The volume's first section treats the politics of genre: María Soledad Barbón on the colonial politics of panegyric in Peru; Amanda Johnson on Thomas Jefferson's use of Ossianic romance; Catherine M. Jaffe on the gender politics of translation in a Spanish novel; Cecilia Feilla on French Revolutionary politics in London harlequinades; and Rebecca Tierney-Hynes on the economics of comedic form in Susanna Centlivre's plays.
The volume's second section, on textual materialisms, includes Daniel Leonard on fetishism and figurism in Charles de Brosses; Beth Fowkes Tobin on the notebooks of the naturalist Dr. Richard Pulteney; Betty Joseph on capitalism and early English fictional treatments of China and India; Dwight Codr on hairs and sneezes in Pope's Rape of the Lock; John Greene on magic lanterns and peepshow boxes in Rousseau's Rêveries; Sara Muñoz-Muriana on mirrors and gender in Spanish comedy; and David Mazella on cultivation and improvement in Swift's Gulliver's Travels.