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In this book, the author enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. She shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern literary sense of atmosphere and moving novelists to explore the threshold between material and immaterial worlds. The book links the emergence of literary atmosphere to changing ideas about air and the earth’s atmosphere in natural philosophy, as well as to the era’s theories of the supernatural and fascination with social manners—or, as they are now known, “airs.” The author thus offers a new interpretation of several standard features of the Enlightenment—the scientific revolution, the decline of magic, character-based sociability, and the rise of the novel—which considers them in terms of the romance of air that permeates and connects them. As it explores key episodes in the history of natural philosophy and in major literary works such as Paradise Lost, “The Rape of the Lock,” Robinson Crusoe, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, the book promises to change the atmosphere of eighteenth-century studies and the history of the novel.

Some of the perplexities of animal rights, as a historical phenomenon, are resolved if we regard rights as neither simply intrinsic to nature nor contingent on state recognition but as a communicative transaction, a claim (etymologically, a cry) that begins before the law and yet is only realized in the law. Testing this premise, this book tracks the development of ethicopolitical community with animals in Britain from the anti-Cartesian origins of ethical sensibility in the Restoration to the first animal welfare legislation, Martin’s Act of 1822. As a semiology of creaturely affect and address, sensibility offered an unprecedented account of the non-linguistic communication humans share with other animals, of the force of the signifying voice to intervene or interpose and of its availability to redirection and remediation. The book moves from accounts of community formation in Enlightenment political philosophy, to public address in periodical culture, to poetry as a medium of advocacy, to parliamentary debates about the statutory protection of animal welfare. At stake in each of these arenas is the status of an intermediary, such as an advocate who establishes his authority to intervene in the sovereign order by staging his secondariness vis-à-vis a passionate voice that precedes him. The book recovers a discourse of sensibility in which the human appears, in the self-difference of a creature subject to history’s impress, in its answerability to the animal, and argues that the non-identity between the vocal claim and the symbolic law preserves the possibility of a justice not yet realized.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, something new made itself felt in European culture—a tone or style that came to be called the sentimental. The sentimental mode went on to shape not just literature, art, music, and cinema, but people's very structures of feeling, their ways of doing and being. This book challenges Sergei Eisenstein's influential account of Dickens and early American film by tracing the unexpected history and intricate strategies of the sentimental mode and showing how it has been reimagined over the past three centuries. It begins with a look at Frank Capra and the Capraesque in American public life, and then digs back to the eighteenth century to examine the sentimental substratum underlying Dickens and early cinema alike. With this surprising move, the author reveals how literary spectatorship in the eighteenth century anticipated classic Hollywood films such as Capra's It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and It's a Wonderful Life. He then moves forward to romanticism and modernism—two cultural movements often seen as defined by their rejection of the sentimental—examining how authors like Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf actually engaged with sentimental forms and themes in ways that left a mark on their work. Reaching from Laurence Sterne to the Coen brothers, the book casts new light on the long eighteenth century, and on the novelistic forebears of cinema and our modern world.

Eighteenth-century British culture is often seen as polite and sentimental—the creation of an emerging middle class. This book disputes these assumptions, plunging into the forgotten comic literature of the age. Beneath the surface of Enlightenment civility, it uncovers a rich vein of cruel humor that forces us to recognize just how slowly ordinary human sufferings became worthy of sympathy. Delving into an enormous archive of comic novels, jestbooks, farces, variety shows, and cartoons, the author finds a vast repository of jokes about cripples, blind men, rape, and wife-beating. Epigrams about syphilis and scurvy sit alongside one-act comedies about hunchbacks in love. The author shows us that everyone—rich and poor, women as well as men—laughed along. In the process, he also expands our understanding of many of the century’s major authors, including Samuel Richardson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Tobias Smollett, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen. The author devotes particular attention to Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, a novel that reflects repeatedly on the limits of compassion and the ethical problems of laughter. The book is a far-reaching study of the other side of culture in eighteenth-century Britain.

