New Eighteenth Century

Felicity A. Nussbaum, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, has published Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre and The Arabian Nights in Historical Context with Saree Makdisi, among other books. A former president of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, she has held NEH, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships. She is currently writing plays on Hester Thrale Piozzi and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.Laura Brown is the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell. She has served as President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. And she is the author of seven books—engaging variously with drama and performance, women and imperialist ideology, sewers and oceans, lapdogs and monkeys, and now earthquakes, storms, and what she is calling the eco-other in eighteenth-century literature. The latter is the topic of her most recent book, The Counterhuman Imaginary: Earthquakes, Lapdogs, and Traveling Coinage in Eighteenth-Century Literature, published in 2023.

• Revising Critical Practices: An Introductory Essay 1. Historicizing Absalom and Achitophel 2. The Romance of Empire: Oroonoko and the Trade in Slaves 3. “When Men Women Turn”: Gender Reversals in Fielding’s Plays 4. Representing an Under Class: Servants and Proletarians in Fielding and Smollett 5. The Resignation of Mary Collier: Some Problems in Feminist Literary History 6. On the Use of Contradiction: Economics and Morality in the Eighteenth-Century Long Poem 7. Heteroclites: The Gender of Character in the Scandalous Memoirs 8. Prison Reform and The Sentence of Narration in The Vicar of Wakefield 9. Johnson and the Role of Authority 10. Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and The Theatrics of Virtue 11. The Spectralization of The Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho 12. The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public Consumption of Private Property

Review of the first publication:‘The New Eighteenth Century is an undeniably important book…I shall assign it to my students in eighteenth-century courses and seminars. If I could, I would assign it to all of my colleagues in the field.’— Jerry C. Beasley, University of Delaware