Keeping Faith with Literature

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

The Spell and the Scalpel:Scientific Sight in Early 3D Photography Cheryl Spinner (bio) Literary studies has entered what might be called an enchanted turn as scholars seek to recuperate magic as a valid mode of reading. The first issue of this journal devoted an entire forum, “In the Spirit of the Thing: Critique as Enchantment,” to the current “mood” [End Page 436] of critique in the academy, one characterized by disillusionment with the scholar as heroic disenchanter.1 Critics have also begun to account for the ways in which paranoid reading practices have historically participated in a larger project of demystification. Rita Felski, literary critic and contemporary theorist of enchantment, articulates how “critics pride themselves in their power to disenchant, to mercilessly direct laser-sharp beams of critique at every imaginable object”; she notes that in literary studies “enchantment is bad magic, and the role of criticism is to break its spell by providing rational explanations for seemingly rational phenomena.”2 Felski’s use of “laser-sharp beams” targets the sterile scientism of surgical precision that appears to be incompatible with enchanted, spellbound modes of reading. Simply put, the spell and the scalpel cannot coexist. Felski correctly uncloaks the distrust of magic as a method in literary scholarship that trains critics into surgeons of the word with lancets in hand, not analytic necromancers. This essay, however, argues that enchantment does not preclude precision or critical reading practices; rather, enchanted modes of reading can actually enable such sustained and critical attention. I return to the nineteenth century—specifically, to the invention of stereoscopic imaging—to show how even the most distinctly hypnotic visual technology of the 3D photograph enables at once enchantment and incisive critical attention. Mass consumer culture, as exemplified by still and motion pictures, has historically been diagnosed as containing mediums that mystify the masses.3 By such a diagnosis, 3D visual culture is the ultimate mystifier, lulling the passive masses into trances as 3D glasses construct illusory realities before their eyes. Yet, viewed through a different critical lens, the mesmerizing power of the stereograph’s ocular illusions can actually promote close and attentive looking that sustains critical engagement. Excavating a history of stereoscopic sight, I argue, will help retrain the way we think, see, and read in both the humanities and the sciences, particularly as scholars begin to question Max Weber’s story of modernity, which pivots on the progressive disenchantment of the world.4 Oliver Wendell Holmes—the noted nineteenth-century physician, writer, and inventor of the Holmesian stereoscope, the most popular handheld 3D viewing device of the century—is a crucial player in the early history of three-dimensional photography and, by extension, an important theorist of enchantment. Holmes’s midcentury work on stereography showcases how enchanted modes of sight could actually engender more immersive powers of analysis. Braiding the nineteenth and twenty-first [End Page 437] centuries together, I read Holmes’s theories of enchantment alongside and with Felski’s to argue that enchanted modes of reading can actually enable more enveloping powers of analysis. A warning, however, as we shall see: when stereographic sight is hyperfeminized in Holmes’s novel, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (1861), scientific and supernatural sight unravel into separate and competing strains. Isolating the enchanted from the scientific reinstates gendered divisions of knowledge, wherein mystical reading practices are aligned with the feminine and precise scientism is aligned with the masculine. The Nineteenth Century, in 3D Three-dimensional phantom images inhabit the ocular field of nineteenth-century visual technologies. Visual landscapes of this kind were made possible by the theoretical work of the inventor and scientist Charles Wheatstone.5 In his experiments with two-dimensional geometric shapes Wheatstone successfully simulated three-dimensionality by inventing the stereoscope, a device that artificially merged twin two-dimensional line drawings into one three- dimensional geometric shape. In doing so, Wheatstone discovered what I call the “binocular trick”—namely, that the mind could be deceived into believing it is receiving a fictive three-dimensional image. Wheatstone published his discovery in 1838, one year before Daguerre revealed his method for fixing images on mirror plates. By the midcentury, stereoscopy would enter the realm of the...

