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Are you ready to submit your work to ECF for consideration?
We have spots open in the October *2025* issue for research articles.
ecf.humanities.mcmaster.ca/guidelines/
Questions? ecf@mcmaster.ca
#18thCentury
Submit mc04.manuscriptcentral.com
ReadECF @ProjectMUSE
muse.jhu.edu/journal/324
July 8, 2024 at 6:28 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
An ECF article from Material Fictions just because it's Tuesday: "Puppets, Waxworks, and a Wooden Dramatis Personae: Eighteenth-Century Material Culture and Philosophical History in William Godwin’s /Fleetwood/," by Emma Peacocke muse.jhu.edu/article/704848
#ReadECF #18thCentury
Project MUSE - Puppets, Waxworks, and a Wooden Dramatis Personae: Eighteenth-Century Material Culture and Philosophical History in William Godwin’s <i>Fleetwood</i>
muse.jhu.edu
June 25, 2024 at 1:39 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
Another great flash essay, new in ECF:
"The Ameliorationist Trap: Reformist Capture and the Long Eighteenth Century," by Ryan Kaveh Sheldon
muse.jhu.edu/pub/50/artic...
ECF 36.2, April 2024, pp. 299-302
#18thCentury #C18th #18thC
ReadECF at Project MUSE!
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 ...
April 16, 2024 at 1:03 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
Another exciting new ECF article in the special issue:
"Eighteenth-Century Proud Boys; or, Why Sir Charles Grandison Is (a) No Wanker," by Rachel Gevlin
muse.jhu.edu/pub/50/artic...
ECF 36.2, April 2024, pp. 233-250
#18thCentury
#ReadECF at Project MUSE. #C18th #18thC
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 ...
April 9, 2024 at 3:46 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
In a new UTP blog post, ECF author Tracy Rutler, Penn State, reflects on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, drawing parallels to the societal inequalities highlighted in Isabelle de Charrière’s novel.
bit.ly/ECFBlog
#ReadECF #18thCentury #AcWri #WhatWeDo #C18th #18thC
@utpjournals
February 27, 2024 at 5:12 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
Thinking of submitting a manuscript for consideration?
Find helpful info: ecf.humanities.mcmaster.ca/guidelines
Feel free to email with any questions: ecf@mcmaster.ca
#18thCentury #WhatWeDo #AcWri
Submit: mc04.manuscriptcentral.com
ReadECF: muse.jhu.edu/journal/324
#C18th #18thC
February 6, 2024 at 3:52 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
Another excellent essay in the new ECF special issue:
"Police Time: Equiano, Blackness, and Custody," by Kaushik Tekur Venkata
muse.jhu.edu/pub/50/artic...

Eighteenth-Century Fiction, U of Toronto Press
36.1, January 2024, pp. 111-125
#18thCentury #C18th #18thC
ReadECF at Project MUSE!
Abstract: Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789) highlights the role that police power plays in restricting Black people from accessing "liberal time," a conception of temporality that is teleological and invests individuals with potential for growth and development. The literary component of this temporality is the genre of autobiography and Bildungsroman. I argue that police power, through careful regulation of Black bodies and their relation to time and narration, make liberal time possible. Episodes in Equiano's narrative draw attention to this regulation, which I call "police time": a conception of temporality that sees Blackness as devoid of history, a vagrant emptiness that is capable of disrupting the liberal order and its "peace," and hence needs to be "suspended." Building on Equiano scholarship about autobiography, the possible fabrication of his own past, and police power, I read Equiano's narrative as confronting police time and trying to fill the void ...
February 1, 2024 at 2:33 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
Here's a suggestion for a weekend read:
"Sublime Luxuries" of the Gothic Edifice: Immersive Aesthetics and Kantian Freedom in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe, by Kristin Girten
muse.jhu.edu/article/622351
ECF 28.4 (2016)
#ReadEcf at Project MUSE.
#18thcentury #19thcentury #C18th
ABSTRACT: This article explores the variable meanings and effects of gothic architecture across Ann Radcliffe’s three most important novels —The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797). With her variable portrayal of the gothic edifice, Radcliffe presents a distinctively immersive version of the sublime that significantly challenges the aesthetic philosophies of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant in its capacity to coexist with real, immediate fear. Radcliffe presents and encourages a markedly democratic aesthetic of terror designed to empower even disenfranchised individuals. This article argues that Radcliffe’s novels teach readers how to achieve the sublime in the most difficult circumstances, thus making widely available both the sublime and also what the sublime represents—freedom. Within the walls of the gothic edifice, Radliffe demonstrates that individuals have the potential for, and indeed the right to, the power to define ...
