EBRO Review Archives

Françoise d'Happoncourt de Graffigny gained celebrity as the author of Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747), a work whose popularity spanned almost a hundred years and produced over 130 editions, reprints, and translations. Despite Graffigny's tremendous success during her own time, nineteenth-century scholars relegated her work to oblivion.

The growing interest in French music and opera in the eighteenth century calls for a systematic study of the institutions, practices, and theories of music criticism in the periodical press of the time. Because La critique musicale au temps des Encyclopédistes attempts to fill this important need, it deserves an attentive reading.

Always the critical late-bloomer, William Blake has been the subject of an array of new approaches in recent years, opening up his work for perspectives driven by concerns about gender (both feminist and queer), politics, and physical space. Scholars have also focused on situating Blake’s work and philosophy more squarely in his historical era.

The dustjacket of Sarah Cohen's beautifully illustrated and presented Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Regime provides a key to the scope of the book. Looking at the front cover, we see a detail from Watteau's " Fetes Venitiennes " (late 1710's) that depicts a dancing couple performing perhaps a minuet.

This short but dense book offers profound insights into the political context of Dublin theatre production from the Stuart Restoration of 1660 to the Act of Union of 1800.

The Complexion of Race attends thoughtfully and copiously to an important and understudied problem that was addressed with varying degrees of self-consciousness throughout the eighteenth century: how to explain the human diversity that expanding commerce and conquest was bringing more prominently into view?

In recent years few events in Irish history have been the subject of more intense scrutiny than the 1798 rebellion. The bicentenary of the rebellion witnessed enormous academic and public interest, marked by an amazing variety of publications and events throughout Ireland and abroad.

This collection of libertine literature (some from the late seventeenth century, in spite of the sub-title) is described by its editor as “proto-pornography”—that is, material drawn from the rich vein of racy writings that pre-date and inform the more recent concept of “pornography.” The texts included are the direct antecedents of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a

Mad Madge is at once a scholarly biography and a book written for the trade market. Mad Madge succeeds as a work of scholarship mostly because it unearths a great deal of new and important material about Margaret Cavendish.

With the arrival of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the dawn of New Historicist criticism, many scholars have been re-evaluating the past, particularly the study of eighteenth-century colonialism.

"History is always unfinished," Anne Firor Scott reminds us in the initial essay of Christie Farnham's Women of the American South: A Mulitcultural Reader.

Women's Worlds is broadly inclusive and appropriate for a wide variety of readers. The text justly claims the subtitle "sourcebook" in that the material includes carefully selected and eminently readable material from almost every area of women's lives.