Exploratory and energetically analytical, 1650–1850 ranges over the expanse of long eighteenth-century culture. Welcoming research on all nations and language traditions, this annual escorts its readers into a truly global Enlightenment. Volume 29 includes essays on familiar topics such as Samuel Johnson and women’s education while it also showcases Sir Joseph Banks’s globetrotting and provides a vivaciously interdisciplinary special feature on the cultural implications of water. Capping it all off is a diverse bevy of robust, full-length book reviews.

Contemporary Francophone African Plays: An Anthology presents performable English translations of eleven West African plays, dating from 1970 to 2021. Works by Dadié, Labou Tansi, Zinsou, Liking, Pliya, Alem, Kwahulé, Éfoui, Akakpo, Mukagasana, and Diouf skewer colonization, grapple with identity, and retell history and myth from African perspectives.

This collection maps the significance of fragmentary forms in early American literature and culture from the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century. The Part and the Whole recovers the distinct aesthetics of the incomplete, retelling the story of American culture by reorienting our collective understanding toward texts and objects that have often been critically ignored.

In this provocative, action-packed comedy that premiered the day after Marie-Antoinette’s beheading, the kings and queens of Europe are marooned on a secluded island, paraded like animals, tried for their crimes, and obliterated by a volcano. This volume offers the first standalone critical edition and English translation of the most infamous play of the French Revolution.

Dans cette comédie riche en événements et scandales qui débuta le lendemain de l’exécution de Marie-Antoinette, les rois et reines d’Europe sont abandonnés sur une île déserte, exhibés et enchaînés tels des animaux, jugés pour leurs crimes, et anéantis par un volcan. Nous proposons ici la première édition critique et la première traduction anglaise de la pièce la plus célèbre de la Révolution française.