This book analyzes why the most influential novelists of the long eighteenth century centered their narratives on the theory and practice of gift exchange. Throughout this period, fundamental shifts in economic theories regarding the sources of individual and national wealth along with transformations in the practices of personal and institutional charity profoundly altered cultural understandings of the gift's rationale, purpose, and function. Drawing on materials such as sermons, conduct books, works of political philosophy, and tracts on social reform, Zionkowski challenges the idea that capitalist discourse was the dominant influence on the development of prose fiction. Instead, by shifting attention to the gift system as it was imagined and enacted in the formative years of the novel, the volume offers an innovative understanding of how the economy of obligation shaped writers' portrayals of class and gender identity, property, and community. Through theoretically-informed readings of Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Cecilia and The Wanderer, and Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma, the book foregrounds the issues of donation, reciprocity, indebtedness, and gratitude as it investigates the conflicts between the market and moral economies and analyzes women's position at the center of these conflicts. As this study reveals, the exchanges that eighteenth-century fiction prescribed for women confirm the continuing power and importance of gift transactions in the midst of an increasingly commercial culture. The volume will be essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth-century novel, economic literary criticism, women and gender studies, and book history.

This book analyzes why the most influential novelists of the long eighteenth century centered their narratives on the theory and practice of gift exchange. Throughout this period, fundamental shifts in economic theories regarding the sources of individual and national wealth along with transformations in the practices of personal and institutional charity profoundly altered cultural understandings of the gift's rationale, purpose, and function. Drawing on materials such as sermons, conduct books, works of political philosophy, and tracts on social reform, Zionkowski challenges the idea that capitalist discourse was the dominant influence on the development of prose fiction. Instead, by shifting attention to the gift system as it was imagined and enacted in the formative years of the novel, the volume offers an innovative understanding of how the economy of obligation shaped writers' portrayals of class and gender identity, property, and community. Through theoretically-informed readings of Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Cecilia and The Wanderer, and Austen's Mansfield Park and Emma, the book foregrounds the issues of donation, reciprocity, indebtedness, and gratitude as it investigates the conflicts between the market and moral economies and analyzes women's position at the center of these conflicts. As this study reveals, the exchanges that eighteenth-century fiction prescribed for women confirm the continuing power and importance of gift transactions in the midst of an increasingly commercial culture. The volume will be essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth-century novel, economic literary criticism, women and gender studies, and book history.

Women and Music in the Age of Austen highlights the central role women played in musical performance, composition, reception, and representation, and analyzes its formative and lasting effect on Georgian culture. This interdisciplinary collection of essays from musicology, literary studies, and gender studies challenges the conventional historical categories that marginalize women’s experience from Austen’s time. Contesting the distinctions between professional and amateur musicians, public and domestic sites of musical production, and performers and composers of music, the contributors reveal how women’s widespread involvement in the Georgian musical scene allowed for self-expression, artistic influence, and access to communities that transcended the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. This volume’s breadth of focus advances our understanding of a period that witnessed a musical flourishing, much of it animated by female hands and voices. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.  

Women and Music in the Age of Austen highlights the central role women played in musical performance, composition, reception, and representation, and analyzes its formative and lasting effect on Georgian culture. This interdisciplinary collection of essays from musicology, literary studies, and gender studies challenges the conventional historical categories that marginalize women’s experience from Austen’s time. Contesting the distinctions between professional and amateur musicians, public and domestic sites of musical production, and performers and composers of music, the contributors reveal how women’s widespread involvement in the Georgian musical scene allowed for self-expression, artistic influence, and access to communities that transcended the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. This volume’s breadth of focus advances our understanding of a period that witnessed a musical flourishing, much of it animated by female hands and voices. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.  

This new volume continues the tradition of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture of publishing innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the interpretive edge. Undertaking critical investigation of eighteenth-century ideas and practices, it discusses the possibilities and limitations of print; royal portraiture, the sentimental novel, and botanical classification through the categories of gender; the European experience in the 1700s; and change over time in the realms of music, architecture, and literature from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth.

Contributors and content:

James Swenson, Critique, Progress, Autonomy Eve Tavor Bannet, Printed Epistolary Manuals and the Rescripting of Manuscript Culture Madeleine Forell Marshall, Late Eighteenth-Century Public Reading, with Particular Attention to Sheridan's Strictures on Reading the Church Service (1789) Daniel Rosenberg, Joseph Priestley and the Graphic Invention of Modern Time

Jennifer G. Germann, Fecund Fathers and Missing Mothers: Louis XV, Marie Leszczinska, and the Politics of Royal Parentage in the 1720s Mary McAlpin, Julie's Breasts, Julie's Scars: Physiology and Character in La Nouvelle HA(c)loAse Ann B. Shteir, Flora primavera or Flora meretrix? Iconography, Gender, and Science

Karen Melvin, A Potential Saint Thwarted: Religion and the Politics of Sanctity in Late-Eighteenth Century New Spain Margaret R. Ewalt, Christianity, Coca, and Commerce in the Peruvian Mercury

Howard Irving, Haydn and the Politics of the Picturesque Richard Wittman, The Hut and the Altar: Architectural Origins and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France GAran Blix, The Occult Roots of Realism: Balzac, Mesmer, and Second Sight

This well-illustrated new volume continues the tradition of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture of publishing innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the interpretive edge.

Contents include:

ASECS Women's Caucus Roundtable: The Career and Work of Madelyn GutwirthCarol Blum, Madeleine Dobie, Madelyn Gutwirth, Katherine Jensen, Sarah Maza, Karyna Szmurlo, and Janet Whately

The Plantation and the Polis: Reform Ideology and the Generic Structure in Matthew Lewis' Journal of the West Indian ProprietorEllen Malenas

Give Us Our Daily Breadfruit: Bread Substitution in the Pacific in the Eighteenth CenturyVanessa Smith

The People Things Make: Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Properties of SelfMark Blackwell

Covering Sexual Disguise: Passing Women and Generic RestraintFraser Easton

Sapphic Self-Fashioning in the Baroque Era: Women's Petrarchan Parody in English and Spanish, 1650--1700Dianne Dugaw and Amanda W. Powell

"Why, you... I oughta'... ": Aposiopesis and the Natural Language of the Passions, 1670--1770Robert G. Dimit

From Geneva to Glasgow: Rousseau and Adam Smith on the Theatre and Commercial SocietyRyan Hanley

Faux savants, femmes philosophes, and philosophes amoureux: Foibles of the philosophe on the Eighteenth-Century French StageAnne Vila

The New Paris in the Guise of the Old: Louis Sebastian Mercier from Old Regime to RevolutionJoanna Stalnaker

Carriages, Conversation, and A Sentimental JourneyDanielle Bobker

Hyperborean Atlantis: Jean-Sylvian Bailly, Madame Blavatsky, and the Nazi MythDan Edelstein