Lumen Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Consortium Erudit (CA) |
| ISSN | 1209-3696 / 1927-8284 |
| OpenAlex | S4210168433 |
| MAG | 4210168433 |
| Total publications | 76 |
| Coverage period | 1996 - 2024 |
| Country | CA |
| Language | EN |
| Access | Open Access |
| Cited by | 11 |
| Impact factor | 0.033 |
| h-index | 2 |
This journal publishes proceedings from eighteenth-century studies, covering social and cultural history, literature, and philosophy of the period. This provides regular intersection with social anthropology, especially through historical and cultural analyses
American and British Literature Analysis · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Canadian Identity and History · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · European Political History Analysis · French Literature and Criticism · French Urban and Social Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Literary Studies
Formes de vie animales et humaines en contrepoint dix-huitiémiste (Diderot, Condillac…)
Sous l’effet des progrès des sciences de la vie, des grandes explorations, du desserrement de la conception chrétienne et des théories vitalistes, matérialistes et sensationnistes en plein essor, le xviii e siècle déploie comme jamais la diversité des formes de vie. À cette diversité correspond une diversité des modes de perception dont des philosophes sensationnistes, tels Condillac, et matérialistes, tels Diderot, déduisent des possibilités phé…
Aute Life
How can, and do, Indigenous thinkers and artists reckon with the simultaneous horrors and vibrancy of the long eighteenth century? Aute is the NZ Māori name for a kind of cloth created from the paper mulberry plant across the Pacific region that is more widely known as tapa. Tracing the ends and new beginnings of aute production, paying attention to three different moments in which I have connected with eighteenth-century tapa, and reciting a mul…
Introduction [in English]
“Pretty Dope Way to Start a Story”
Reviewers of the 2022 American film Fire Island , directed by Andrew Ahn and written by and starring Joel Kim Booster, have somewhat misleadingly characterized it as a straightforward transposition and modernization of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). Such characterizations ignore the film’s marked intertextuality, including notable references not only to Amy Heckerling’s 1995 film Clueless , itself an adaptation of Austen’s Emma (1815),…
Comment vivre dans un monde d’idées ? L’objet comme construction de l’esprit chez Berkeley
On trouve chez Berkeley, avant même les thèses de Quine dans « Deux dogmes de l’empirisme », l’idée selon laquelle l’objet physique conçu comme unité d’idées qualitativement différentes est une construction de l’esprit pour vivre. Dans cet article, je montre que cette lecture classique de Berkeley n’est pas erronée, à condition de prendre en compte le rôle du langage et de ne pas considérer littéralement que l’esprit « fait » l’objet. Il faut plu…
Anna Barbauld’s Critique of Class Structures in Thoughts on the Inequality of Conditions
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, British intellectuals continued to grapple with the discussions of class inequality that had been made more relevant with the occurrence of the French Revolution. Some writers believed that the poor as a group needed to be contained, so that they would not disrupt the wider structures of society. This essay examines a contribution to thinking on this subject by Anna Laetitia Barbauld in a pamphlet titled…
Parasites and Planetary Systems
As eighteenth-century naturalists sought to determine the nature and origins of biological lifeforms, from polyps to primates to people, novelists extrapolated their ideas to other biospheres to imagine how life might develop under differing circumstances and propose their own “systems.” This paper examines two late-eighteenth-century texts that promote a hylozoic cosmogony, in which all matter is animate and life arises from celestial bodies, cy…
« Sentir son existence »
Au cours des vingt dernières années, de nouvelles études ont mis au jour l’aspect matérialiste des oeuvres d’Émilie du Châtelet. Alors que les travaux de Whitehead, de Le Ru et de Kovács se sont respectivement penchés sur la manière dont la notion de bonheur s’incarne, chez la marquise, au sein de réflexions sur les normes de genre et les conditions matérielles permettant d’être heureux, sur les similitudes entre la pensée de La Mettrie et celle …
Un avant-goût du néant
