Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

The latest work in eighteenth-century studies.

Showcasing exciting new research across disciplines, Volume 52 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture explores how history's dominant narratives have been challenged and reframed.

Anne Lafont shows how early writings about Black art questioned the cultural negation of enslaved peoples' humanity. A cluster of essays on "Decolonizing Eighteenth-Century Studies" connects the current conditions under which we produce scholarship to the forms of exploitation that defined the eighteenth century. Erica Johnson Edwards chronicles how self-liberated people in colonial Haiti resisted their recapture by using advertisements for unclaimed runaways, while Allison Cardon argues that Ottobah Cugoano's critiques of abolitionist discourse were more radical than we have recognized. Another cluster recenters Native epistemologies in the interactions between Indigenous Peoples and settlers in the American South.

Alison DeSimone compares love songs to didactic and erotic literature. Carolina Blutrach recovers the contributions that diplomats' spouses made to cultural life, while Jolene Zigarovich unearths evidence of women who transmitted property to other women. Two clusters focus on the "Female Wunderkind in the Eighteenth Century" and "Biography and the Woman Writer Revisited."

Jeffrey Ravel investigates the use of playing cards in the French Revolution, while Christopher Hendricks recovers the history of the jumbal, a proto-cookie. A collaboratively written essay explores the movements of four commodities through the global supply chain. Mattie Burkert focuses on the invisible labor of women. Andrew Black considers Alexander Pope's use of the oral. Volume 52 concludes with a cluster on Oliver Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" that studies the poem's acoustics, history of illustration, and intertextual resonance.

CONTRIBUTORS: Kathleen Tamayo Alves, Nicole Balzer, Andrew Black, Carolina Blutrach, Mónica Bolufer, Mattie Burkert, Allison Cardon, Emily Casey, Tita Chico, Sarah R. Cohen, Rebecca Crisafulli, Pichaya Damrongpiwat, Alison DeSimone, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Erica Johnson Edwards, Robbie Ethridge, Timothy Erwin, Lise Gaston, Michael Griffin, Christopher E. Hendricks, Elizabeth Hutchinson, Cynthia Kok, Anne Lafont, Brittany Luberda, Waltraud Maierhofer, Patrícia Martins Marcos, Jennifer Monroe McCutchen, Elizabeth Neiman, David O'Shaughnessy, Jürgen Overhoff, Jeffrey S. Ravel, Bryan C. Rindfleisch, Robbie Richardson, Yael Shapira, Kaitlin Tonti, Sophie Tunney, Denys Van Renen, Andrew O. Winckles, Joshua Wright, Chi-Ming Yang, Jolene Zigarovich, Tim Zumhof