Papers by Peter DeGabriele
Early Modern Literary Studies, 2015
Perhaps as well-known as the poetry of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) is the p... more Perhaps as well-known as the poetry of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) is the portrait of the poet posing with a monkey. In this painting, by Jacob Huysmans, the monkey stares at the poet, while the poet glances ironically at the viewer. The painting thus draws a distinction between the human and simian gazes, with the monkey's eyes directing us to the central subject of the portrait: the human aristocrat.1 Monkeys also play a central role in Rochester's poetry, but there the simian and human gazes are not so easy to distinguish. Indeed, the monkeys in Rochester's poetry ape man so faithfully and naturally that the positions of satirist and monkey are almost interchangeable. The peculiar way in which the monkey functions in Rochester's poetry has been overlooked in critical accounts of his work. Indeed, despite the new concern with the animal in literary studies, there has been little work on the place of animals in Rochester's poetry outside of...
The Eighteenth Century, 2020
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2014
This article argues that Frances Burney's Evelina uses the resources of epistolary form to interv... more This article argues that Frances Burney's Evelina uses the resources of epistolary form to intervene in eighteenth-century debates concerning the "legal fiction" of paternity. In doing so, Burney makes epistolarity into a technology of subjectivity that refuses the subsumption of the subject into the powerful symbolic discourse of the law, and also refuses her definitive attachment to the materiality of biological paternity. Burney locates the "epistolary fiction" at precisely the point at which the subject is split between materiality and discourse: the letter. By reading the way in which Caroline Belmont is, in a posthumously delivered letter, unable to definitively address Sir John Belmont as husband, lover, or father of her child, this piece argues that it is the question of address, the letter's material link to the world, that Burney makes crucial to epistolarity. Evelina shows that paternity (like the letter itself) is too sensuous to be a mere fiction of the law (or of literary style). The epistolary mode is not simply a conceit that allows an author to realistically explore the interiority of the subject, but a technology that marks the subject's "entrance into the world" as irreducibly material. T he heroine of Frances Burney's Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778), concludes her first letter to her guardian Reverend Villars by writing, "I cannot to you sign Anville [her pseudoanagrammatic pseudonym] and what other name may I claim" (19). By the end of the novel, she is able to subscribe a letter "for the first-and probably the last time" with her legitimate patronym "Belmont" (335). Both Wolfram Schmidgen and Catherine Gallagher have argued, in different ways, that it is Evelina's lack of a patronym, her being nobody or nullius filius, that allows for the novel to be written and that thus underwrites the authority of both Burney
Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, 2015
In his History of England, David Hume declares himself to be a post-1688 political thinker, writi... more In his History of England, David Hume declares himself to be a post-1688 political thinker, writing that the "revolution forms a new epoch in our constitution; and was probably attended with consequences more advantageous to the people, than barely freeing them from an exceptionable administration" (History 6: 531). Hume is clear, then, that the revolution is not merely a change in government but an event that stands as a definitive interpretation of the constitution. He writes that by "deciding many important questions in favour of liberty, and still more, by that great precedent of deposing one king, and establishing a new family, it gave such an ascendant to popular principles, as has put the nature of the constitution beyond all controversy" (History 6: 531). The idea that controversy about the constitution is at an end, while perhaps an intentional form of wishful thinking, indicates that, for Hume, to do political philosophy, or even to discuss politics, after 1688 is fundamentally different than it was before this signal event. Both the mode of discussion, which will (or should) no longer be that of controversy or heated, factional debate; and the content of that discussion, which will (or should) no longer concern the nature of the constitution, will change; and this change both signals and produces a new kind of political stability. Indeed, by declaring that after 1688 controversial discussions about the constitution are no longer valid, Hume secures the constitution from debate, shrouds it in silence, while the discussions of polite society, no longer controversial or fractious, address other, less volatile, topics. The post-1688 character of Hume's thought manifests itself, then, in this general claim that the constitution is now beyond controversy. In a much more specific way, Hume develops a theory concerning the right of resistance to sovereign power that makes
The Eighteenth Century, 2012
This article argues that Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire makes a ti... more This article argues that Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire makes a timely and decisive intervention in eighteenth-century political philosophy. Rejecting attempts to reduce the social bond to its horizontal through the force of sympathy or through the emergent ideology of cosmopolitanism, Gibbon insists on the continuing importance of the vertical, and radically unequal, bond between sovereign and subject to the constitution of the social field. Moving from an analysis of Gibbon's portrayal of an absolute disjunction between the interests and happiness of sovereign and subject within the Roman Empire, the essay then argues that Gibbon illustrates the persistence of this disjunction in the eighteenth-century in the relation between Europe and its colonial territories. Finally, the essay claims that Gibbon's intervention is relevant to current debates about sovereignty and globalization within the fields of eighteenth-century studies and contemporary political philosophy.
The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats
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Papers by Peter DeGabriele