Final Frontiers: Exploring, Discovering and Conquering in the Age of Enlightenment (LAPASEC (Landau Paris Studies on the Eighteenth Century))

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 div erse 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 ContentsAcknowledgments ....................................................................................................... viiForeword ...................................................................................................................... ixFRÉDÉRIC OGÉE AND PETER WAGNERIntroduction ................................................................................................................... 1KERSTIN-ANJA MÜNDERLEINExplorations at Home and AwayI advise you ... to continue an Englishman: Horace Walpole and China ................... 9PETER SABORWe See theTrident of Neptune the Eagle of Jupiter the Satyrs of Bacchus:Neo-Classicism and British Ideas of India ................................................................... 29CHRISTOPH HEYLThis Prospect vast: Astronomy in Eighteenth-Century British Poetics .................... 43FLORIAN KLAEGERExploring the IndividualThe Underbelly of Enlightenment in Wollstonecraft'sPrivate Letters to Gilbert Imlay: Exploring Sensibility to the Limits -and the Limits of Sensibility ....................................................................................... 63MICHAEL MEYEREliza Haywood: (M)Other of the Eighteenth-Century Literary Marketplace .............. 79CHANDNI RAMPERSADExploring GenreFrom the Stage to the Home:Libretto-Reading in Eighteenth-Century France and England ................................... 103PIERRE DEGOTTParody in William Beckford:Exploring Eighteenth-Century Socio-Political Subversion ....................................... 113KERSTIN-ANJA MÜNDERLEINExplorations WithinThe Greatest Discovery in Modern Medicine:Smallpox and the Inoculation Controversy in Boston of 1721 .................................. 131MARCEL HARTWIGThe Mental Optician: On Telescopes in Early Modern Literature and Art ................ 147CHRISTIAN FESERNotes on Contributors ................................................................................................ 165