Description
Book SynopsisWhy was eighteenth-century English culture so fascinated with the things its society discarded? This book explains how English writers used contemporary theological and philosophical texts about unwanted and leftover matter to explore secular, literary relationships between waste and value.
Trade Review"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."--Choice "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
Table of ContentsACKNOWLEDGMENTS 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
