Em/bedded Narratives: Marriage, Seduction and Adultery in the Eighteenth-Century English novel

Interpreting the Eighteenth-Century English Family

In this exhaustive exploration of several genres of fiction, Ruth Perry argues that a seismic change in the basis of kinship occurred in eighteenth-century England, from a primary kin group rooted in “consanguineal” ties to one rooted in “conjugal” ties. In other words: “the biologically given family into which one was born was gradually becoming secondary to the chosen family constructed by ma...

Marriage and Fertility in a Catholic Society: Eighteenth-Century Quebec

There are similarities and differences in marriage and fertility behavior between early North American societies and their modern counterparts. This paper investigates the quantitative importance of differential fecundity, assortative matching, and marriage market search frictions in affecting marriage and fertility behavior in a Catholic society, 18 century Quebec. The model may provide an exp...

Novel spectators: spectatorship in the eighteenth-century novel

Tom Jones is a typical eighteenth-century hero: he is beaten, bullied, seduced, betrayed, and banished by numerous other characters in the narrative. He performs very little action himself, and that rather unsuccessfully. In one escapade in Book XIII, the hero overwhelmed by London society and ignored by his hosts, Fielding writes that “Poor Jones was rather a Spectator of this elegant scene, t...

“Antitheatrical Theatricalism” on the Eighteenth- Century English Stage

Allegory and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century

In a reading of William Blake's frontispiece to “There is no Natural Religion” that draws largely on the history of the allegorical mode, I offer a narrative that explores the creative ways in which Blake illuminated his ideas about the value of Enlightenment thought.