Abstract
This book sets out to make vivid certain telling moments of interconnection among a variety of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century phenomena that might be assumed to have inhabited separate cultural spaces: seduction plots, sentimental narratives, and the economic, social, credal, and ideological imperatives of what has become known as “the Atlantic world.” Literary and largely (though not exclusively) anglophone in orientation, the essays here work together to offer new ways to understand the interdependence of this complex set of discursive and historical phenomena and to challenge the perpetuation of disciplinary boundaries that limit scholars’ imaginative engagements, both with texts and with each other.
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Notes
G. J. Barker-Benfield, for example, dates sensibility in Britain to Locke and Newton and argues that George Cheyne (1671–1743), doctor to Samuel Richardson, was a key figure in sensibility’s popularization by the early eighteenth century. See The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3–9.
See also Brett D. Wilson, A Race of Female Patriots: Women and Public Spirit on the British Stage, 1688–1745 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011)
Stephen Ahern, Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680–1810 (New York: AMS Press, 2007)
Thomas DiPiero, Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569–1791 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992)
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).
See, for example, Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
Katherine Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Stéphanie Genand, Le Libertinage et l’Histoire: Politique de la Séduction à la Fin de l’Ancien Régime (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2005)
Aurora Wolfgang, Gender and Voice in the French Novel, 1730–1782 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004)
William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).
See Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1–7.
See also Margaret Cohen’s suggestive discussions of “traveling genres” (The Novel and the Sea [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010], 167–70, and “Traveling Genres,” New Literary History 34, no. 3 [Summer 2003]).
The Princess of Cleue. The Most Famed Romance. Written in French by the Greatest Wits of France. Rendred into English by a person of quality, at the request of some friends (London, 1679), and Nathaniel Lee, The Princess of Cleve, as it was acted at the Queens Theatre in Dorset-Garden (London, 1689). For a summary of the literary dispute, see Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, “Lafayette’s First Readers: The Quarrel of La Princesse de Clèves,” in Approaches to Teaching Lafayette’s “The Princess of Clèves,” ed. Faith E. Beasley and Katharine Ann Jensen (New York: The Modern Language Association, 1998). For an analysis of Lee’s version, see Tara L. Collington and Philip D. Collington, “Adulteration or Adaptation? Nathaniel Lee’s Princess of Cleve and Its Sources,” Modern Philology 100, no. 2 (November 2002).
For a summary of the literary dispute, see Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, “Lafayette’s First Readers: The Quarrel of La Princesse de Clèves,” in Approaches to Teaching Lafayette’s “The Princess of Clèves,” ed. Faith E. Beasley and Katharine Ann Jensen (New York: The Modern Language Association, 1998).
For an analysis of Lee’s version, see Tara L. Collington and Philip D. Collington, “Adulteration or Adaptation? Nathaniel Lee’s Princess of Cleve and Its Sources,” Modern Philology 100, no. 2 (November 2002).
James Grantham Turner, “Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela,” Representations 48 (Fall 1994)
Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela,” 1740–1750, 6 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001).
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), remains the starting place.
Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998).
For critiques and responses to Anderson, see Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)
Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 3.
Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 10–11.
Though not itself monolithic or stable. See Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano The Atlantic Enlightenment (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 3; and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik Seeman The Atlantic in Global History: 1500–2000 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2007), ix.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik Seeman The Atlantic in Global History: 1500–2000 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2007), ix.
The term has various cognates: “Trans-Atlantic Studies,” “Circum-Atlantic Studies,” and the like. We use “Atlantic Studies” because we find it the most encompassing of the available terms. “Trans-Atlantic” seems to us the least productive of the labels, since it reinforces the East-West axis that has long dominated Atlantic Studies but should not be understood as synonymous with the field. Still, all these labels have their uses. See Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman, The Atlantic in Global History, ix, xxiii–xxiv; Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 5–31
David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman, The Atlantic in Global History, xxiii. Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman optimistically review current efforts to expand and complicate the “Atlantic paradigm,” including new work that proceeds from credal, rather than national, alignments (the Catholic Atlantic, the Christian Atlantic, and so on) and an emerging emphasis on “borderlands” and “middle grounds.” See also Kathleen Wilson’s discussion of the “new imperial history” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–5, and Bailyn, Atlantic History, 62.
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2.
For a valuable summary of Atlantic Studies scholarship as it has taken shape in historians’ work over the past two decades, see Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Introduction. We seek here both to expand the unilateral focus on capital-H “History” silently at work in Greene and Morgan’s view of the field and to retain history, more broadly defined, as a multifaceted, multiply located aspect of Atlantic Studies.
A key desideratum among Atlantic historians. See, for example, Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault’s Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 3–4, 8, 9, 42–43. Armitage and Braddick suggest on the contrary that “the larger Atlantic world was itself not a bounded social system,” while claiming coherence for their own narrower subject: “the British Atlantic world.… corresponds to real networks of social, political, and economic connection in the past” (British Atlantic World, 4).
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© 2012 Toni Bowers and Tita Chico
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Bowers, T., Chico, T. (2012). Introduction: Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment. In: Bowers, T., Chico, T. (eds) Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014610_1
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