Final Frontiers

Exploration, discovery and conquest in all its forms were integral parts of the eighteenth century and of the formation of cultural and national narratives in its course. The plurality of approaches to what "discovery" meant in the long eighteenth century makes the term particularly interesting, showing that the century was indeed replete with discoveries in all areas of research, ranging from geographic to medical exploration within the human body and mind. In September 2019, the seventh Landau Paris Symposium on the Eighteenth Century (LAPASEC), held in Bamberg, Germany, brought together a diverse group of scholars from Europe and Canada to discuss issues of discovery, exploration and conquest in the long eighteenth century. The contributions presented and discussed at the conference are collected in this book, which constitutes volume 7 of the Landau-Paris Studies on the Eighteenth Century. As the contributors shared their highly different insights into and approaches to the different forms of discovery undertaken in the long eighteenth century, this collection of essays provides an impressive topical range, covering discoveries in literature, science, music and arts, politics and medicine, explorations at home and away, the individual, genre, and even the inner workings of the human body and mind.


Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................... vii

Foreword ...................................................................................................................... ix
FRÉDÉRIC OGÉE AND PETER WAGNER

Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1
KERSTIN-ANJA MÜNDERLEIN

Explorations at Home and Away

"I advise you . to continue an Englishman": Horace Walpole and China ................... 9
PETER SABOR

We See the Trident of Neptune, the Eagle of Jupiter, the Satyrs of Bacchus:
Neo-Classicism and British Ideas of India ................................................................... 29
CHRISTOPH HEYL

"This Prospect vast": Astronomy in Eighteenth-Century British Poetics .................... 43
FLORIAN KLAEGER

Exploring the Individual

The Underbelly of Enlightenment in Wollstonecraft's
Private Letters to Gilbert Imlay : Exploring Sensibility to the Limits -
and the Limits of Sensibility ....................................................................................... 63
MICHAEL MEYER

Eliza Haywood: (M)Other of the Eighteenth-Century Literary Marketplace .............. 79
CHANDNI RAMPERSAD

Exploring Genre

From the Stage to the Home:
Libretto-Reading in Eighteenth-Century France and England ................................... 103
PIERRE DEGOTT

Parody in William Beckford:
Exploring Eighteenth-Century Socio-Political Subversion ....................................... 113
KERSTIN-ANJA MÜNDERLEIN

Explorations Within

"The Greatest Discovery in Modern Medicine":
Smallpox and the Inoculation Controversy in Boston of 1721 .................................. 131
MARCEL HARTWIG

The Mental Optician: On Telescopes in Early Modern Literature and Art ................ 147
CHRISTIAN FESER

Notes on Contributors ................................................................................................ 165