Cet article porte sur la philosophie de la mort élaborée par Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand, dans sa correspondance avec Voltaire. Celle-ci tourne autour du concept clé du néant et de l’ennui que Deffand a éprouvé quotidiennement, conçu comme « un avant-goût du néant ». Le but du propos est de montrer que Deffand, en tant que salonnière qui n’a jamais cherché à faire publier ses écrits et qui ne souhaitait pas qu’on parle d’ell…
In the Woods and on the Waves
The 21st century has brought new attention to the use of music in Ann Radcliffe’s novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). To date, much of this work focuses on how unknown music evokes the fearful elements of the Gothic. However, reducing key sonic scenes to a sense of fear neglects Emily’s often positive relationship to sound. A re-examination of this seemingly “haunted” music reveals it to be a more ambiguous vessel for the protagonist Emily’s …
Introduction [en français]
Women Writers Constructing Foremothers
How far were women writers of the long eighteenth century aware of literary foremothers, of a women’s tradition? Did they seek to build such a tradition and to claim its legacy? This paper begins and ends with two highly personal experiences of relating to literary grandmothers. In between, it looks at homage paid to Restoration writers seen as originators, like Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, and others, at allusion and influence, at…
Writing History, Writing Novels
This article features excerpts from two historical novels set in the eighteenth century, The Boy in the Chimney and The Canada Act , written by Chantel Lavoie of Royal Military College and Eric Miller of the University of Victoria respectively. The novels are inspired in part by the authors’ historical and literary research in eighteenth-century studies. Readings from the novels at the 2022 CSECS conference in Ottawa (Canada), generated a fruitfu…
Repenser la société française sous l’Ancien Régime dans le roman oriental
Dans son roman oriental pseudo-historique intitulé Abbassaï, histoire orientale (1753), Anne-Marie de Fauques pose un regard critique sur la France d’Ancien Régime. En feignant de retracer l’histoire d’un espace lointain à une époque révolue, elle tend aux lectrices et aux lecteurs un miroir qui les invite à s’interroger sur les relations entre les sexes, de même que sur les relations de pouvoir propres aux sphères religieuse et sociale. Espace d…
Introduction [en français]
Des déclinaisons de l’illusion et de son rôle dans le Discours sur le bonheur d’Émilie du Châtelet
Cet article examine l’accent placé sur l’illusion dans le Discours sur le bonheur d’Émilie du Châtelet. Il considère, premièrement, sa spécificité en la différenciant de l’erreur et analyse les quatre types d’illusions présentés par la marquise du Châtelet, puis précise comment les illusions se manifestent et le pouvoir que nous avons sur elles. Deuxièmement, il postule que les illusions sont des plus nécessaires pour la félicité, bien que les il…
“The example and ornament in this transplanted Christian Colony”
Interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), ethnography, anthropology, and history has widely debated the powerful biography of St. Catherine Tekakwitha, the first Indigenous saint. This essay close-reads life writings by and about Tekakwitha as so death-centric that they can be referred to as “death writing.” Death writings document relationships among the living and the dead. This essay examines…
Introduction [in English]
The Maternal Picturesque in Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Simcoe
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) and Elizabeth Simcoe (1762–1850) composed narratives of their travels: accounts influenced by picturesque theory, especially as articulated by William Gilpin. Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark appeared in 1796; Simcoe, a gifted artist, kept a written and visual diary of her 1791–96 sojourn in Lower and Upper Canada, as spouse of the first Lieutenant-Governor of U…
The Importance of a Rhetorical Approach for the Historically Informed Performance of Music
During the period 1740–1830, the classical art of rhetoric was still largely connected to music. Eighteenth-century theorists emphasized crucial links between rhetoric and the musical arts. Each mode of expression informed the other, with common goals of expressing, communicating, and persuading. Rhetoric guided musical composers and performers alike, who sought to capture the hearts and minds of listeners through artistic expression. However, su…
Voltaire, penseur de la modernité