During the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of research on the seaboard mortality associated with intercontinental migration during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The focus of historical interest in this linkage between mortality and migration has been the Atlantic slave trade. We now have mortality rates on voyages from various regions in Africa to various destinations in the Americas, from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (see Curtin, 1968, 1969: 275-286; Klein and Engerman, 1976, 1979; Klein, 1978; Postma, 1979; Miller, 1981; Cohn and Jensen, 1982a, 1982b; Cohn, 1985; Eltis, 1984, 1987; Steckel and Jensen, 1986; Galenson, 1986). These slave studies have spawned renewed interest in the mortality associated with other seaborne populations, and mortality rates have been calculated on Dutch immigrant voyages to the East Indies during the eighteenth century, European convict and immigrant voyages to North America and European immigrant voyages to Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Indian and Pacific Islander indentured labor voyages to Fiji and Queensland, Australia, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Riley, 1981; Eltis, 1983; Cohn, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988; Grubb, 1987; Ekirch, 1987; Morgan, 1985; Shlomowitz, 1986, 1987, 1989; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1988, forthcoming).

The Evasion of Literary History

Law is always shaped to some extent by economic factors. Contrary to the implications of some legal historians,' this was nothing new in the nineteenth century. In fact, the American legal system underwent steady change in response to economic developments well before the alleged modernization in the nineteenth century. During the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, America passed from a basically agrarian to a commercial and then to an industrial society. At the same time, the law adapted to the interests and concerns of a landed elite in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, a commercial elite during the rest of the eighteenth century, and then an industrial elite in the nineteenth century. Because the law was responding to a changing economy and a changing elite, it should be no surprise that the law changed. This article focuses on the adaptation of the New York legal system to economic developments of the eighteenth century. The significance of legal adaptations of the eighteenth century is often not recognized by historians for two reasons. First, they are often ignored because the eighteenth century adaptations were of a different nature than the changes of the nineteenth century. Specifically, in the nineteenth century the substance of the law changed in response to economic developments while in the eighteenth century legal practice changed. Procedure and practice are not neutral, just as the substance of contract and tort law are not neutral. Different forms of legal practice support and further different economic structures and interests. Therefore, changes in legal practice are just as significant as changes in substantive law.

Until the eighteenth century in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, one general pattern of landholdings and settlement predominated. Land was organized either as single large grazing farms or tacks, or in a form of communal openfield agriculture comprising restricted infield and outfield, and predominant common pasture. The associated settlement was clustered in clachans.1 Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to a lesser extent in the present century, various changes have taken place in this landscape. The pattern has become essentially one of enclosed fields, often with regular lines, and settlement throughout the region is now predominantly dispersed, with only occasional relict or adventitious clusters. Only in a few areas, near the fringes of the Lowlands, do non-agricultural villages form a significant part of the landscape. The nature of the enclosure, moreover, differs considerably from one area of the Highlands to another. In the Inner Hebrides and along the southern fringes of the Highland seaboard, single small holdings and single farms of varying sizes are the predominant elements; crofting townships are few and far between. On the seaboard of the West Highland mainland, large grazing farms alternate with crofting townships. But in the Outer Hebrides, crofting townships of several types form the most important element in the landholdings pattern.2 These internal differences within the broad West Highland region are rarely the result of purely physical factors. More usually the different patterns have been the result of individual initiative. Scotland's Enclosure Acts3 enabled any landlord to enclose lands without the need to obtain an enabling Act of Parliament as was required of his English counterpart. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such initiative by individual landlords gave rise to various social, technical and agrarian changes. In turn, the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen the introduction of changing policies of land settlement and other agrarian changes which have been instigated both by private individuals and by Government bodies. The different changes have resulted through time in the present pattern of landholdings and settlement, not only according to the different ideas of the various landlords, but lso to the degree of isolation from, or accessibility to, the centres of these ideas, the timing of the changes, and to the length of period over which changes took place. In the Inner Hebrides, the Clyde Islands and the Lowlands (Fig. 1) the impact of the Agricultural Revolution was felt much earlier than elsewhere in Highland Scotland. The changeover in these areas from common to individual farming, together with a drift of population from the land to the villages, occurred in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was at a time when pressure of population on resources was less than it was when changes subsequently affected the West Highland mainland and many of the islands. In Islay in the Inner Hebrides, for example, migration to the rising industrial centres of Lowland Scotland had been taking place gradually from the eighteenth century onwards. This migration aided the enlightened policy of the major landlord, Campbell of Shawfield, and his relatives. The policy aimed at a gradual reduction in numbers of people on the land, through the creation of non-agricultural villages. In these villages, agricultural day-labourers, craftsmen, fishermen, foresters, lead-miners and distillery workers feued land4 and built houses to a definite plan of the landlord. In Islay there were always relatively fewer people dependent on the land than elsewhere in the region. This in itself assisted reorganization of landholdings, whether planned or informal, not only in the earlier

