Workshop Abstracts Sophie Gee (English, Princeton Univ): Holding onto the Corpse: Fleshly Remains in A Journal of the Plague Year The paper explores the problem of the corpse as a residue or leftover in the early eighteenth-century. Corpses were the visible echoes of their living inhabitants who had suddenly ceased to be but whose presence could yet be traced in the terrestrial frame of the body. But corpses were also unsentimental leftovers, waste that had to be eradicated as quickly as possible. Theological contentions about the doctrine of Resurrection expose these very confusions: the terrestrial frame is an unwanted residue, but at the same time a splendid corporeal form, promising a perfect celestial replacement. I argue that debates about the terrestrial body and the resurrection are central to the significance of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. Anita Guerrini (History, UC Santa Barbara): An Impolite Science: Public Anatomical Demonstration in the Eighteenth Century Public anatomy was the quintessential impolite science, messy, bloody, and profane. Yet contemplation of the dead body led audiences to contemplate the meaning of death itself. This paper will explore the multiple meanings of public anatomy for its diverse eighteenth-century audiences. Sarah Cohen (Fine Arts, SUNY Albany): Fashionable Corpses: Animal Death in Hunt Portraiture This paper addresses hunt portraiture in eighteenth-century northern Europe, and calls attention to the prominent inclusion of dead game, not just to demonstrate the prowess of the hunters but also to associate the elegantly arranged, furred and feathered bodies of the animal corpses with the fashionably attired bodies of the hunters. In connecting the animals to the humans, particularly through the visual parallelling of fur and feathers to silk, velvet, embroidery, and styled hair, the artists confirmed the aesthetic association between nature and art. Moreover, by depicting the dead animals as intensely elegant, even ornamental, in their surface display, the artists softened or even belied the fact of bodily mortality--animal and, by implication, human as well. Paul Friedland (History, Bowdoin College): Beyond Deterrence: Animals, Effigies, Suicides and the Logic of Executions in Pre-Modern France The legal trial and public execution of corpses, effigies, and animals occurred relatively often in early modern France. Although we have tended to view pre-modern executions as an exercise in deterrence and a display of royal power, this paper explores how the public death of inanimate and non-human bodies may shed light on other functions served by executions that lie beyond the simple didactic message of deterrence. Lee Sterrenburg (English, Indiana): Narratives of Extinction in the Eighteenth Century This paper asks how writers before the 1790s dealt with details and developments that, in retrospect, appear to us as obvious evidences of species extirpation and extinction. In order to approach this question historically, we need to recall the great penchant for building seemingly permanent and imperious systems in the eighteenth century also the sometimes equally impressive penchant for accepting anomalies and ad hoc exceptions within those systems down at a local level. Tales about human impacts and effects on nature at the local level did not have to change all that much in order to be refashioned into narratives about species extinction during the post-1790s epoch that officially recognized extinction as a realty. Mark Jenner (History, Univ of York): Death, Decomposition and Dechristianization? Church Burial and Public Health in Eighteenth-Century England Annaliste historiography and historians of public health have highlighted the moves to end burials in churches and within urban centres in the late C18, generally presenting them as early examples of successful hygienic campaigns sponsored by secular medical and state authorities. Using 1720s English pamphlets as a starting point, this paper re-examines this literature, highlighting the role of religious discourses and of histories of the church in the construction of these campaigns. Erik Seeman (History, SUNY Buffalo): Jewish Deathways in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World The dynamic relationship between theory and practice was--and still is--central to understanding Jewish deathways. With a centuries-old written tradition providing the "theory" of their burial and mourning activities, Jews negotiated the "practice" of their beliefs and rituals within the context of frequent interactions with Christians. This paper will present both a fine-grained study of Jewish deathways in the eighteenth-century Atlantic, and a more conceptual contribution regarding the generative nature of cross-cultural interactions on the terrain of death. Jonathan Elmer (English, Indiana): On Lingering and Being Last This paper explores depictions of torture and death in the New World, by eyewitnesses, by philosophers (Adam Smith, e.g.), and in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. My key analytic terms are the concept of sovereignty (Oroonoko is a "royal slave") and the Foucauldian notion dramatized famously in the opening of Discipline and Punish that the 18thC witnesses a decisive shift from death to life as the concern and target of state power. Something similar takes place, I argue, in the descriptions of the death of non-Europeans, from Aphra Behn's heroization of the death of her African prince, through Lafitau, Smith, or Ferguson's sociologies of the dark Stoic, to Jefferson's immortalization of "Chief" Logan, the model of the "last" of the race doomed to the twilight zone of life-in-death because unmourned and unmournable. Robert Travers (History, Harvard): Death and the Nabob This paper examines the role of death and dying in the politics of colonial state-formation in eighteenth century India. It explores the central importance of the categories of ' murder' and 'massacre' as symptoms of 'asiatic despotism', and justifications of war with Indian rulers. Drawing on evidence from wills, tombs, and travel narratives, it suggests how the representation of British death in India was an important tool in forging a new imperial patriotism. Adam Potkay (English, College of William and Mary): Joy in Life and in Death In this paper, I