Le récit de l’empirisme triomphant mis en circulation par Voltaire est à réexaminer. C’est dans ses Lettres sur les Anglais (1733) que Voltaire construit une histoire de la pensée empirique qui oppose Locke à Descartes, et qui culmine dans la pensée de Locke et de Newton. Inutile d’insister sur les simplifications évidentes de ce récit novateur. Premièrement, Voltaire innove en présentant les idées clés de Newton. Deuxièmement, il suggère, de faç…
A Certified Copy
In an era before the invention of photography, fine art prints based on famous paintings dominated the eighteenth-century art market, inviting a common comparison between engravers and translators. At a time when writers and scholars placed much value on the closeness of translations to their original texts, such comparisons reflected a subordination of the skills of technical engravers to the assumed genius of painters. However, careful examinat…
Everyday Aesthetics and Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Everyday Aesthetics and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Un article de la revue Lumen (Volume 41, 2022, p. 1-277) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Race, Gender, and Memes
This essay interweaves pedagogy, reflection, and critical synthesis to evaluate an assignment employed in the upper-division seminar, “Race and Gender in the Eighteenth Century”: The Meme Museum. The Meme Museum harnesses social media reaction with the goal of orienting students’ responses and readings to eighteenth-century literature. The Meme Museum also ineluctably reproduces “digital blackface” in that students, who attend a Predominately Whi…
Defining and Negotiating the Limits of the Immunity of Diplomatic Servants in Eighteenth-Century England
The activities of foreign diplomats in England helped push and create the boundaries of diplomatic privilege in the eighteenth century. One specific issue—the extent to which foreign ministers could shield people from being arrested for debt—led to a sizeable body of case law that defined the limits of the immunity of servants of diplomats. The British government frequently allowed ambassadors to assert privileges even in instances when they were…
An Entire Change of Performances?' The Politicisation of Theatre and the Theatricalisation of Politics in the mid 1790s
An Entire Change of Performances?' The Politicisation of Theatre and the Theatricalisation of Politics in the mid 1790s. Un article de la revue Lumen (Theatre of the world) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Sir Charles Grandison and the Sexual Politics of Toleration
Two concerns preoccupied eighteenth-century readers of Sir Charles Grandison: that the hero's ability to love two women simultaneously compromised the emotional, if not the moral, integrity of his character; and that the novel's willingness to entertain the idea of an interfaith marriage set a dangerous precedent.On the fi rst subject, Lady Bradshaigh announced, "Say what you will, it is impossible for a Man to be equally in Love with two Angels …
Eighteenth-Century Magazine Illustration and Copper Plates Coloured from Nature
In the second half of the eighteenth century, as the magazine publishing industry grew, illustrations became a fundamental element of magazines, and some of the most ambitious publishers began offering readers coloured illustrations. This article examines a series of coloured illustrations published in The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure . Launched in 1752, this series depicts subjects from natural history, including birds, animals, …
Engraved Images, the Visualization of the Past, and Eighteenth-Century Universal History
This article examines several engravings found in a 1744 German translation of the massive A Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time (published in instalments between 1736 and 1784). 1 It explores these engravings in several ways: first, as part of the continuum of the mechanical reproduction of images, in this case, in the form of an image-text publication; second, from an interest in the roles these images may have played in the kno…
Indicting the Woman Artist
devoted a large-scale exhibition to the forgotten half of Western painting since the Renaissance, 'Women Artists: 1550-1950/ 2 Since then, a number of single-artist exhibitions, important catalogues and books have focused on the most prominent of these female painters, including three late eighteenth-century French artists, the still-life painter Anne Vallayer-Coster and the portraitists Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. 3Among …
Échanger ou (se) donner le change
