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The latest groundbreaking work in eighteenth-century studies.

Volume 56 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture features a range of essays detailing the collision of form and history in the eighteenth century, identifying the echoes, aftershocks, and resonances of these collisions-in some cases, throughout the long eighteenth century, and in others, here in the twenty-first century.

A group of pieces focus on how eighteenth-century negotiations of identity appear in twenty-first century media forms. A cluster assembled by Nicole Wright offers an apt subtitle for this group of essays: "The Politics of Reenacting the Past."

In the cluster, Tekla Babyak makes a plea to resist the ableism inscribed in historically informed performance of eighteenth-century classical music; reviving the period's emphasis on "dignity and poise" serves only to exclude. Shruti Jain and Julie Murray analyze social media "tradwives" through the eighteenth century. For Murray, tradwives ultimately remind us that "'modern woman' has been a paradox, or a contradiction, from the start." Jain compares the subversive potential of Nara Smith, tradwife of color, to that of Olivia Fairfield, heroine of The Woman of Colour, who injects abolitionism into the marriage plot; Smith, she finds, cannot commit to her own subversive potential.

In addition to the cluster, two stand-alone also meditate on the political import of reenactments: Jacob Myers, in a Catherine Macaulay Award-winning essay, examines how the HBO series "Gentleman Jack" deploys and resists the form of the heritage drama series to negotiate the possibilities of deriving a usable past for queer and trans viewers from Ann Lister's diaries, while also dramatizing the limits of, and violence inscribed in, the archive.

James Ward traces Zong's appearances in writing, painting, and sound as he theorizes the sonic afterlives of the massacre and their resonance in twenty-first century radio dramas-born of pandemic-era adaptations that put unexpected pressure on representations of violence.

Elena Deanda-Camacho's "Divine Chocolate" offers a history of the evolving cultural standing of chocolate, a New World staple, that traverses the long eighteenth century and beyond. The essay unfolds the tale and unravels the politics of a text censored by the Roman Inquisition for its depiction of a Mayan priestess using chocolate to enter into an erotic frenzy. Startlingly, the Inquisition censored the text for framing chocolate-and the priestess-in negative terms.

Shruti Jain's Race and Empire Caucus prize-winning essay "Global Abolition and the Assemblages of Slavery in the Eighteenth Century," persuasively argues that the concepts of "freedom" at play in the parliamentary debates about abolition and about the East India Company make a carve-out for caste in India which obscures the ongoing British reliance on forced, unfree, and slave labor throughout its empire.

A final grouping of essays work to revise our histories of key literary forms.

Caroline Pari's "Recovering The Story of Fidelia," considers how print and historical context profoundly shape our understanding of the seduction narrative as a negotiation of women's agency. She details the discovery of an early, overlooked narrative by Hester Mulso Chapone, later a famous conduct book author.

Jie Zhuang reconsiders the gender dynamics of Chen Duansheng's eighteenth-century Chinese tanci novel Zaishengyuan, famous for its use of cross-dressing, arguing that key but neglected contexts, most crucially elite women readers performance of tanci, allows us to see past debates about the sincerity of Duansheng's overt deference to Confucian patriarchy, to the performative space the novel opened up for gender non-conforming women in its original audience.