Preface Préface

“Secrets & Surveillance” CSECS 2016 took place in Kingston, originally Cataraqui, located on the traditional land of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe Peoples. First referred to as “the King’s Town” or “King’s Town” by 1787 in honour of King George III, the name was shortened to “Kingston” in 1788. Prior to this it had been a French settlement and Fort, then played a major part as a British military base in the war of 1812. Clearly, it is a place that has borne witness to many secrets, and to much surveillance. Current scholarly questions about Enlightenment projects reveal the significance of both secrecy and surveillance in all of our pasts. Where these two preoccupations rely on keeping things hidden and dark and on how much has been achieved by these means, advantageous and otherwise, both topics fostered fascinating papers and keen debates at the conference. Lisa Freeman (University of Illinois) spoke on “Anti-Theatrical Politics and the Suppositious Play of the Stage,” and in so doing revealed new possibilities for plays the scholars in the audience thought they knew. The French plenary speaker, Christophe Cave (Université Grenoble-Alpes), specialist of the Mémoires secrets, showed how secrets can become a critical means of control to a regime of surveillance. One public roundtable discussion on “Big Data” at Queen’s University surveyed the history and current political climate of surveillance, in Canada and globally, and another roundtable on “Relations between Nations: Eighteenth-Century Indigenous Diplomacy in the Kingston Area” enhanced our understanding of how secrecy and surveillance inform relationships between peoples, as well as between peoples and the land. The papers in Lumen XXXVII speak to the breadth and depth of the two-fold theme, coming from an impressive variety of critical spaces examining history, literature, politics, religion, and aesthetics. Servanne Woodward focuses on the links between secret and surveillance in the comedy Arlequin poli par l’amour (1720) by Marivaux. Noel Chevalier’s intriguing “Treasures of the Imagination: Rethinking Pirate Booty in Pirate Narratives” looks at pirate narratives from the eighteenth-century press and moral propaganda perspective, rather than through the lens of nineteenth-century adventure fiction, and shows a vastly different, more modest and quotidian side of piracy that is virtually lost in popular understanding today. Michèle Bokobza Kahan explores the affective and moral dimensions of secrets in the memoir-novels of Abbé Prévost. She puts forward the importance of the secret in the autobiographic enterprise. Eric Miller’s “Cow Chase and Monody: Major John Andre’s and Anna Seward’s Prophetic Poems” marshals an impressively wide range of references to other texts and genres in his analysis of satirical ballad. Miller’s paper is equally historical and literary. Catherine Dubeau, who studies a manuscript that remained secret for a long period of time, Entretien avec moi-même by Jacques Necker, reveals a new face to Louis XVI’s finance minister. Rosemary Legge’s “The Mirror and Manners: Watching, Being Watched, and Watching Oneself in Rococo Spaces” analyses the mirror in later eighteenth-century France, beginning with a specific painting of people, other paintings, and mirrors in a commercial/social space. Diane Woody looks at the motives, the sources, the evolution and the difficulties inherent to the coded writing that Mme de Graffigny uses in her letters. In “‘Some Fatal Secret’: Mortmain in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto” Caroline Winter focuses on the economic ideas at the core of The Castle of Otranto. Walpole’s castle—and the novel—represent both the secrecy and the surveillance at the very heart of gothic. Epistolary writing is the topic that Sophie Rothé explores in her article on Mirabeau’s personal correspondence while imprisoned at Vincennes, where he found ways to resist to penitentiary surveillance. …