Échanger ou (se) donner le change : la correspondance d'Émilie du Châtelet et de Jean-François de Saint-Lambert. Un article de la revue Lumen (Volume 23, 2004, p. 1-323) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Conjectural History vs. the Bible
Conjectural History vs. the Bible: Eighteenth-Century Scottish Historians and the Idea of History in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Un article de la revue Lumen (Volume 21, 2002, p. 1-231) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Mapping the Distorted Worlds of Gulliver's Travels
An Entire Change of Performances?' The Politicisation of Theatre and the Theatricalisation of Politics in the mid 1790s
An Entire Change of Performances?' The Politicisation of Theatre and the Theatricalisation of Politics in the mid 1790s. Un article de la revue Lumen (Theatre of the world) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Conjectural History vs. the Bible
Conjectural History vs. the Bible: Eighteenth-Century Scottish Historians and the Idea of History in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Un article de la revue Lumen (Volume 21, 2002, p. 1-231) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Français canadiens ou Canadiens? Construction et mutation d'une identité originale au XVIII siècle
Le théâtre de Marivaux et la Terreur
Indicting the Woman Artist
devoted a large-scale exhibition to the forgotten half of Western painting since the Renaissance, 'Women Artists: 1550-1950/ 2 Since then, a number of single-artist exhibitions, important catalogues and books have focused on the most prominent of these female painters, including three late eighteenth-century French artists, the still-life painter Anne Vallayer-Coster and the portraitists Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. 3Among …
Échanger ou (se) donner le change
Échanger ou (se) donner le change : la correspondance d'Émilie du Châtelet et de Jean-François de Saint-Lambert. Un article de la revue Lumen (Volume 23, 2004, p. 1-323) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Engraved Images, the Visualization of the Past, and Eighteenth-Century Universal History
This article examines several engravings found in a 1744 German translation of the massive A Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time (published in instalments between 1736 and 1784). 1 It explores these engravings in several ways: first, as part of the continuum of the mechanical reproduction of images, in this case, in the form of an image-text publication; second, from an interest in the roles these images may have played in the kno…
La République des Lettres au féminin. Femmes et circulation des savoirs au XVIII siècle
circulation des savoirs au XVIII e sicle Comment s'expliquer qu'au XXI e sicle on puisse encore crire sur le mouvement des Lumires comme si les femmes n'existaient pas, sans se proccuper de la place qu'elles ont pu y tenir ou mme en dclarant d'emble qu'elles n'ont pu y en avoir aucune, sinon de sympathie ou d'opposition? En mme temps, il est peu de termes plus en vogue actuellement que celui de femme des Lumires -et tout rcemment mme de filles, h…
Les petits drames de L’Ami des enfants de Berquin
Les petits drames de L’Ami des enfants de Berquin : l’influence des théories de Diderot sur le théâtre d’éducation. Un article de la revue Lumen (Volume 28, 2009, p. 1-150) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
All Shall Yield to the Mulberry Tree
All Shall Yield to the Mulberry Tree: Of Toothpick Cases, Punch Ladles, Tobacco Stoppers, Inkstands, Nutmeg Graters, and the Legend of Shakespeare. Un article de la revue Lumen (Volume 29, 2010, p. 1-174) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit
Figures du recueil
Sir Charles Grandison and the Sexual Politics of Toleration
Two concerns preoccupied eighteenth-century readers of Sir Charles Grandison: that the hero's ability to love two women simultaneously compromised the emotional, if not the moral, integrity of his character; and that the novel's willingness to entertain the idea of an interfaith marriage set a dangerous precedent.On the fi rst subject, Lady Bradshaigh announced, "Say what you will, it is impossible for a Man to be equally in Love with two Angels …
Un mythe libéral, une invention des Lumières
comme remède à la guerre
Le Créole patriote (1792-1794)
Milscent et son journal Le Créole patriote s’insèrent dans les dynamiques \ntransatlantiques qui concernent la Révolution française et la Révolution de Saint-Domingue/Haïti. Deux révolutions qui aboutirent \nà la première abolition de l’esclavage en France, ratifiée par le décret \ndu16 pluviôse an II, sous la Convention montagnarde. \nLe décret représente un des moments politiques les plus signi6catifs \npas seulement parmi les conquêtes juridiq…
