By restoring the poet's image to view against the cultural background that branded it as monstrous, Deutsch recasts Pope's literary career, from his translations of Homer to his imitations of Horace, as itself a form of monstrous embodiment - a stamping of his own personal, disfigured image on fragments of the cultural past.
The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century explores disabled people who lived in the eighteenth century. The first four essays consider philosophical writing dating between 1663 and 1788, when the understanding of disability altered dramatically. We begin with Margaret Cavendish, whose natural philosophy rejected ideas of superiority or inferiority between individuals based upon physical or mental difference. We then move to John Locke, the founder of empiricism in 1680, who believed that the basis of knowledge was observability, but who, faced with the lack of anything to observe, broke his own epistemological rules in his explanation of mental illness. Understanding the problems that empiricism set up, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, turned in 1711 to moral philosophy, but also founded his philosophy on a flaw. He believed in the harmony of “the aesthetic trinity of beauty, truth, and virtue” but he could not believe that a disabled friend, whom he knew to have been moral before his physical alteration, could change inside. Lastly, we explore Thomas Reid who in 1788 returned to the body as the ground of philosophical enquiry and saw the body as a whole—complete in itself and wanting nothing, be it missing a sense (Reid was deaf) or a physical or mental capacity. At the heart of the study of any historical artifact is the question of where to look for evidence, and when looking for evidence of disability, we have largely to rely upon texts. However, texts come in many forms, and the next two essays explore three types—the novel, the periodical and the pamphlet—which pour out their ideas of disability in different ways. Evidence of disabled people in the eighteenth century is sparse, and the lives the more evanescent. The last four essays bring to light little known disabled people, or people who are little known for their disability, giving various forms of biographical accounts of Susanna Harrison, Sarah Scott, Priscilla Poynton and Thomas Gills, who are all but forgotten in the academic world as well as to public consciousness.
Eighteenth-century English literature, art, science, and popular culture exhibited an unprecedented fascination with small male bodies of various kinds. Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb plays drew packed crowds, while public exhibitions advertised male dwarfs as paragons of English masculinity. Bawdy popular poems featured diminutive men paired with enormous women, and amateur scientists anthropomorphized and gendered the "minute bodies" they observed under their fashionable new pocket microscopes. Little men, both real and imagined, embodied the anxieties of a newly bourgeois English culture and were transformed to suit changing concerns about the status of English masculinity in the modern era. The Little Everyman explores this strange trend by tracing the historical trajectory of the supplanting of the premodern court dwarf by a more metaphorical and quintessentially modern "little man" who came to represent in miniature the historical shift in literary production from aristocratic patronage to the bourgeois fantasy of freelance authorship. Armintor's close readings of Pope, Fielding, Swift, and Sterne highlight little recognized aspects of classic works while demonstrating how the little man became an "everyman."
Justice has been the dominant cultural framework of people in the West for two centuries, ever since the rise of constitutional democracies. Consciously or not, most people in the West have a strong awareness of right and wrong. Their sense of morality is generally rooted in an obligation to the rule of law. In democratic societies, the rule of law ultimately relies on constitutional documents ratified by a widely-accepted process of development and implementation. For millennia, honor has been the dominant cultural framework of most people in the East and Middle East. Here, people know that speech and behavior display respect or disrespect. While pervasive in all relationships, honor and shame are most important in the family, extended family, and local community. In the East, honor is not necessarily an internal feeling, as it is in a justice culture. Honor is more often an external attribution bestowed by others rather than claimed by oneself. Harmony is prevalent globally in indigenous cultures. Many indigenous peoples do not distinguish between the supernatural and natural worlds. All aspects of life are connected. Interactions with spirit beings are the key to maintaining harmony in order to be secure. Reciprocity is a common cultural framework in the Global South. Here, one learns to develop connections with the right people in given circumstances for needed resources. These connections may or may not be characterized as "friendships" and provide not so much close friendships as reciprocal exchange. In some places, reciprocity is the means whereby one survives.
