ECF journal (Eighteenth-Century Fiction)

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ECF is an international, peer-reviewed quarterly devoted to the critical and historical investigation of literature and culture of 1660-1832. Editor Eugenia Zuroski, McMaster University. Posts by ECF editors; contact: ecf@mcmaster.ca.

The cover of the October 2024 issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction journal features a japanese artwork from the 18th century. In the artwork, a woman sits on the floor. She is wearing flowing robes and is reading some manuscript pages.
Abstract: This encounter with The Woman of Colour (1808) began with a 2019 call by Romantic Circles Pedagogies for essays on "Romantic" teaching. The COVID-19 pandemic intervened, as did a personal tragedy that was yet not my own. The essay I eventually wrote was reshaped by this tragedy, as were my reflections on the experimental assignment in life-writing that was to be the essay's focus. My tone, while meditative and personal, compelled me to pose new questions about The Woman of Colour and to recognize limits in my prior readings of the novel (2019; 2020). The Woman of Colour is shown to push past the limits of what (white) readers can say or know about the protagonist, Olivia Fairfield, both because of and despite the author's use of a strong epistolary "I."
The image on the front cover is Courtesan Writing a Letter, by Kaigetsudō Doshin (ca. 1715). The digital file of this Public Domain painting is provided courtesy of The Met, New York.
Front Cover of the July 2024 issue of ECF journal: The image is called Courtesan Writing a Letter, by Kaigetsudō Doshin (circa 1715). The digital file of this Public Domain painting is provided courtesy of The Met, New York.
The image on the front cover of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction is entitled Young Woman with a Book, by Miyagawa (Katsukawa) Shunsui (mid-18th century). The digital file of this Public Domain painting is provided courtesy of The Met, New York.
Discarded, white-clay smoking pipes, many with broken stems, likely from the early eighteenth century.
Abstract: In this essay, I use Delarivier Manley's The Wife's Resentment (1720) to examine how my own scholarly reading practices more broadly reflect and have helped shape a primarily cis-gendered, overwhelmingly white feminist critical history of amatory fictions of the long eighteenth century. I have previously read Manley's text primarily as a study in feminist rage: Violenta, the virtuous white protagonist, and Ianthe, a woman of African descent enslaved to Violenta's family, work together across statuses to dispatch an abusive patriarch. However, Ianthe engages in this labour neither for the sake of Violenta nor to attack the system of gendered and economic violation that results in Violenta's wrongful ruin, but to liberate herself from enslavement. This micro-critical reflection suggests that the text offers a prequel of contemporary discourses on gendered and racial rage. Whose rage is politically consequential or imaginatively possible? ...
Journal cover art for ECF July 2024, Vol. 36, No. 3, shows the eighteenth-century painting entitled Courtesan Writing a Letter, by Kaigetsudō Doshin (circa 1715). The digital file of this Public Domain painting is provided courtesy of The Met, New York.
A list of Common mistakes in choosing article keyphrases: such as (1) Using single-word terms; (2) Choosing terms or phrases that are too broad and not focused on your work – such as “eighteenth-century studies,” ...
A snippet from the Table of Contents for the Eighteenth-Century Fiction journal issue July 2024, 36.3, the book reviews section, starting with: England Re-Oriented: How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750–1857 by Humberto Garcia. Review by Eun Kyung Min, Seoul National University ...
Ceramic teapot from the 18th century. The body of the teapot is shaped like a round pineapple and is yellow. The spout and handle are green.
