The "emergence of literature in eighteenth-century France" changes our understanding of when, how and why modern ideas of literature emerged in France. Using a unique blend of literary and digital methods, it argues that it was in the mid eighteenth century, rather than the nineteenth (as many have claimed), that the word littrature…

This article describes a book review assignment that is an application of enlightenment practices to a modern learning environment. This paper encourages both student learning in the content of enlightenment ideas and the methods of critical, accessible writing. Students engage in metacognition by using the critical reasoning capacities of their…

Eighteenth-century actor and playwright Eusebio Vela, long thought to be born in Mexico but actually born in Spain, dominated Mexico City's Coliseo theater for decades and has been variously interpreted as a creole patriot or as a Spanish propagandist. Vela's four extant plays, which treat the fall of Spain, Telemachus's wanderings in the…

This article considers the extent to which medieval "mappaemundi" are an important precedent for literary cartographies in fiction for children. It connects the notion of embeddedness to Peta Mitchell's (2011) suggestion that "mappaemundi" refused to entertain the later, post-Enlightenment cartographic distinction between…

As a professor of eighteenth-century British Literature I am often tasked (like my colleagues in other areas) with constructing a period based syllabus that "represents" this portion of literary history. Every semester, without fail, I am befuddled by the word "represents." How, exactly, do I want to "represent" the…

The author discusses their experiences teaching an upper-division seminar course in a traditional face-to-face setting, and re-designing a "long eighteenth century" survey course for delivery online. The article thus explores spatial strategies in both face-to-face and online courses, and suggests ways in which they can be particularly…