Reviewed by: A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain George Haggerty A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain. By Robert Darby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 368. $35.00 (cloth). Robert Darby has added a fascinating chapter to the history of sexuality by detailing the attitudes toward the foreskin and the rise of circumcision in Britain throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The book is impressive in its scholarly erudition and depth of observation, and it builds on various studies of sexuality, especially masturbation, by Thomas Laqueur and others. In addition to its careful attention to detail and its impressive range of observations, the book is largely a pleasure to read. Clear and carefully argued, it builds a case that is as fascinating as it is penetrating. At times there are repetitions and restatements of facts stated earlier, but in every case the new context seems to warrant these repetitions, and I could not imagine the study any shorter. Because Darby writes so clearly about such complex and at times contradictory material, I would be pleased to have the study continue even further into the twentieth century and into cultures beyond the British. He does have a good deal to say about the United States and Australia, to be sure, but we have to wait for a more complete study of the latter, which we are assured in the conclusion is his next book-length project. The thesis of this book is a simple one. In the eighteenth century circumcision was considered an act of deformation, relegated to Jewish and Muslim cultures, but by the early twentieth century had become a fairly common medical procedure, at least among the elite classes. Darby sets out to explain that change in attitudes. In doing so he talks in detail about masturbation phobia in families, in schools, and in the British culture at large. He also talks about the ways in which various nervous complaints were connected to the foreskin. As Darby tells us in his introduction: Frederick Hodges locates the origin of circumcision in Europe and Britain specifically in the masturbation phobia of the eighteenth century and in theories of reflex neurosis, which held that disturbances of the nervous equilibrium could cause disease and which thus targeted sensitive parts of the body as the guilty parties. In this scenario, particularly according to the work of Claude-François Lallemand on spermatorrhea, erotic sensation was redefined as irritation, prepubertal orgasms misinterpreted as epilepsy, and erections viewed as pathological; as the dynamic and most sensitive part of the penis, the foreskin was particularly suspect. (7) The implications of this illogical connection make chilling reading, and at times this book is impossible to put down. "The conviction that circumcision would alter sexual behavior was thus not a side effect of a procedure adopted as a health precaution," Darby tells us, "but its original purpose" [End Page 318] (15). This is the story that Darby tells, and the general shape of his argument is what I will explain here. I want to say at the outset, though, that I think this is a wonderful study that I would recommend without qualification to historians of sexuality and medicine. Darby begins his study by looking at various eighteenth-century accounts of the foreskin. There, "in striking contrast to the nineteenth century," he points out, "there was no concern that a man's well-being was somehow threatened by his foreskin, and no sign of the 'congenital phimosis' that suddenly become so common in boys after the 1860s" (25). (Phimosis is a condition in which the foreskin is too tight for the glans to emerge. It was prevalent in cases of syphilis, "since the disease often produced scabs that fused foreskin to glans" [26].) Eighteenth-century medicine and medical practice were backward by later nineteenth-century standards. Robert James, the author of a famous medical dictionary (A Medicinal Dictionary, 1743–45), referred to circumcision as a therapeutic procedure, and he also, "more ominously," according to Darby (41), discussed the operation in terms of its hygienic importance...

