The 36th annual conference of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies took place in St. John’s, NL, from 14 to 16 October 2010. Our theme was “Charting the 18th Century: Encircling Land & Sea.” If anything, this conference was a testament to longevity: two plenary speakers from our last CSECS conference held here in 1992 returned eighteen years later as hale and as intellectually hardy as ever. The eighteenth century constantly surprises us. In her lifelong mapping out of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s mental terrain, Isobel Grundy has uncovered Philocles, “a vision of male charms… a feminised man of sensibility, the only character in the story who is capable of reciprocating her deep and passionate love. He turns out, however, not to be human, but a visitor from space, heir apparent to the ruler of the planet Venus.” So gender-sensitive, extra-terrestrial soul-mates were not an invention of Steven Spielberg after all. Jean-François Palomino applies his expertise in cartography to the mapping of New France. Pat Rogers illuminates an occupation not often thought of beyond the realm of property acquisition, essential in determining boundaries: that of surveyor who followed the trailblazer (Thomas Jefferson, we are reminded, came from a long line of surveyors). Other papers from new and established scholars alike cover poetry, prose, drama, art, history, biography, philosophy, and religion. I would like to thank Gary Kachanoski, the President of Memorial University of Newfoundland, and his predecessor, Chris Loomis, for supporting this endeavour. I am also grateful to my head of department, Donna Walsh, for providing me with two graduate assistants, Amber Parker and Rebeccah Hearn, for help with the editing of these papers. Another 1992 delegate, Jay Macpherson, returned to us in 2010. As a schoolgirl, Jay crossed the Atlantic from England in the dark days of WWII. She attended Bishop Spencer College in St. John’s before moving on to Victoria College in Toronto where she taught for nearly forty years. She recalled the last time she stayed at our conference venue, seventy years earlier. It was Hallowe’en 1940, and she wandered the halls of the old hotel draped in a bed-sheet for her ghostly disguise. An influential poet and Swift scholar, she was a longstanding member of CSECS. Jay passed away at the age of eighty on 21 March 2012. This volume is dedicated to her. C’est à St. John’s, Terre-Neuve, que s’est déroulé du 14 au 16 octobre 2010 le trente-sixième congrès de la Société canadienne d’étude du dix-huitième siècle. Le thème retenu était « Cartographier le dix-huitième siècle : mesurer la terre & la mer ». Ce congrès fut notamment l’occasion d’une belle démonstration de longévité : deux conférenciers invités au dernier congrès de la SCEDHS à Terre-Neuve, en 1992, étaient de retour dix-huit ans plus tard, plus inspirés et inspirants que jamais. Le dix-huitième siècle peut encore nous surprendre. Au détour de ses recherches consacrées à la cartographie de l’univers intellectuel de Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Isobel Grundy est tombée sur le personnage de Philocles : « a vision of male charms […] a feminised man of sensibility, the only character in the story who is capable of reciprocating her deep and passionate love. He turns out, however, not to be human, but a visitor from space, heir apparent to the ruler of the planet Venus. » Il semblerait que Steven Spielberg n’ait pas été le premier à imaginer la rencontre entre des âmes soeurs venues de l’espace et sensibles aux rapports entre les sexes. Jean-François Palomino, dans le cadre d’une enquête sur le rôle des savoirs géographiques en milieu colonial, se …
PrefacePréface[Notice]
…plus d’informations
Don Nichol
Department of English, Memorial University of Newfoundland / Université Memorial de Terre-Neuve