"This playful but challenging study is a testament to the wide-ranging intellect of the late Mary Sheriff (a professor of art at Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), whose scholarship was formative in the field of 18th-century art history. . . . In each chapter, Sheriff’s characteristically dazzling play between texts and images and her virtuoso readings of single artworks reinforce her argument that islands condense the era’s thinking about pleasure, politics, and gender. Sheriff’s sophisticated but accessible study is indispensable for students and scholars of 18th-century art and culture. . . . Summing Up: Essential."

CHOICE

“Sheriff is at her best when analysing eighteenth-century pictorial representations of enchanted island narratives, most of them reproduced in this beautifully illustrated volume. . . . Melissa Hyde and Keith Luria are to be commended for bringing this rich, wide-ranging and erudite book to publication.”

Times Literary Supplement

"There is much to discover in Sheriff’s book. Her light touch with sources, the careful weaving together of explication with critical examination, and her skill at exploring and describing paintings and visual culture more broadly, means that although the book is just over 200 pages it is a challenge to sum up....Sheriff’s early death is an inestimable loss to the scholarship of this period. Yet, as a final testament to Sheriff’s scholarship, this is an important book with potential to inform a range of research and ideas well beyond the art history of eighteenth-century France."

H-France Review

"Sheriff’s presentation of Tahiti and Saint-Domingue make the concerns of early modern court ballets and paintings remarkably contemporary. Alcina, Armida and Calypso are a long way from us, but there is a clear line of filiation between the images of their islands and TV commercials inviting us to escape to tropical resorts. Examining their Old Regime roots makes it clear that our escapist fantasies that play on possession and self-possession are descendants of eighteenth-century concerns about gender and sovereignty."

French History

"In this appealing book, Sheriff ingeniously synthesized analyses of disparate texts and visual representations to enrich our understanding of what was clearly an enduring theme in French culture. . . . This is an inventive study, a fitting capstone, and—in many respects—a seductive book."

Journal of Modern History