Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

This volume of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture offers a special cluster of essays on literature and medicine, "Allegories of Healing," that considers at length the different ways the physician-patient relationship was configured in France and Great Britain. Other essays discuss the unspoken politics of ocular observation, family relations and family values in Defoe and Frances Burney, ideals of polite marriage in France, portraiture as a record of the career of actress Sarah Siddons, period contexts for the works of dramatist Joanna Baillie and novelist Maria Edgeworth, and the phenomenology of rereading Richardson. The volume concludes with a reconsideration by Robert Wokler and Bruce Mazlish of Ernst Cassirer's classic study, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. "Each of these marvelous essays was selected to reflect the wide intellectual scope and keen local interests of students of the period. Several ask and answer interdisciplinary questions about the relation of the literary arts to the science of healing. Still others present workable ways of reconciling the discursive play of values to more traditional forms of historiography. All of them offer ideas that deserve to be much better known." -- Timothy Erwin