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The trope of the explained supernatural has vexed scholarly efforts to place Ann Radcliffe's works squarely within an Enlightenment or Romantic regime. The tropes appeal to naturalism in The Mysteries ofUdolpho (1794) invites comparisons between Radcliffe and contemporaries like Erasmus Darwin, Charlotte Smith, and other early practitioners of Romantic science. I argue that Radcliffe achieves a more radical vision of science than her contemporaries by rejecting utilitarian appropriations of natural phenomena. She instead presents science as a romantic pursuit of knowledge that rejects technical mastery and ends in aestheticized scenes of pastoral and domestic harmony. Finally, by interrupting the progress of Udolpho's narrative, the explained supernatural creates textual clearings for Radcliffe's readers to reproduce the scientific romances of her characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth-century radical Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809) devoted himself to communicating truth in all his writings. But to what extent is this dedication to truth-telling undermined by Holcrofts use of deceit and duplicity to test the omnipotence of truth, especially when deceit threatens to overpower truth? In this article, I examine a series of scenes in Holcrofts plays and novels wherein truth is not always adequately expressed in language. As a result, performance gains importance. Holcroft develops an increasingly subtle understanding of the relation between truth and the modes of its communication. Performance, even as it may seem to destabilize speech, can be used to intensify it and ultimately to clarify the transmission of truth, which is Holcrofts great aim. By the end of his career, in his final novel Memoirs of Bryan Perdue (1805) Holcrofts understanding of the efficacy of clear speech and performance is strengthened and developed by a new appreciation of what the body of the truth-teller, silent or speaking, can convey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 2016 marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy (1766), which, in the early 21st century, was named one of the greatest travel books of all time. Frank Felsenstein, editor of the 1979 Oxford University Press edition of Smollett's Travels (and the Broadview Press 2011 edition), discusses the original publication of the book and its reception history, as well as his own recollections of first studying the Travels. He examines the changes in editorial research methods from the time of the typewriter to the era of the internet and the ways in which the electronic archive can be plumbed for yet more exciting revelations about this and other eighteenth-century works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains the ambiguities in Henry Mackenzie's quasiironic sentimental novel, The Man of Feeling, by examining its debt to an earlier, formative literary tradition: the seventeenth-century character collection that features the caricatured antiquarian virtuoso. Character collections, exemplified by Samuel Butler's Characters (mainly written between 1667 and 1669), constitute catalogues of ridiculed social and psychological types, prominent among whom are collector-characters derogated for antisocial self-absorption, arrogance, scopophilia, impotence, and credulity. As a sentimental novel, written in an era that highly valued sociability, The Man of Feeling reveals how this satiric inheritance complicates the praise of feeling. It reworks the structure and types of the character tradition and the figure of the antiquarian virtuoso by means of narrative frames that distance readers from the sentimental incidents; an episodic form that fractures sequential narrative; and rhetoric, themes, and characters that play on the opposition between materiality, idea, and feeling that informs the caricature of the antiquarian virtuoso. These features help to explain the ambiguity of the "man of feeling": the sentimental virtuoso who both objectifies and personalizes a world of collectible experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]