J.M. Coetzee has new things to say about this relation between the ‘real’ and ‘fictions of the real’, and while much has already been written about him, these questions need to be more fully explored. The contributions to this volume are drawn together by the idea of the hinge between the world (whether understood in ontological, bio-ethical, personal and interpersonal, or socio-political terms) and fictional representations of it (whether understood in epistemological, ficto-biographical, formal, or stylistic terms). In this collection, the question of understanding itself — how we understand or imagine our place in the world — is shown to be central to our conception of that world. That is, rather than beginning with forms developed in socio-political understandings, Coetzee’s works ask us to consider what role fiction might play in relation to politics, in relation to history, in relation to ethics and our understanding of human agency and responsibility. Coetzee has a profound interest in the methods through which we make sense of the contemporary world and our place in it, and his approach appeals to readers of fiction, critics and philosophers alike. The central problems he deals with in his fiction are of the kind that confront people everywhere and so involve a "translatability" that allow the works to maintain relevance across cultures. Added to this, though, his fiction makes us question the nature of understanding itself. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.
John Locke described the mind as a cabinet; Robert Hooke called it a repository; Joseph Addison imagined a drawer of medals. Each of these philosophers was an avid collector and curator of books, coins, and cultural artifacts. It is therefore no coincidence that when they wrote about the mental work of reason and imagination, they modeled their powers of intellect in terms of collecting, cataloging, and classification. The Mind Is a Collection approaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century metaphors of the mind from a material point of view. Each of the book's six chapters is organized as a series of linked exhibits that speak to a single aspect of Enlightenment philosophies of mind. From his first chapter, on metaphor, to the last one, on dispossession, Sean Silver looks at ways that abstract theories referred to cognitive ecologies—systems crafted to enable certain kinds of thinking, such as libraries, workshops, notebooks, collections, and gardens. In doing so, he demonstrates the crossings-over of material into ideal, ideal into material, and the ways in which an idea might repeatedly turn up in an object, or a range of objects might repeatedly stand for an idea. A brief conclusion examines the afterlife of the metaphor of mind as collection, as it turns up in present-day cognitive studies. Modern cognitive theory has been applied to the microcomputer, and while the object is new, the habit is as old as the Enlightenment. By examining lived environments and embodied habits from 1660 to 1800, Silver demonstrates that the philosophical dualism that separated mind from body and idea from thing was inextricably established through active engagement with crafted ecologies.
A Brief Literary History of Disability is a convenient, lucid, and accessible entry point into the rapidly evolving conversation around disability in literary studies. The book follows a chronological structure and each chapter pairs a well-known literary text with a foundational disability theorist in order to develop a simultaneous understanding of literary history and disability theory. The book as a whole, and each chapter, addresses three key questions: Why do we even need a literary history of disability? What counts as the literature of disability? Should we even talk about a literary aesthetic of disability? This book is the ideal starting point for anyone wanting to add some disability studies to their literature teaching in any period, and for any students approaching the study of literature and disability. It is also an efficient reference point for scholars looking to include disability studies approaches in their research.
This handbook is a guide to the kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth century and it focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.
Here is the young fan's record book of the worst performances in batting, fielding and pitching, along with the most inauspicious major league debuts and the worst teams of all time. Includes a catalog of the dumbest trades, the worst World Series performances and the worst baseball movies.
Singing by Herself reinterprets the rise of literary loneliness by foregrounding the female and feminized figures who have been overlooked in previous histories of solitude. Many of the earliest records of the terms "lonely" and "loneliness" in British literature describe solitaries whose songs positioned them within the tradition of female complaint. Amelia Worsley shows how these feminized solitaries, for whom loneliness was both a space of danger and a space of productive retreat, helped to make loneliness attractive to future lonely poets, despite the sense of suspicion it evoked. Although loneliness today is often associated with states of atomized interiority, soliloquy, and self-enclosure, this study of eighteenth-century poetry disrupts the presumed association between isolation, singular speech, and bounded models of poetic subjectivity. In five chapters focused on lonely poet figures in the works of John Milton, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Charlotte Smith—which also take account of the wider eighteenth-century fascination with literary loneliness—Singing by Herself shows how poets increasingly associated the new literary mode of being alone with states of disembodiment, dispersal, and echoic self-doubling. Seemingly solitary lonely voices often dissolve into polyvocal, allusive community, Worsley argues, when in dialogue with each other and also with classical figures of feminized lament such as Sappho, Echo, and Philomela. The book's provocative reflections on lyric mean that it will have a broad appeal to scholars interested in the history of poetry and poetics, as well as to those who study the literary history of gender, affect, and emotion.