Refusing Eighteenth-Century Fictions: Introduction, by Manu Samriti Chander, and Eugenia Zuroski -- 1 Refusing Settler Georgics Katarina O’Briain, York University 7 Little Lamb’s Roast Pig: A Minor Intervention Olivia Loksing Moy, CUNY, Lehman College 37 Born That Way: Asexuality and Kinship in “The History of Mrs Selvyn” Abigail Zitin, Rutgers University 69 An Alternative Revolution: Isabelle de Charrière’s Politics of Care Tracy L. Rutler, Pennsylvania State University 91 Police Time: Equiano, Blackness, and Custody Kaushik Tekur Venkata, Binghamton University (SUNY) 111 Flash Essays Refusing the Fictions of Unmarked Whiteness: Challenging Human Rank, Race, and History Patrícia Martins Marcos, UCLA 127 On Noongar Boodjah: George Vancouver’s Colonial Fictions Ryan D. Fong, Kalamazoo College 133 Anti-Black Racism, British Orientalism, and the Ottoman Empire: Rereading The Turkish Embassy Letters Arif Camoglu, NYU Shanghai 139 AND MORE
Abstract: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) has elicited myriad contradictory readings based on its central ideologies about race and slavery. The ambivalence within the novel has made it a popular text to adapt or translate to produce a certain politics. This essay examines two twentieth-century Dutch-Surinamese translations of the novel: H.D. Benjamins's of 1919 and Albert Helman's of 1983. I contextualize both translations within each author's language politics and imperial projects, reading their work through the lens of Gloria Wekker's notion of "white innocence." I argue that Benjamins and Helman rely on Behn's ethnographic authority and her white sentimentalized womanhood to produce an imperialist politics that perpetuates the long-standing myth of the Netherlands as a gentle and benevolent nation. By moving beyond the notorious politicization of Oroonoko during the nineteenth-century abolition movement, this essay sheds new light on how the novel's ambivalent politics ...
Abstract: This article reads amatory fiction through the image of white women's tears, and it argues that amatory fiction assists in eighteenth-century racialization by idealizing a feminine affect that mobilizes passivity for status. A spectacle of sympathetic attention, white women's tears exemplify the affective work of white feminism, which singularly analyzes power through gender. Lacking intersectionality, white feminism upholds white supremacy and enables constituents to wield gender oppression self-servingly. This article locates and deconstructs that affective dynamic in Delarivier Manley's "The Wife's Resentment" (1720), Penelope Aubin's "Conjugal Duty Rewarded" (1721), and Eliza Haywood's "Female Revenge" (1727). These retellings of heroines navigating adulterous lovers depict feminine virtue as passive and essentialize this virtuous passivity within the logic of whiteness. This narrativization victimizes the heroine and purchases her sympathy, which protects her virtue...
Abstract: Recent discussions often conflate the project of developing an antiracist Romantic studies with the project of discovering an antiracist Romanticism, the elements of which could be culled from its revolutionary texts and radical figurations. This essay considers the risks of this conflation and the critical investments it protects. First, I discuss how and why some scholars are liable to skip over the task of considering the extent of Romanticism's racism. Next, I relate my experience teaching an upper-level undergraduate course titled "Race-Making and Romanticism," in which we explored how Romantic literature registered and participated in the early nineteenth-century project of forging whiteness and consolidating logics of anti-Blackness. Finally, I reflect on how my approach to antiracist work is a function of my position as a white cis male, suggesting that those of us in the position of whiteness would do well to consider our attachment to Romantic authors ...
Abstract: This Reflections essay considers antiracist theory and practice and its impact on Romantic Studies today as displayed in a master's-level module aimed at introducing the use of theory to postgraduate students of nineteenth-century studies. Alongside these concerns, the reflection considers what it means to feel "Romantic" today, as well as the role and usefulness of discomfort in postgraduate pedagogy.
Abstract: This course emerges from my individual research and seeks to bring students into an experimental project of co-reading. The course reading plan is structured by pairing canonical Romantic poets with writing by Black theorists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This course is designed for the graduate level and would also be appropriate for upper-level undergraduate students.
Abstract: This cowritten Reflections essay describes an upper-division seminar for honours and master's students that brought together established antiracist pedagogical principles (for example, decentering Britain) with a commitment to hands-on, in-class collaboration. This collaborative dimension buoyed the class's capacity to encounter both the challenges and insights that the antiracist framework brought to the fore. In a course that sought to engage with Romantic poetry of "labour and longing" in the age of transatlantic slavery, working together became both an object of study and a learning practice. The coauthored nature of this essay therefore advances, beyond the end of term, the importance of listening and learning from one another in the pursuit of more inclusive, wide-ranging, and (very often) discomforting learning environments, even as such environments can only ever be imperfect.
