English

"Abstract:

Eliza Haywood's 1741 novel narrativizes the object-centered discourse of the visual field as described by contemporary optical theory. In eighteenth-century visual theory, the "object" of the gaze is not the one who is seen but the one who sees. Such a notion seems counter-intuitive; we have naturalized the theory of the dominant/male gaze. Anti-Pamela explores, first, the gendered implications that attended assumptions about vulnerable "subjects" and empowered "objects," and, second, the material (as well as symbolic) limits to the kind of empowerment that intromittist theories about vision and ontology seemed to promise to women in real social spaces. This essay makes a twofold contribution. First, it fashions a fresh theoretical lens from optical philosophy; as theorized by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries, the dialectics of the visual field, informed by the empirically generated nexus of seeing, knowing, and being, exceeds modern equations between sight and agency. Second, this essay focuses in on a particular text, Anti-Pamela, to show how this novel's attention to the nature of visual exchange is informed by contemporary optical theory and popular (as well as urban / material) contexts. Anti-Pamela explores the empirical and narrative implications—and the symbolic and gendered / material limitations—of the theory that the seen object occupies a primary, causal status in its ability to transform the seeing subject's ontology."

Generic boundaries were creatively limned during the period, and we should hesitate to embrace expectations about gender and genre. Demonstrating the benefits of critical flexibility, I focus on a single fascinating example of "historical discourse": Eliza Haywood's _Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots: Being the Secret History of Her Life_ (1725), a translation and revision of a French history. Haywood's _Secret History_, which surprisingly reduces and de-sensationalizes the material we might expect to find expanded, challenges what we think we know not only about the Scottish queen but about genre, gender and genre, and the notoriously seductive "Mrs. Eliza Haywood" of 1720s fame. As we illuminate taxonomy's aporiae, complexity emerges. In a comparative and "recessive" reading, I show how Haywood's so-called _Secret History_ notably emphasizes the importance of Mary's competitive relationship with her cousin Queen Elizabeth, but, instead of bringing to life that drama, the _Secret History_ *erases*, thus manifesting the fatal absence, the canceling out, at the heart of a fraught sorority.

John Locke asked, “since all things that exist are merely particulars, how come we by general terms?” Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 1603–1832 tells a story about aesthetics and politics that looks back to the 1603 Union of Crowns and James VI/I’s emigration from Edinburgh to London. Considering the emergence of British unionism alongside the literary rise of both description and “the individual,” Rivka Swenson builds on extant scholarship with original close readings that illuminate the inheritances of 1603, a date of considerable but untraced importance in Anglo-Scottish literary and cultural history whose legacies are still being negotiated today. The 1603 Union of Crowns spurred interest in exploring the aesthetic politics of unionism in relation to an alleged Scottish essence that could be manipulated to resist or support “Britishness,” even as the king’s emigration generated a legacy of gendered representations of traveling Scots and “Scotlands-left-behind.”

Discussing writers such as Bacon, Defoe, Smollett, Johnson, Macpherson, Ferrier, and Scott (and others, e.g., Austen, Brunton, Coleridge), along with lesser-known or forgotten popular authors (and ballads, transparencies, newspapers, joke books, cant dictionaries, political speeches, histories, travel narratives, engravings, material artifacts such as medals and snuffboxes), Essential Scots describes the years 1603 to 1832 as a crucial period in British history. Paradoxically, the political and cultural exploration of ideas about “unionism” in relation to a supposed “essential Scottishness” participated in the increasing prominence of both description and the “individual” in nineteenth-century Scottish literature; Swenson persuasively concludes that essential Scottishness (as both “identity” and symbolism) was refigured to mediate a national synthesis between the emergent individual and the nascent British nation—as well as the naturalized, even de-politicized, literary synthesis of particulars within putatively analogous narrative wholes.

Scholars consistently read the texts of Eliza Haywood through a culturally defined heteronormative lens. Yet Haywood’s texts in multiple genres throughout the course of her career structurally and descriptively present same-sex relationships of varying degrees of intimacy. This essay explores what happens when we disrupt our methods for interpreting Haywood and complicate our readings by recognizing her creation of non-normative possibilities for intimacy, gender formation, and narrative structures across the span of her career.

In their life writing, Elizabeth Thomas (1675Thomas ( -1731 and Laetitia Pilkington (c.1709-50) strategically use the book (as a material object, literary commodity and cultural currency) and the library (as both a physical space and a curated collection of texts) to create meaning and identity. Well-read gentlewomen with literary ambitions, associations with established male writers and a keen understanding of the literary marketplace, Thomas and Pilkington aspired to achieve fame as poets, desiring literary reputation more than the financial remuneration. They also recognized the book as a marker of status within eighteenth-century culture. Yet even as they narratively privilege the book as evidence of their own cultural position and literary viability, they retain only limited control over its possession and circulation, and, ultimately, their own reputations. As their personal situations deteriorated (both faced homelessness and endured debtors' prison), they struggled to remain financially solvent by exploiting the primarily commercial value of the book. Resorting to less reputable means of earning a living within print culture eroded the cultural capital they previously enjoyed. When the book (as owned or produced) becomes most valuable for them in a purely financial sense, it becomes most costly to their professional reputations and literary legacy.

The influence of feminist theory on philosophy has been less pervasive than it might have been. This is due in part to inherent tensions between feminist critique and the university as an institution, and to philosophy's place in the academy. These tensions, if explored rather than resisted, can result in a revitalized, more expEicitly feminist conception of philosophy itself, wherein philosophy is seen as an attempt to rethink the deepest aspects of experience and culture.

With regard to both the self-characterizations and the material substance of modernity, there are few more suggestive distinctions than the one between standardized practices and nonstandard ones, or more properly between practices which have and have not been subject to standardization. Deeply entrenched in contemporary society, standardization is different from the general processes of developing cultural norms, since values are inherent in culture at every level.