This paper explores the complex relations between the emergence of the middle class, commercial market and children's literature as entertainment takes its place firmly alongside instruction. It is widely accepted that children's literature as a separate genre of writing began in the eighteenth century as part of the modern idea of the child and childhood that emerged in the same period. John Newbury stands at the very beginning of this new development with the publication of his Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744), in which he states the two purposes of his book: instruction and amusement. The tradition of didacticism has always been strong in books that children were encouraged to read, and in the eighteenth century increasingly it served through education to meet the goal of the new middle class. But at the same time, popular literature that included fairy tales, medieval romances and fables, provided mainly through chapbooks, had been steady reading materials for children although they were considered dangerous as providing merely pleasure and amusement. However in the eighteenth century, pleasure/entertainment found a legitimate way into children's literature as popular tales assimilated some didactic elements to become more respectable. Behind this change in favour of entertainment is the emergence of the commercial market in which children's books became a highly valued commodity.

Using the concepts of Avery F. Gordon's “ghost” and Marilyn Francus's “spectral motherhood” as a set of analytical frameworks, this paper examines Daniel Defoe's Roxana (1724). It also uses Judith Herman's “revenge fantasy” to effectively conceptualize the trauma of the birthmother and implicitly decipher the psychological presentation of Roxana's traumatic memories and anxieties. In doing so, this paper reconfigures the traumatization inscribed in Susan's death and her ghost, Roxana's maternal absence, and spectral motherhood within the social and historical context of eighteenth-century Britain and its literature. As Gordon asserts, the ghost represents a loss. Roxana's early traumatic experience of surrendering her children and her loss of birthmotherhood manifest in a revenge fantasy enacted upon Amy, the Landlord, and Susan, which is closely linked to the traumatic memories of maternal loss and unacknowledged grief of the birthmother. This paper reconfigures Susan's ghost through the lens of Herman's revenge fantasy; also, by recapitulating Roxana's maternal absence through Francus's spectral motherhood, it points at and highlights the site where the unspeakable speaks and the invisible becomes visible.

Reading Margaret Cavendish's fiction The Blazing World (1666) alongside her philosophical tract Observations upon Natural Philosophy, which was published together as a companion piece, this article examines Cavendish's unique view on the relationship of soul and body as well as its gendered implications. In Observations, Cavendish puts forth her philosophy of nature, now called “vitalist materialism,” which suggests that everything in nature is corporeal, self-moving, self-knowing, and self-living. In The Blazing World, Cavendish complements Observations and uses the genre of fiction to explore uncertainties and ambiguities regarding the questions of the gendered nature of the body and soul. Firstly, this essay focuses on the difference between immaterial spirits and corporeal human souls as explained in The Blazing World and draws a tentative conclusion that Cavendish views the mind and soul as gendered. However, through a close reading of two scenes where female souls merge together in one body, and two female souls enter into the male body, this article argues that Cavendish comes up with a fictional human body that rejects gender essentialism as a way to envisage a more empowered mode of women's existence. Therefore, Cavendish's creation of a “hermaphroditical” body, justified by her system of natural philosophy, functions as an effective counter-attack on the seventeenth-century discourses that had accused masculine women as unnatural and monstrous.

This paper addresses the craft of disguise and spatial mobility through the reading of two eighteenth-century autobiographies. The Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750) deals with the life story of a woman who dons male garb and joins the Royal Marine. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755) features an actress and author notorious for cross-dressing both on and off the stage. Broadside ballads that deal with narratives of cross-dressing began to be printed at the end of the sixteenth and became greatly popular in the next century. While the autobiographies of Charlotte Charke and Hannah Snell partly follow the customary patterns of printed ballads, their narratives diverge from them in that Charke and Snell's clear self-identification as laboring woman allows their crossover into economic agents. The ruses they employ to traverse out of traditional boundaries and to participate in exclusively male domains are examined in this paper with respect to the transforming definition of industriousness and women's labor at the mid-century. While the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of domestic subjectivity based on the secluded private space, the two autobiographies signal that an antithetical type of identity also arose by using spatial mobility to breach the rigid division. The tradition of broadside ballads and popular literature must be investigated alongside the domestic novel in order to fully envisage the contemporary bounds of women's work.

James Harrington's Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) was republished posthumously in 1700, along with his other treatises, by the Irish-born radical thinker John Toland. He inserted in this edition, however, a non-original treatise by John Hall related to the history of the Scottish dynasty. While the reason for its inclusion has not been illumined in current literature, a close examination of its content and Toland's editorship engaged in it more specifically reveals that it was selected primarily for its anti-Stuart drift. If more aptly contextualized in 1700, however, anti-Stuartism was, for Toland, translatable into anti-Unionism. An awareness of this hidden thrust of the 1700 edition helps to rethink the original edition of Oceana beyond its usual association with the seventeenth-century English republican debate; it was rather a precursor of anti-unionist discourse as Harrington attempted to set forth a work of national historiography after the regal union of England and Scotland had been severed with the head of Charles Stuart in 1649. The breadth and scope of the historical narrative he constructed in Oceana substantiate this view. In it, Harrington laid out the strongest anti-unionist argument; Toland must have found its illocutionary forces particularly useful for the purpose of preventing Anglo-Scottish unionism from garnering popular support in the changed circumstances of Restoration England. By re-contextualizing the two texts―original and edited―within the longer-term framework of early modern English history, the present article seeks to explain how and why questions about English nationhood played a vital role in the formation of both texts and in the attraction of Harrington for Toland.