November 16, 2023 at 3:06 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
The ECF editors support a very broad definition of "fiction":
"Mother Gin and the Bad Examples: Figuring a Drug Crisis, 1736–51," by Nicholas Allred
muse.jhu.edu/article/787458
#ReadECF @ProjectMUSE #18thCentury #C18th #18thC
Submit your work for consideration:
mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/ecf
Detail from William Hogarth’s engraving called Gin Lane (1751). An inebriated woman sits on some stairs. She wears a grin on her face, but her baby is tumbling over the railing to the street below. Abstract: The most memorable figure of the London “Gin Craze,” a furor over cheap spirits from approximately 1720 to 1751, is the woman in the foreground of William Hogarth’s Gin Lane (1751), so deep in stupor that she fails to notice her tumbling child. Hogarth draws on a longer tradition throughout the Gin Craze of using individual drinkers—particularly women—to rhetorically invoke a drug crisis. This essay asks how such figures of individual drinkers come to betoken a larger crisis, and how they establish gin as the cause of that crisis, rather than a symptom of underlying dispossession. I explore how various portrayals of drinkers in Gin Craze discourse each work to exemplify the crisis and to posit gin as its cause. Further, I offer formal as well as historical explanations for why these figures are so often women: how the cultural institutions of eighteenth-century femininity, including maternity and coverture, convinced artists, authors, and readers that women were ...
October 24, 2023 at 7:09 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
A little good news for your Monday reading:
ECF October 2023 is now available to read at Project MUSE!
muse.jhu.edu/issue/51263
See the pictures for part of the table of contents.
Click the link to see the list of book reviews.
#18thCentury #WhatWeDo #ReadECF #C18th #18thC
Front Cover of the ECF journal October issue: The image on the front cover is Mujer indígena con cempasúchil (Indian Woman with Marigold) (1876), by Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez (Mexico, Texcoco, 1824–1904). LACMA: Gift of Ronald A. Belkin. This artwork is in the public domain. The digital reproduction is provided courtesy of LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Table of Contents Articles Singing through the Pain: Murat Riffing on Montaigne By Scott M. Sanders Mercier's Clinic: Public Health Utopianism in L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais By Andrew Billing Reflections essays: Troubling White Femininity: Revisiting Delarivier Manley's The Wife's Resentment (1720) By Kirsten T. Saxton Fictions of Character By Nicola Parsons and Amelia Dale Flash essays: Abolitionist Visions and the Spectre of Enthusiasm By Rachael Isom Sexualized Racial-Colonial Grotesque in the Company Archives By Shruti Jain Eighteenth-Century Literary Fragments: Queering the Fiction of "Finished" Work By Lucien Darjeun Meadows, Leia Lynn Deconstructing Reliance on Enlightenment Methods in Feminist Book Historical Scholarship By Micaela Rodgers Click the Project MUSE link to see the list of book reviews. Table of Contents Articles Singing through the Pain: Murat Riffing on Montaigne By Scott M. Sanders Mercier's Clinic: Public Health Utopianism in L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais By Andrew Billing Reflections essays: Troubling White Femininity: Revisiting Delarivier Manley's The Wife's Resentment (1720) By Kirsten T. Saxton Fictions of Character By Nicola Parsons and Amelia Dale Flash essays: Abolitionist Visions and the Spectre of Enthusiasm By Rachael Isom Sexualized Racial-Colonial Grotesque in the Company Archives By Shruti Jain Eighteenth-Century Literary Fragments: Queering the Fiction of "Finished" Work By Lucien Darjeun Meadows, Leia Lynn Deconstructing Reliance on Enlightenment Methods in Feminist Book Historical Scholarship By Micaela Rodgers Click the Project MUSE link to see the list of book reviews.
October 23, 2023 at 2:07 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
ECF publishes on theatre too!
Read ECF at Project MUSE online:
"A Comedian on Tragedy: Colley Cibber’s /Apology/ and /The Rival Queans/," by Vivian L. Davis muse.jhu.edu/article/550612
#18thCentury #C18th #18thC
#ReadECF #TheaterStudies
A Wayback Wednesday post to 2014.
An 18th-century engraving, a portrait of Colley Cibber. He sits in a chair with his left elbow reading on a side table. He holds a paper in his left hand and a quill in his right hand. He wears a white curly wig on his head and a velvet overcoat with many buttons. A young woman stands on his right side and she has her right hand on the feather quill pen in his hand. Abstract: While eighteenth-century actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber is most frequently discussed within the context of sentimental comedy, this article addresses the comedian’s writing for and about the tragic stage. The neoclassical establishment consistently argued for the propriety of tragedy; however, actor and manager Cibber in his 1740 autobiography makes a case for the ludic qualities of successful tragic performance which, he insists, produces pleasure not tied to moral improvement. Moreover, Cibber embraces, rather than bemoans, the destabilization of social hierarchies that attends confessed generic hybridity. In an analysis of the comic burlesque The Rival Queans, a parody of Nathaniel Lee’s earlier tragedy The Rival Queens, I show how Cibber’s tragic stage was less concerned with categories of masculinity and femininity than in the sheer fluidity of gender...
