Drawing on unusual archival materials, addressing a variety of nonliterary or extratextual sources, employing new theoretical approaches, and offering innovative discussions of established works, the essays gathered in the latest volume of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture reflect the most exciting new directions of research within the field.The novel is a dominant focus, and the contributors to this volume offer new perspectives on the genre itself or bold new readings of such canonical texts as Les Liaisons dangereuses, Cecilia, Histoire de M. Cleveland, and the early fiction of Daniel Defoe, as well as Casanova's novelistic autobiography, Histoire de ma vie. Some essays use unusual or little-known sources or materials:the early English novel, The Jamaica Lady; an anonymous British seaman's journal; and ''infant's petitions,'' the letters that accompanied babies left at foundling hospitals. Other essays examine the complicated constructions of identity and authorship that emerge in various disciplines and genres: depictions of statuary in eighteenth-century French painting and literature; representations of the French literary marketplace; the role of singing in the poetry of Stephen Duck; the presence of ancient Stoic and Baconian principles in Samuel Johnson's moral writing; and the complicated correspondence between Horace Walpole and William Cole. The volume concludes with a special section of essays meditating on the complex eighteenth-century discourse on beauty and aesthetics.