329 cords and novels provide Ms. Joseph a ‘‘window into the processes through which colonial rulers produced their categories of self-understanding and knowledge of the other.’’ Ms. Joseph concludes that both English literature and the colonial archive deployed the figure of woman to facilitate ‘‘the ruses and deployments of colonial power.’’ The claim hinges on extensive archival research and brilliant, intertextual, close readings of disparate bureaucratic records and literary narratives . Representations of woman can ‘‘be read as metonyms of significant historical changes.’’ For instance, Ms. Joseph argues, that in the 1720s, Defoe employed the sexual odyssey of his protagonist , Roxana, to critique English colonialism and as well as England’s commercial relations to Holland. At roughly the same time, Francis Hastings, the president of the East India Company, heavily fined an English employee for raping an Indian woman. Hastings’s action was driven more by his desire to secure his own control of the Company, Ms. Joseph argues, than it was by a commitment to justice for colonial women. Ms. Joseph carefully places her argument in relation to canonical figures in postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Yet she largely overlooks the fact that her central question—how can one read for historical ‘‘fact’’ in archives shaped by the interests and fantasy of the colonizer—has been at the heart of the subaltern studies project in Indian historiography for over two decades. Partha Chatterjee’s and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critical analysis of the archive and of women’s place in national history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would constitute an important additional context . Previews of each chapter explain the significance of Ms. Joseph’s claims. These are, for the most part, unnecessary ; the material and the readings can stand on their own. The book would have profited if its explanatory apparatus were reduced and Ms. Joseph filled the space with her acute readings of the archive. For example, Ms. Joseph contends that while Indian women’s names were left out of birth records of the children they bore with British men, these women were frequently listed as heirs to property in the wills of Company employees. She presents this ‘‘unevenness’’as a window into the contradictions and secrets of colonialism. However, she says nothing more about those fascinating wills. At other times, the evidence Ms. Joseph provides seems insufficient for her farreaching claims. She asserts, based on one quick example (the Indian reformer Rammohun Roy), that the local elite— the bhadralok class—continued the strategic and colonial deployment of women and Indian culture. This important argument demands more evidence and space than the seven-page final section of the final chapter. Leah Reade Rosenberg University of Florida SUSANNAH R. OTTAWAY. The Decline of Life. Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004. Pp. xiv ⫹ 322. $70. From the vantage point of the social legislation that began in the nineteenth century, we tend to see the eighteenth century as a harsh and unforgiving era. As the old system of parish relief broke down, with nothing to replace it, the poor were neglected and the very young and very old left to fend for themselves if they had no family. Ms. Ottaway’s ex- 330 cellent book complicates this narrative and shows that the elderly had much more agency than has been credited to them. She reconstructs the lives of older men and women. Particularly engaging are the many vignettes she offers, drawn from letters, diaries, and literary sources, of individual lives. Wills and parish records also give glimpses of the lower orders . These stories leaven the book’s use of statistical data, such as that from the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Some of Ms. Ottaway’s conclusions are surprising. There were more elderly (defined generally as over-60) people in the eighteenth century than we might expect ; she points out that life-expectancy figures were heavily skewed by high infant and child mortality; if you survived to 30, you could reasonably expect to live 30 or 40 more years. Productive members of society, these people generally maintained their autonomy as long as possible. Retirement did not become a common concept until the end...

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

<i>The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England</i>. Edited by Mark Blackwell . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 365.

The recent decline of American exceptionalism has coincided with a critical reassessment of the fundamental ideas and forces that shaped the culture and politics of the US in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whereas the idea of the nation, with its investment in the creation of a distinctly American identity and culture, organized the exceptionalist project, the role of empire, particularly in the guise of colonialism, has become the new focal point of a postor even anti-exceptionalist reinterpretation of the history and culture of the early US. In the case of scholarship grounded in the eighteenth century, the old story of a gradual but inexorable movement of the colonies away from Great Britain that culminates in the Revolution has been replaced with a narrative of Anglicization that essentially inverts the exceptionalist story. According to the Anglicization thesis, as the colonies developed economically and culturally over the course of the eighteenth century and became more entangled in Britain’s commercial empire, they also grew increasingly similar to the imperial metropolis. In the nineteenth century, on the other hand, the exceptionalist insistence that the US was fundamentally anti-imperial has given way to a new “postnationalist” understanding of the racial politics and territorial goals of the US that situates its imperial ambitions at the center of the story. It would seem logical therefore that we ought to be able to construct a longer term narrative that flows smoothly from the Anglicization thesis’s account of the colonies’ relationship to the British Empire in the eighteenth century to the postnationalist American studies’ vision of the US as an incipient imperial power in the nineteenth century. Yet we cannot, because both Anglicization and postnationalist American studies cast the Revolution as a national moment. In essence, then, Anglicization describes a movement from empire to nation that mirrors the

