narrative form, I had entered the professoriate as a scholar without a century. The serendipity of a Folger Library seminar on Diderot taught by the late Jack Undank had turned me into an aspiring dix-huitièmiste, so I took myself off to an ASECS Annual Meeting to dip into the new field. It took a few years before I felt sufficiently immersed in the period to become an active member of the Society, but the warm welcome of the Women's Caucus, the energy in that ballroom of round tables making exciting feminist inroads over lunch, promised an embracing intellectual and collegial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallTransforming ASECS: The Difference a Caucus Can Make2026-02-03text/htmlen-USTransforming ASECS: The Difference a Caucus Can Make2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®165302026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03The Early Days of the Women's Caucus of ASECS
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981542
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The founding story of the Women's Caucus of ASECS is worth telling again. It happened at the Fourth International Congress on the Enlightenment (ISECS), held at Yale the summer of 1975. The all-male nominating committee had put together a slate of candidates for the Board of ISECS that included no women at all. And when Jean Perkins (French, Swarthmore) protested, R. S. Leigh criticized her sharply, saying: "Which women could we possibly think could be eligible for this august body." His arrogance made her mad and together with a number of the American members she called for a meeting in the courtyard of one of the Yale colleges. Over a hundred people showed up, and they pulled together a slate of women to run for
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallThe Early Days of the Women's Caucus of ASECS2026-02-03text/htmlen-USThe Early Days of the Women's Caucus of ASECS2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®221642026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03Re-Thinking "Women" and Agency: Past, Present, and Future
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981541
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This special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the ASECS Women's Caucus. The occasion recommended that we invite longstanding members of this body Ruth Perry (Professor Emerita of Humanities, MIT) and Susan S. Lanser (Professor Emerita of English, Brandeis University) to reappraise and update its history. Their gracious contributions to this volume illustrate how the aim of the Women's Caucus to bring gender issues to the forefront of eighteenth-century studies has gone hand in hand with claiming professional representation, opportunity, and recognition for women scholars within the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, while creating a welcoming
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/55/image/coversmallRe-Thinking "Women" and Agency: Past, Present, and Future2026-02-03text/htmlen-USRe-Thinking "Women" and Agency: Past, Present, and Future2026-02-032026TWOProject MUSE®185762026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-03