Abstract: This essay explores a link made in the late eighteenth century between social critique and economic progress. At the intersection of enlightenment and capitalist exchange a series of assumptions about social development and social tutelage are made. While national development driven by exchange was understood to homogenize people, and peoples, over time, I argue that this homogenizing effect depended on a constant application of economic tutelage. According to Adam Smith the propensity to exchange is a universal human attribute driving economic progress, but in practice the adoption of technical change could not be guaranteed by the propensity to exchange alone. As both Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth recognized, the implication was clear: without critique of old technical forms, no general increase in wealth. A tutor specifying the appropriate stance toward technical progress was forever needed. The form of enlightenment that was good for individuals, to think ...
Abstract: This essay interrogates the tensions between historical fact and colonial fiction in Jean-François Marmontel's Les Incas, ou le destruction de l'Empire du Pérou (1777). Through this study of deleted passages and publisher notes in the 1776 manuscript of the novel (Houghton Library, Harvard University), Marmontel's concern with verisimilitude, truth, and objective reality belies the fantasy of conquest and the myths of American Indigeneity that are central to eighteenth-century French understandings and imaginings of the Inca Empire and the American continent as a whole. Politically, the novel served a dual purpose: to vehemently denounce the Spanish conquest of the Americas and to subversively critique the "fanaticism" of the ancien régime in the years leading up the 1789 Revolution. Across the Atlantic, the novel was read by generals of the Latin American Wars of Independence, and it shifted from an allegorical text to a direct call for revolution...
Abstract: This essay advances ameliorationism as a keyword and diagnostic concept for reappraising eighteenth-century anti-slavery writing and political thought; it also considers the implications of eighteenth-century abolitionism for contemporary abolitionist theory and practice. I argue that Anglophone Atlantic writing on the transatlantic slave trade and colonial plantation slavery is overwhelmingly oriented by a reformist perspective that aims to soften, economize, and refine the practice of slave-based agricultural production in order to stave off demographic and environmental catastrophe. By way of a brief consideration of merchant and philosopher Thomas Tryon, I meditate on how this reformist line of thinking puts forward potent critiques of slavery that nonetheless reinscribe the plantation as a necessary form of social organization. This reformist trap confronts contemporary organizers and theorists of abolition, and scholars of the long eighteenth century ...
Abstract: Scholars coordinate the historical emergence of political hope with the French Revolution, Romanticism, and the secularization of inherited theological ideas. This essay argues that the conceptual development of political hope functioned as a technology of racialization. Drawing attention to how hope's theological opposite, despair, had become synonymous with racial slavery in the late eighteenth-century British political imagination, it unpacks the figural logic of "black despair" and shows how this logic subtends the Romantic conception of political hope as a hereditary right of the white liberal subject.
Abstract: Eighteenth-century literature is rife with intense female friendships, relationships that often challenge or supplant heteronormative bonds in women's lives. These connections can be productively identified as "queer platonic relationships" (QPRs) for the ways they resist heteropatriarchal norms. In this article, I trace the conflict between QPRs and amatonormativity—the social and political primacy of romantic relationships—across four texts from the period. These depictions constitute part of a rich, understudied archive for scholars of asexuality and aromanticism, allowing us to trace the ongoing social enforcement of amatonormative ideology and the evolving political stakes of QPRs as sites of feminist resistance to heteropatriarchy.
Abstract: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) has elicited myriad contradictory readings based on its central ideologies about race and slavery. The ambivalence within the novel has made it a popular text to adapt or translate to produce a certain politics. This essay examines two twentieth-century Dutch-Surinamese translations of the novel: H.D. Benjamins's of 1919 and Albert Helman's of 1983. I contextualize both translations within each author's language politics and imperial projects, reading their work through the lens of Gloria Wekker's notion of "white innocence." I argue that Benjamins and Helman rely on Behn's ethnographic authority and her white sentimentalized womanhood to produce an imperialist politics that perpetuates the long-standing myth of the Netherlands as a gentle and benevolent nation. By moving beyond the notorious politicization of Oroonoko during the nineteenth-century abolition movement, this essay sheds new light on how the novel's ambivalent politics ...