Notes on Contributors

Wandering: An Essay on Histories, Genders, Mobilities, and Forms

Reviewed by: Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings About Technology, From the Telegraph to Twitter by Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt Martina Hessler (bio) Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings About Technology, From the Telegraph to Twitter By Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 464. The history of emotions is not an established field of research within the history of technology. Even though groundbreaking works have analyzed emotions toward technology, such as David Nye's American Technological Sublime (MIT Press, 1996) or Spencer Weart's Nuclear Fear (Harvard University Press, 2009), this is a rare focus. However, Luke Fernandez and Susan Matt's book demonstrates what a promising field of research this can be. Their starting point is observing a new American emotional style in the digital age. The authors refer to common contemporary statements about digital media, such as Facebook adding to loneliness or social media encouraging [End Page 1222] narcissism. They juxtapose such statements with a historical study that traces the changes in emotions since the eighteenth century. In doing so, they also demonstrate the importance of a historical contextualization of the digital present. In six chapters, they offer a thorough analysis of the history of six feelings: narcissism, loneliness, boredom, attention, awe, and anger. The book uses a wide array of sources: nineteenth and twentieth century diaries, letters, memoirs, and advertisements; psychological and sociological studies from the same period; and fifty-five interviews conducted between 2014 and 2018 to capture contemporary self-descriptions of the American emotional world. These interviews represent a small sample with predictable findings, but bring the study to the present day. In the introduction, the authors briefly outline the state of research in the history of emotions. Further, they refer to the basic consensus of the history of emotions: first, emotions have a history and are changeable; secondly, they are not purely biological, but also culturally shaped. The authors do not mention debates about different approaches, define terms, or provide conceptual considerations on the relationship between technology and emotions, which would have been useful for historians of technology. The aim of the book, however, is to understand a new American emotional style. Briefly and somewhat simplified, the authors summarize their core thesis: "Americans' emotional lives have changed as their society, culture, and technologies have changed. Today many are less humble about themselves and their powers and also less awed by the world around them. They expect constant stimulation, connection, affirmation, and activity, and they are disappointed when these expectations go unmet. This new conception of self breeds a sense of power and also a sense of disappointment" (p. 15). Throughout the book, Fernandez and Matt give voice to different social groups, revealing a variety of norms and experiences of emotions, while effectively describing changes in the broader patterns described in their summary. Interestingly, Fernandez and Matt describe the early twentieth century as a time of change for each emotion, with the interplay of all six emotions as central to the thesis of a new American emotional style. Only one chapter can be examined here. In the chapter on loneliness, the authors trace changing norms and experiences in a multifaceted way. People suffered from loneliness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well, illustrated by impressive quotes from slaves and workers. However, loneliness was regarded as a part of the human condition; it had to be endured. Loneliness was also considered a divine test, idealized by an individualistic ideology. In the twentieth century, the evaluation of loneliness began to change. It was no longer seen as something to passively endure, but something to actively fight. Around 1900, Lonely Clubs or Less Lonely Leagues emerged in cities. Letters had already been used to maintain social relationships [End Page 1223] from a distance and alleviate feelings of loneliness. Companies advertised radio and telephone as means of combating loneliness. According to the industry's message, loneliness could be fought with technology. In the course of the twentieth century, the negative view of loneliness increased. The term "loner" emerged, and the ability to endure loneliness decreased. Digital media and the Internet were able to tie in seamlessly, and alleviated loneliness...

It is widely assumed that laissez-faire had its origins in the European context and that through colonization the countries of the East adopted the ideology. This might not be completely true for a distinctive brand of the same ideology had been prevalent in the Malay Archipelago long before the advent of western colonisation. In fact five trading zones, namely the Bay of Bengal, Straits of Malacca, the east coast of Malaya, the sea of Southern Vietnam, the Sulu Sea and the Java Sea, are known to have practiced a laissez-faire economy as far back as in the fifteenth century. This paper will trace the emergence of laissez faire ideas as embodied for example in free ports and trading zones prior to the arrival of western powers. It also shows how western powers used the existing free trade network to promote a colonial economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Western powers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were able to develop trade without territorial ambitions was due to the existence of a laissez-faire policy and the accommodative nature of the local rulers in this part of the world. The developments of Penang in the eighteenth century and Singapore in the nineteenth century are case studies to prove this argument.