October 18, 2023 at 2:04 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
Here's an ECF article from a few years ago for ThrowbackThursday:
"Tobias Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom: The Purpose of Picaresque," by Richard Squibbs
ECF Summer 2018, 30.4
Please ReadECF @ProjectMUSE
muse.jhu.edu/article/699084
#18thCentury #18thC #C18th
An early nineteenth-century engraving from an edition of Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom. Three people wearing night clothes are in a bedtoom. Two women look disturbed, and the man is opening the door to a closet. He has a scowl on his face. Through the crack of the opening door, a young man crouches and looks fearful. Abstract: Tobias Smollett's third novel, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), is best understood as a satire of the national self-involvement that Smollett detected in the emergent discourse of English literary sentimentalism. Like Sarah Fielding, Smollett identified a distinctive strain of sentimentalism in the mid-eighteenth-century English novel well before the sentimental novel had emerged as its own subgenre. In Fathom, he revises older Spanish picaresque conventions to confront this popular taste for sentimental fiction, which he sees as simply a modern manifestation of traditional romance delusion. To grasp the central importance of picaresque to Smollett's project in Fathom is to see that this method of writing in its original anti-romance guise retains a more vital and purposive presence in the eighteenth-century British novel than is often recognized ...
September 7, 2023 at 4:26 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
Random Word Search Wednesday
An ECF article @ProjectMUSE that includes the word "inertia"
"A perfect Retreat indeed": Speculation, Surveillance, and Space in Defoe’s /Roxana/, by Christina L. Healey
muse.jhu.edu/article/270395
#18thCentury ReadECF #C18th #18thC
In lieu of an abstract, a brief excerpt: Daniel Defoe’s novel Roxana (1724) begins with the title character’s birth, an event immediately followed by her family’s flight from France to England because of religious persecution. The infant Roxana is carried to England along with a variety of valuable commodities: “French Brandy, Paper, and other Goods,” which allow her father to set himself up as a businessman in London (37). Once there, the successful immigrant family finds itself called upon to aid other refugees, their “Door continually throng’d with miserable Objects of the poor starving Creatures, who at that Time fled hither for Shelter, on Account of Conscience, or something else” (37). At the outset Defoe raises the subjects of flight and refuge, the theme of financial reward through wise investment and money management, and the spectre of unscrupulous opportunism. The novel’s beginning foregrounds the issue of the necessity of circulation and refuge for Roxana and her money.
August 30, 2023 at 1:08 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
For Throwback Thursday,
ReadECF at Project MUSE:
"La solitude ajoute à l’ardeur du désir": Dangerous Isolation in /Les Liaisons dangereuses/,
by Marine Ganofsky
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/796657
#C18th #18thC #18thCentury
Submit your work for consideration: https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/ecf
Woman wearing a white dress sits at a small tabletop portable writing desk. She holds a quill in her right hand and is writing on paper. Illustration from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's eighteenth-century novel called Dangerous Liaisons. The depiction is of a scene between a man and a young woman in Letter 10 « O mon ami, lui dis-je … Pardonne-moi mes torts, je veux les expier à force d’amour ». From the 1796 edition. Artist Charles Monnet. Abstract: In Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), the motif of solitude, from conventual seclusion to virtuous retreats and libertine isolation, is as much a contributor to the characters’ downfall as the dangerous liaisons advertised in the novel’s title. Engaging the eighteenth-century discourse on solitude, I argue that Les Liaisons dangereuses illustrates the period’s redefinition of the private and public spheres, the Enlightenment’s secularization of the notion of retreat, and its understanding of the Self as the real source of one’s temptation. Solitude in Les Liaisons dangereuses is reconfigured as a space where inner desires can surface; however, such revelations often menace one’s happiness. Analyzing the representation of the characters’ physical seclusion, of their strategic retreats, and of their psychological isolation allows me to explore how Laclos’s representation of solitude as perilous stems from the conviction that ...
August 17, 2023 at 1:37 PM
ecfjournal.bsky.social
For Wayback Wednesday:
An ECF article about theatre and the novel,
"Staging Sociability in /The Excursion/: Frances Brooke, David Garrick, and the King’s Theatre Coterie,"
by Katherine G. Charles
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/564773
#18thCentury #C18th #18thC
Please ReadECF at Project MUSE.
Abstract: While previous critics have classified Frances Brooke’s novel The Excursion (1777) as a moral tale aligned with either the sentimental or pastoral tradition, this article makes the case for interpreting The Excursion as a political satire directed against corrupt theatre politics. Reading the plot in the context of contemporary letters, periodicals, and theatrical miscellanies reveals a thick weave of topical allusions to the 1770s London stage and uncovers a buried homage to celebrity actress Mary Ann Yates, Brooke’s friend and business partner. Brooke leverages her novel to promote the interests of her theatrical circle and her own claim to be recognized as one of the great theatre managers of the day—specifically, as the equal to David Garrick. As a satire of theatre politics, The Excursion allows Brooke to map out a specific vision for what constitutes good acting, how the government should reform its theatre policy, and ... Portrait of eighteenth-century author Frances Brooke. She is holding a book in her lap with her left hand. She leans her head slightly, resting it on her upraised right hand. She wears a green shawl draped over her right shoulder and her left arm. Her dress is orange. The interior of an eighteenth-century theater during a performance. The audience is at capacity, with the balcony boxed full to almost overflowing: standing room only.
August 16, 2023 at 1:46 PM
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I love that #readecf applies to both the amazing @ECFjournal and to me (ECF, AKA Emily Clare Friedman)
December 8, 2024 at 6:02 AM