Abstract: This article links Samuel Richardson's final novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753) to the twenty-first-century Proud Boys in order to examine seriously the implications of two often overlooked aspects of both: Grandison's virginity and the Proud Boys' "No Wanks" policy. This policy, which limits members' masturbation, can serve to elucidate the sexual politics of Grandison, as both the modern-day men's rights group and the eighteenth-century novel valorize male sexual restraint as a form of domestic dominance. This article argues that Grandison's idealization of male sexual restraint reinforces the portrait of male virility for which Richardson's earlier novels were criticized, rendering the virile male protagonist palatable to readers of the domestic novel's courtship plot. The valorization of restraint exhibited by Richardson's hero and the Proud Boys advances a sublimated understanding of male virility that works to solidify the fiction of sexual essentialism ...
Abstract: This article reads amatory fiction through the image of white women's tears, and it argues that amatory fiction assists in eighteenth-century racialization by idealizing a feminine affect that mobilizes passivity for status. A spectacle of sympathetic attention, white women's tears exemplify the affective work of white feminism, which singularly analyzes power through gender. Lacking intersectionality, white feminism upholds white supremacy and enables constituents to wield gender oppression self-servingly. This article locates and deconstructs that affective dynamic in Delarivier Manley's "The Wife's Resentment" (1720), Penelope Aubin's "Conjugal Duty Rewarded" (1721), and Eliza Haywood's "Female Revenge" (1727). These retellings of heroines navigating adulterous lovers depict feminine virtue as passive and essentialize this virtuous passivity within the logic of whiteness. This narrativization victimizes the heroine and purchases her sympathy, which protects her virtue...
Front Cover: The image on the front cover is Young Woman with a Book, by Miyagawa (Katsukawa) Shunsui (mid-18th century). The digital file of this Public Domain painting is provided courtesy of The Met, New York.
Weather forecast graphic showing rain and cool temperatures in Toronto midweek, early April 2024
Abstract: Eighteenth-century literature is rife with intense female friendships, relationships that often challenge or supplant heteronormative bonds in women’s lives. These connections can be productively identified as “queer platonic relationships” (QPRs) for the ways they resist heteropatriarchal norms. In this article, I trace the conflict between QPRs and amatonormativity—the social and political primacy of romantic relationships—across four texts from the period. These depictions constitute part of a rich, understudied archive for scholars of asexuality and aromanticism, allowing us to trace the ongoing social enforcement of amatonormative ideology and the evolving political stakes of QPRs as sites of feminist resistance to heteropatriarchy.
Abstract: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) has elicited myriad contradictory readings based on its central ideologies about race and slavery. The ambivalence within the novel has made it a popular text to adapt or translate to produce a certain politics. This essay examines two twentieth-century Dutch-Surinamese translations of the novel: H.D. Benjamins’s of 1919 and Albert Helman’s of 1983. I contextualize both translations within each author’s language politics and imperial projects, reading their work through the lens of Gloria Wekker’s notion of “white innocence.” I argue that Benjamins and Helman rely on Behn’s ethnographic authority and her white sentimentalized womanhood to produce an imperialist politics that perpetuates the long-standing myth of the Netherlands as a gentle and benevolent nation. By moving beyond the notorious politicization of Oroonoko during the nineteenth-century abolition movement, this essay sheds new light on how the novel’s ambivalent politics ...
This article links Samuel Richardson’s final novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753) to the twenty-first-century Proud Boys in order to examine seriously the implications of two often overlooked aspects of both: Grandison’s virginity and the Proud Boys’ “No Wanks” policy. This policy, which limits members’ masturbation, can serve to elucidate the sexual politics of Grandison, as both the modern-day men’s rights group and the eighteenth-century novel valorize male sexual restraint as a form of domestic dominance. This article argues that Grandison’s idealization of male sexual restraint reinforces the portrait of male virility for which Richardson’s earlier novels were criticized, rendering the virile male protagonist palatable to readers of the domestic novel’s courtship plot. The valorization of restraint exhibited by Richardson’s hero and the Proud Boys advances a sublimated understanding of male virility that works to solidify the fiction of sexual essentialism that still permeates ...