Introduction
Travel as Education
Travel provides countless opportunities for wonder. The breadth of human experience enabled by traversing new territory includes curiosity, excitement, and surprise. However, achieving this breadth may well be better left unfulfilled. Gulliver’s interactions with the King of Brobdingnag in Book II of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) raise interesting questions regarding travel and its effects on the traveller. This essay argues that Gulliver’s Travels d…
No Master of Himself
Although he is the exemplar of poetic balance, control, and precision, Pope’s classical aesthetics and ecological vision are ultimately authorized not by restraint but by excess, by a response of wonder: emotive not rational, imaginative not formulaic, and fundamentally religious in nature. Pope’s lifelong and profound engagement with wonder — in both personal expression and formal poetics — embodies the tensions of his time: between myth and par…
On Being Difficult
Is discomfort intrinsic to wonder? The author pursues this question by showing how early visitors to the Niagara Falls found that efforts to improve the view eliminated the difficulty that made viewing the falls rewarding in the first place. Visitors’ experiences accord with eighteenth-century accounts that suggest that wonder thrives on difficulty and desire thrives on inaccessibility. This aesthetic effect finds expression in The Arabian Nights…
Wonder, Politics, and the Founding of Civilizations in Gravina’s Della Ragione Poetica and Vico’s Scienza Nuova
Gianvincenzo Gravina (1664–1718) and Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) were two Neapolitan philosophers concerned with the way human society initially formed. They agreed that ancient myths were produced by a mentality that had a powerful ability for acute perception but could not reflect abstractly. They also agreed that wonder ( la maraviglia ) was an important force that enchanted the first peoples into founding society. They disagreed on how this…
“Our Modern Priapus”
In 1781, British Envoy Sir William Hamilton wrote to Joseph Banks of an astonishing discovery in rural Abruzzo. The inhabitants of Isernia offered wax phalluses as votives to Catholic shrines during the annual Fête of St. Cosmo and Damiano. The waxen vows were evidence that the cult of Priapus persisted in the modern world, and their appearance produced thauma or wonder in antiquarian circles. Moving from Hamilton’s letter to Richard Payne Knight…
Soaring Imaginations
Beginning with the first series of flights by the French Montgolfier brothers in 1783, hot air ballooning quickly metamorphosed from a dangerous scientific experiment with potential military uses into a widespread cultural craze with deep social implications. Using the lens of the idea of “wonder,” I examine the word-image interactions in a selection of engraved representations of the first Montgolfier demonstration for Louis XVI at Versailles. S…
Banished Bodies and Spectral Identities
This article argues that eighteenth-century theatrical reviews and biographical descriptions equate the physical decline of the aging actress with the loss of her identity. It analyses disappearing selfhood through an investigation of the intersection of gender and age in William Hazlitt’s essays on retiring players: namely, “Miss O’Neill’s Retirement,” “Mr. Kemble’s Retirement,” and “Mrs. Siddons’ Lady Macbeth.” In these essays, Hazlitt suggests…
Music, Fable, and Fantasy
This article considers a strange, understudied work of eighteenth-century musical theatre, Thomas D’Urfey’s Wonders in the Sun (1706) . This highly intertextual, generically heterogeneous comic opera is a pastiche of literary and performative modes and ultimately a machine for generating wonder; it draws on elements from Aristophanes’ The Birds , seventeenth-century masque and semi-opera, as well as the lunar fictions. The article situates this p…
Eighteenth-Century Magazine Illustration and Copper Plates Coloured from Nature
In the second half of the eighteenth century, as the magazine publishing industry grew, illustrations became a fundamental element of magazines, and some of the most ambitious publishers began offering readers coloured illustrations. This article examines a series of coloured illustrations published in The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure . Launched in 1752, this series depicts subjects from natural history, including birds, animals, …