Making Waste - Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

Erscheinungsjahr 2010
ISBN: 978-0-691-13984-5
Verlag: Princeton University Press

Buch, Englisch, 216 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 462 g

Why was eighteenth-century English culture so fascinated with the things its society discarded? Why did Restoration and Augustan writers such as Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope describe, catalog, and memorialize the waste matter that their social and political worlds wanted to get rid of--from the theological dregs in Paradise Lost to the excrements in "The Lady's Dressing Room" and the corpses of A Journal of the Plague Year? In Making Waste, the first book about refuse and its place in Enlightenment literature and culture, Sophie Gee examines the meaning of waste at the moment when the early modern world was turning modern.Gee explains how English writers used contemporary theological and philosophical texts about unwanted and leftover matter to explore secular, literary relationships between waste and value. She finds that, in the eighteenth century, waste was as culturally valuable as it was practically worthless--and that waste paradoxically revealed the things that the culture cherished most.The surprising central insight of Making Waste is that the creation of value always generates waste. Waste is therefore a sign--though a perverse one--that value and meaning have been made. Even when it appears to symbolize civic, economic, and political failure, waste is in fact restorative, a sign of cultural invigoration and imaginative abundance. Challenging the conventional association of Enlightenment culture with political and social improvement, and scientific and commercial progress, Making Waste has important insights for cultural and intellectual history as well as literary studies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gee, Sophie

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder England, UK, Irland: Regional & Stadtgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

Introduction: Making Waste 1

Chapter 1: The Invention of the Wasteland: Civic Narrative and Dryden's Annus Mirabilis 18

Chapter 2: Wastelands, Paradise Lost, and Popular Polemic at the Restoration 41

Chapter 3: Milton's Chaos in Pope's London: Material Philosophy and the Book Trade 67

Chapter 4: The Man on the Dump: Swift, Ireland, and the Problem of Waste 91

Chapter 5: Holding On to the Corpse: Fleshly Remains in A Journal of the Plague Year 112

Afterword: Mr. Spectator's Tears and Sophia

Western's Muff 137

NOTES 145

BIBLIOGRAPHY 169

INDEX 187

Über Autor(innen)

Gee, Sophie
Sophie Gee is assistant professor of English at Princeton University and the author of "The Scandal of the Season" (Scribner), a novel based on the story behind Alexander "Pope's Rape of the Lock". She writes regularly for the "New York Times Book Review", the "Washington Post", and the "Financial Times".