Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

Sophie Gee

Published by Princeton University Press 2010

Making Waste

Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

Sophie Gee

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400832125

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

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.

Reviews

"This is a vivaciously written, multidimensional study of the problem and promise that waste posed to the eighteenth-century English imagination. It is surprisingly and commendably concise, given its topic, and it frames economic, political, anthropological, and historical analysis with a very fine literary sensibility—one that actively appreciates the role that imaginative writing played in the negotiation of a paradox that turns out to be constitutive of modern English identity."—Jayne Lewis, University of California, Irvine

This brief book on an unlikely topic is packed with insights. By focusing on 'waste,' Gee has found an original way to look at the literature of the Restoration and early 18th century. . . . Best of all, she always writes clearly, making her book accessible even to beginners.

"Making Waste is a pleasure to read—vividly, gracefully, wittily written. It will be a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies."—Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia

For a book concerned largely with filth, Making Waste is stylistically pristine. Gee writes with an elegance and fluency that buoys her thinking from one topic to the next. . . . Rarely does criticism read so well.---Jonathan Kramnick, Studies in English Literature

Dazzling in its range of reference and implications, Making Waste springs to life like Swift's gaudy tulips, mixing memory and desire like lilacs bred out of the dead land, and inviting us to feast on the rich literary and theoretical harvest Ms. Gee has gleaned from the leftover.---Lynn Festa, Scriblerian

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Introduction. Making Waste Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. The Invention of the Wasteland: Civic Narrative and Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	18
2. Wastelands, Paradise Lost, and Popular Polemic at the Restoration Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
3. Milton’s Chaos in Pope’s London: Material Philosophy and the Book Trade Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
4. The Man on the Dump: Swift, Ireland, and the Problem of Waste Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
5. Holding On to the Corpse: Fleshly Remains in A Journal of the Plague Year Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	112
Afterword: Mr. Spectator’s Tears and Sophia Western’s Muff Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	137
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187

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