identify a controversy over the proper objects of and motives to joy in eighteenth-century, chiefly British, literature. Arguing that a dialectic of Christian and non- (or anti-) Christian motives for joy is set in motion by the third earl of Shaftesbury's controversial writing on the joys of seeing oneself as an integral part of the natural order, and so acting beneficently towards others, I turn from a brief examination of Shaftesbury and James Thomson's The Seasons to address Shaftesbury's opponents, beginning with Edward Young, who sought to reclaim joy as an anticipatory response to death and afterlife. Faye Stewart (Germanic Studies, Indiana): Towards a Vocabulary of Same-Sex Desire: Death and the Afterlife An exploration of the structural relationship between the symbolic constructs of death and same-sex desire and of their simultaneous appearance in literature may help to explain how homosexuality or homoerotic desire may have been experienced at times in which they could not be expressed. My research on the late 18th-century author Karl Philipp Moritz and his autobiographical novel Anton Reiser has led me to conclude that references to death can be read as a code for non-heterosexual inclinations: everywhere in Anton Reiser where homoerotic desire appears, it is always accompanied by a figurative or literal death. This indicates that death may appear in the literature of the German Storm and Stress period as an expression of homoerotic desire: only in fantasies of death, or in near-death experiences, can a homoerotic union be figuratively consummated. Scholars such as Eve Sedgwick have claimed that death appears as a figure of the impossibility of coming out of the closet, or of the potentially devastating consequences of coming out to one's family or object of desire. I propose that rather than being interpreted, as it traditionally has been, as a negative reaction to same-sex desire, death can come to be understood as an affirmation and expression of these desires, perhaps even as the signification of a new beginning or even as an opportunity to perform homosexual acts or identities. Jane Taylor (School of Dramatic Art, Univ of the Witswatersrand, South Africa): Grave Misgivings: Willed Gifts and willful commodities in Richardson's Clarissa The eighteenth century is generally defined as the moment in which western economies became commodified; it is also the era of the epistolary novel, a literary genre that is formally an exchange economy. I will consider the links between these two factors by exploring the final chapters of Richardson's extraordinary epistolary, "Clarissa". In particular I shall speculate about the meaning of the hieroglyphs on Clarissa's coffin, as comments on value in the face of the increased hermeneutic indeterminacy due to the introduction of paper money and bills of trade. Paula Lee (Humanities, Univ of South Florida): Death of the King This paper examines the death of a captive lion during the Terror, and follows the shifting representations of this death over the course of the Revolutionary Decade. This particular king of the beasts generated extraordinary interest because his unusual life and sudden demise was linked to the fate of Louis XVI, guillotined by order of the Convention in January 1793. It inserts the changing descriptions of this lion into the political debates of the period, using manuscripts, engravings, drawings, and other primary materials to demonstrate how ideological pressures affected the narration and visualization of the lions death, which subsequently provided a way to reframe and partially rehabilitate Louis XVI's execution. Miranda Spieler (History, Columbia Univ): Legal Fictions of Death in Eighteenth-Century France For this years workshop I will explore what it meant to die to the law in late eighteenth-century France, focusing on the meaning of civil death during the Revolution. From the time of its invention by canonists as worldly anathema, civil death was associated with island deportation and, relatedly, with banishment from the realm. Deportation and banishment, accompanied by civil death, later assumed remarkable prominence during the revolution, in laws of proscription against priests and émigrés. Looking to legal texts of the period, to debates, plays and petitions, I trace the anomalous predicament of people whom the law proclaimed dead and absent from domestic soil, and whom the citizenry discussed as elsewhere, while the banned or deported people remained in the country either in prisons or on the loose, as killable travelers. I shall conclude with a look at how jurists at the turn of the nineteenth century came to understand natural and civil death, legal fiction, and Frenchness while drafting the Civil Code (1804). Luke Davidson: The Eighteenth-Century Fascination with Resuscitation My paper demonstrates the importance of the history of resuscitation for a complete understanding of death in the eighteenth century. It will show delegates the main ways in which the introduction of resuscitation disturbed existing ideas about death, in particular convictions about the moment of death, the agency of death, and the status of the corpse. Howard Pollack-Milgate (Modern Languages, De Pauw Univ): Death as Screen: Lavaters Aussichten in die Ewigkeit Lavater's "Aussichten in die Ewigkeit" (Prospects of Eternity; 1768-78), a detailed and influential compendium about, as it were, the life-world of the dead, is notable for its complete disregard of the problematical nature of death. My question is whether we can take this disregard at face value or whether we must search for anxieties which it might conceal. Lee Ravitz (History, Univ of York): Not an Apparition, but an Audition: The Ghost as Public Spectacle and the Aesthetics of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England This paper will focus principally on the discourse generated by a London based cause célèbre of 1762, the 'poltergeist' case known as the Cock Lane haunting. The analysis will be primarily concerned with examination of how a publicly sanctioned, affective, relationship with the returning dead was increasingly associated with 'vulgarity' by the arbiters of 18th century 'taste', and ultimately show how this change in aesthetic opinion transformed the notion that encounters with ghosts were objectively real experiences.