Abstract: Recent discussions often conflate the project of developing an antiracist Romantic studies with the project of discovering an antiracist Romanticism, the elements of which could be culled from its revolutionary texts and radical figurations. This essay considers the risks of this conflation and the critical investments it protects. First, I discuss how and why some scholars are liable to skip over the task of considering the extent of Romanticism’s racism. Next, I relate my experience teaching an upper-level undergraduate course titled “Race-Making and Romanticism,” in which we explored how Romantic literature registered and participated in the early nineteenth-century project of forging ...
The cover for Eighteenth-Century Fiction April 2024, the special issue entitled "Refusing 18th-Century Fictions, Part 2," features the painting called Young Woman with a Book, by Miyagawa (Katsukawa) Shunsui (mid-18th century). The digital file of this Public Domain painting is provided courtesy of The Met, New York.
Seventeenth-century author Aphra Behn, painted portrait.
Abstract: This essay recovers and seeks to refuse a harmful and enduring eighteenth-century fiction: settler georgic, an imperial mode that North American settlers used to foreclose refusal, naturalize British understandings of cultivation and use, and figure violent dispossession as both inevitable and in the past. Tracing this history helps to show the damage that such logics continue to do as well as the assumptions that govern literary historical methods. I look to the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (2020) is premised on the refusal of settler narrative, to think through alternate modes of literary history. Read alongside Audra Simpson's important study of refusal, Mohawk Interruptus (2014), Leanne Simpson's text opens up possibilities for reading the quieter, everyday refusals that are sometimes overlooked in eighteenth-century archives. This work also suggests the limits of refusal in academic and university contexts ...
Woman reading a letter (Fumi yomu onna), by Kitagawa Utamaro (1754-1806); Edo period, Japan, late 18th century. Woodblock print. A women casts her gaze on a letter that she holds close to her face. She is dressed in a kimono decorated overall in a dotted matsukawa-bishi motif, accented by her yellow obi [sash] with black arabesques. Her shaved eyebrows and her frontally tied sash suggests that she is the wife of a restaurant or shop owner. Yet, her intense posture and the firm way she holds the letter hints that it may have been written by a clandestine lover.
The image on the front cover is of the eighteenth-century painting called Woman Reading under a Mosquito Net, by Fuhiken Tokikaze (circa 1720). The woman, who wears a flowing gown with red and blue decoration, holds a large piece of paper on her knee, and the paper has much black ink writing on it. The digital file of this Public Domain painting is provided courtesy of The Met, New York.
Abstract: This article expands the critical account of queer orientations in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762) to include not only sapphic eroticism but also asexuality. In the inset narrative "The History of Mrs Selvyn," Scott focuses on Mrs Selvyn's mother, Lady Emilia Reynolds, who is all too eager to punish herself for having conceived a child out of wedlock. I generate a threefold close reading of Emilia's story, considering it along a spectrum of exemplarity, at one extreme, and feminist subversion, at the other. In between is a symptomatic reading, in which Scott uses the consequence of Emilia's perverse moral scrupulousness—the fragmentation of her family—to indict the sexual double standard. In framing the narrative as the daughter's story, I argue, Scott celebrates Harriot Selvyn's freedom from sexual desire as the apotheosis of her mother's renunciation of sexuality.
Abstract: This essay recovers and seeks to refuse a harmful and enduring eighteenth-century fiction: settler georgic, an imperial mode that North American settlers used to foreclose refusal, naturalize British understandings of cultivation and use, and figure violent dispossession as both inevitable and in the past. Tracing this history helps to show the damage that such logics continue to do as well as the assumptions that govern literary historical methods. I look to the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (2020) is premised on the refusal of settler narrative, to think through alternate modes of literary history. Read alongside Audra Simpson's important study of refusal, Mohawk Interruptus (2014), Leanne Simpson's text opens up possibilities for reading the quieter, everyday refusals that are sometimes overlooked in eighteenth-century archives. This work also suggests the limits of refusal in academic and university contexts, and ...