The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when Napoleon declared the Revolution at an end. This book explores how the works within this enormous corpus announced the new shapes of literature to come and reveals that vestiges of these stories can be found in novels by the likes of Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and L. Frank Baum. Deploying political history, archival research, and textual analysis, it focuses on five major events between 1789 and 1794—first in newspapers, then in fiction—and shows how the symbolic stories generated by Louis XVI, Robespierre, the market women who stormed Versailles, and others were transformed into new tales with ongoing appeal. The author uncovers a 1790 story of an automaton-builder named Frank énsteÏn, links Baum to the suffrage campaign going back to 1789, and discovers a royalist anthem’s power to undo Balzac’s Pére Goriot.

This book argues that reflection on the spread of print commerce was a key factor in the shaping of our modern intellectual category of "oral culture." In 1700, the concept of oral culture did not exist. At a time when the bulk of the population could not read, orality was not something to be especially valued. Protestants deemed "oral tradition" a suspect Catholic theological notion, and literate intellectuals linked what we might call popular oral discourse with vulgarity, sedition, and religious dissent. But by 1800, ideas of oral tradition dramatically changed. The proliferation of print and the specter of mass literacy prompted widespread reflection on what we would now call media shift. This period saw the emergence of a secular notion of oral tradition and an interest in what would later be called folk culture -- a culture that was valorized for its presumed distance from print commerce and the degraded present. Fugitive Voices examines ideas of oral tradition, oral discourse, and orality over the long eighteenth century. Drawing on a hitherto unparalleled range of sources including elocution manuals, theological writings, travel narratives, legal records, scientific writings, and satiric prints, and emphasizing the relationship between emergent abstract ideas and particular local voices, this study re-creates a world in which fishwives and philosophers, clergymen and street hucksters, competed for audiences in taverns, marketplaces, and streets. A historical investigation of changing ideas of the oral also defamiliarizes key assumptions of current media studies concerning “print culture,” “oral culture,” and “orality.”

The autopsy of Samuel Johnson (1709–84) initiated two centuries of Johnsonian anatomy—both in medical speculation about his famously unruly body and in literary devotion to his anecdotal remains. Even today, Johnson is an enduring symbol of individuality, authority, masculinity, and Englishness, ultimately lending a style and a name—the Age of Johnson—to the eighteenth-century English literary canon. This book uses the enormous popularity of Johnson to understand a singular case of author love and to reflect upon what the love of authors has to do with the love of literature. This book's work is driven by several impulses, among them affection for both Johnson's work and Boswell's biography of him, and distance from the largely male tradition of Johnsonian criticism—a tradition to which this book's author remains indebted and to which this book is ultimately an homage. Limning sharply Johnson's capacious oeuvre, the study also examines the practices and rituals of Johnsonian societies around the world, wherein Johnson's literary work is now dwarfed by the figure of the writer himself.

Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity. This book explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. The book examines, for instance, the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ such devices. It considers the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most important, the book explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat—one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners. Through readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, along with a glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the period, the book shows how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions.

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. This book returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry, especially when it came to the intersection between biological and historical life. It puts apparently literary projects such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life” back into conversation with openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Revealing a hidden counterpoint of atomist materialism in a period best known for vitalism and organic form, the book argues that many Romantic poetic sciences share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organizing nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and semiotic processes that give it viable and recognizable shape. They summon Lucretian materialism not only to present a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power but also to make a monumental and gorgeous case for the role of poetic figuration in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science advances a new theory of Romantic figuration and opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.

Modern scholars often find it difficult to account for the profound eccentricities in the work of William Blake, dismissing them as either ahistorical or simply meaningless. But this study develops a reliable and comprehensive framework for understanding these peculiarities. According to the author, Blake's poetry and drawings should compel us to reconsider the history of the 1790s. Tracing the many links among economics, politics, and religion in his work, the author shows how Blake questioned and even subverted the commercial, consumerist, and political liberties that his contemporaries championed, all while developing his own radical aesthetic.