Preface Préface

The Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Conference was held in October 2017 in Toronto. Co-organized with the Northeastern American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, the event invited the eighteenth-century community to question the notions of the cosmopolitan and cosmopolitanism. A theme of such richness could not fail to attract considerable attention, and more than three hundred Canadian, American, and European colleagues participated in three days of lively papers, discussions, and events. While this topic has already stimulated a great deal of work over the past decades, it was precisely in order to provide new approaches to this complex question that the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies chose this subject. What, indeed, is cosmopolitanism? Who are these cosmopolites, or “cosmopolitans,” men and women who are “étrangers nulle part,” and whose family is the human race? Congress participants highlighted several definitions of cosmopolitanism that flourished throughout the Age of Enlightenment to which these selected works all, in their own way, testify. The two plenary speakers explored the richness and complexity of the conference’s theme: “From Cosmopolitans to Cosmopolitanism.” Sophie Wahnich, Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, presented French revolutionary thought on cosmopolitanism by focusing on the place of foreigners during the French Revolution. The young Republic, on this point, moved from “enthusiasm to embarrassment.” David Womersley, professor at Oxford University, highlighted the genesis of the young Edward Gibbon’s thought on cosmopolitanism by studying the many manuscripts preserved in Lausanne in order to understand the works of this somewhat “pre-philosophical” Gibbon. In addition to these plenary lectures that attracted a large audience, the conference was also the occasion for various events: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas was presented by the Toronto Masque Theatre; Katelyn Clark performed works by Haydn, the Dusseks, and Pleyel on the pianoforte; and librarian Leslie McGrath led tours of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. The graduate student members of the Society were also very active. A round table discussion considered the wide range of careers available to young eighteenth-century scholars, and Toronto students organized a virtual exhibit of the collections held at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, “Cosmopolitanism in the Archive.” Faithful to its tradition and editorial practices, the Lumen editorial team is pleased to present selected works from the 2017 FromCosmopolitans to Cosmopolitanisms conference. Barbara Abrams, in “Rousseau’s Moral and Legal Legacy: Hospitality and Alterity in The Levite of Ephraim,” studies a little-known text of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Levite of Ephraim, in order to analyze how this biblically-inspired drama serves as an ethical fable used to define what is a foreigner in the eighteenth century, and more generally, to enrich our understanding of Rousseau’s philosophy on the eve of publishing The Social Contract. In “Morgan, le ‘négrillon’ de Chateaubriand,” Michèle Bocquillon brings more light on the appearance in Chateaubriand’s Congrès de Vérone of a young African, probably offered as a diplomatic gift, an inclusion that suggests an influence of Madame de Duras’ Ourika on the author of René. In “Frances Burney and the Marketplace,” Lorna Clark explores the rich literary and social implications, in Burney’s novels and journals, of the recent discovery that her mother owned a fan shop in London. Eric Miller’s “‘Spenser, Ariosto, etc.’: Elizabeth Simcoe Reads Canada” considers how Simcoe’s construction of Canadian reality was determined by her considerable knowledge of European Renaissance epic. Laetitia Saintes, in “Germaine de Staël, citoyenne du monde: Le cosmopolitisme dans l’oeuvre staëlien,” explores the context that led to the first French Romanticism in an eminently cosmopolitan setting: the Coppet Group. Italy, England, and Germany are …