Abstract: This article revisits the racial imaginaries and cultural fictions perpetuated in two of Charles Lamb's so-called "China essays": "A Dissertation upon Roast Pig" (1822) and "Old China" (1823). Using theorizations of the minor and minorness borrowed from Asian Americanist critique, it calls for a recalibration of distorted global scales and false histories. It demonstrates how themes of nostalgia and childhood promote the innocence of minor forms, such as the familiar essay, the fable, and the children's tale, which provide cover for "harmless" texts and authors as mild and gentle as "little Lamb." Positioning Lamb as a minor Romantic author, this article highlights his mastery of these minor forms that serve as a shelter for his imperial and racial innocence.
Abstract: Using the popular adoption of "fanfiction" as it applies to eighteenth-century fiction, this essay calls for a closer attention to terminology from the established field of fan studies. By doing so, we may be able to better understand our own period's relationship to creative output, the commercial print marketplace, and the making of celebrity.
Abstract: In ACE: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (2020), Angela Chen writes, "Aces draw attention to sexual assumptions and sexual scripts—around definition, feeling, action—that are often hidden and interrogate the ways that these norms make our lives smaller. Aces have developed a new lens that prioritizes what is just over what is supposedly natural." This cowritten essay argues that asexuality studies offers a helpful framework for scholars of Jane Austen. In particular, with our reading of Austen's Emma (1815), we suggest that asexuality studies dials us into Austen's metacritical moments about the genre of romance and the expectations generated by the marriage plot. This essay aims to start a discussion on what it would mean to read novels with a kind of attention and reading practice that asexuality studies has begun to carve out.
Abstract: The terminology we use in eighteenth-century studies needs to encompass both the period's and the field's global reach. James Cook's ship HMS Endeavour provides a starting point for considering the terms that were used to imagine the eighteenth-century Pacific from Great Britain, the importance of refusing eighteenth-century fictions in and from the Pacific, and the need to expand our critical vocabulary in the field beyond the frameworks of the transatlantic world. This essay proposes "Endeavouring" as a Pacific-focused corollary to the term "Columbusing" in order to advance anti-colonial scholarship in eighteenth-century studies and broaden its scope and vision.
Abstract: This essay reads Mary Wortley Montagu's The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) as an entry point for an investigation of the entwinement between the British anti-Black racial consciousness and orientalist rhetoric concerning the Ottoman Empire. Montagu's racially marked depictions of women in Ottoman lands not only reveal the limits of her capacity to identify and sympathize with the oriental other, but also prompt a wider scrutiny of the anti-Black racial rhetoric that percolates through eighteenth-century British orientalist narratives about the Ottoman Empire.
Abstract: This essay reads Captain George Vancouver's account of his 1791 landing on the southwestern coast of what is now known as Australia through the theorizations and analyses of Indigenous theorists and scholars to expose the colonial fictions that undergird his actions and rhetoric. I then focus on the rhetoric and critical posturing of the settler colonial academy, especially within white-dominated fields like eighteenth-century studies, to consider how its work participates in the processes of Indigenous erasure and points to the need for self-reflexive and reciprocal engagements with Indigenous communities and their knowledges.
Abstract: The 2017 inauguration of a statue in Lisbon, Portugal, to the seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary in colonial Brazil, Father António Vieira, offers an opportunity to discuss history writing as a narrative genre. The statue epitomizes the naturalization of Portugal's imperial narrative genres of history writing, instantiating their recapitulation into the future. Vieira's statue exposes how colonial mythologies constitute a narrative of power premised on the erasure of colonial resistance. These dynamics, I argue, are intrinsic to the history of history writing. They arch back to a panegyric tradition of narrating the past that emerged in the eighteenth century in the Portuguese Royal Academy of History. Confronting eighteenth-century fictions demands exposing the epistemic whiteness undergirding Western exercises of recovery of the past and narrating history. Focusing on History as a genre, and its attending exercises of curatorial knowledge-production, exposes ...