Introduction

The current issue of Te Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS) offers four scholarly essays that all, in differing ways, focus upon the self and its technologies.

For Kristina Booker, the self in question is class-identified, and the technologies of its identification include various kinds of competitive/imitative behavior—e.g., the oft-encouraged upper-class effort to match past ideals of patriotic achievement, or the less-welcome lower-class tendency to imitate the vices and indulgences of one’s betters—that can be understood collectively as forms of emulation. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Daniel Defoe’s Roxana stage emulative activity in differing ways, achieving complementary formulations of social anxiety in the process. The eponymous heroine of Richardson’s novel functions as a “master-class ideal,” humble and pious, her social advancement managed consistently by others. Defoe’s Amy, by contrast, effects a dystopian reversal of social and domestic standards, in the process attesting to the discomfort that subtends Richardson’s ideal.

Marie-Odile Bernez, in turn, focuses upon a particular form of emulation: the variety produced in the eighteenth century by economic growth and the increased availability of luxury goods for middle-class consumers. These goods, when marked as luxuries, inherit a specific and troublesome ethical character that derives not only from the word luxury’s etymological affiliations with lust and sin more generally but also from the historical identification of luxury with upper-class privilege. Thus eighteenth-century writers rehabilitate luxury goods and their consumption by identifying them instead with a competing vocabulary of comfort—a vocabulary more closely associated with virtue as well as with the developing discourse of English nationalism.

For Kari Nixon, on the other hand, the self corresponds to its anatomical manifestations, which in turn provide a pattern for understanding various extra-anatomical configurations and processes. In particular, the calcified or suppurating plague buboes described by Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year offer a parallel for the international boundaries—whether fortified and policed or transgressed and overrun—that prove increasingly important for the expansion of trade and national prestige in late-seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe.

Peter DeGabriele, by contrast, maps the self through kinship, particularly paternity—a highly unstable quality for the early modern literary imagination. Thus Frances Burney’s Evelina emerges as an exploration of the strategies whereby paternity (and kinship more generally) is established, strategies that range from the appeal to biological certitude, on one hand, to various legal and literary constructs, on the other. Among the latter, epistolarity assumes a particular level of importance concomitant with the epistolary form of Burney’s novel; indeed, epistolarity comes to mark the subject’s entrance into selfhood, identity, and the world itself.

Beyond these articles, the present issue of JEMCS continues our forum discussion of early modernity with short essays on the subject offered by Adam Bryx and Bryan Reynolds, Fran Teague, Hannah Crawforth, and Margreta De Grazia, and it ends with book reviews by Judith Bailey Slagle and Jacob Stegenga. Finally, I should also note that JEMCS 14.2 is the last issue of the journal to be produced at Florida State University, which has been host to our operation since its inception in 1999–2000. Henceforth, the main offices of the journal will migrate to a new home at the Department of Literature of the University of California at San Diego. We are grateful to all those at FSU who have helped support and produce the journal over the past dozen-odd years, and we look forward to our new association with UCSD.