Description
Book SynopsisDiscusses fictional encounters between Europeans and purportedly “savage” people in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, arguing that these fictions illuminate debates about sovereignty, violence, and political community. Examines works by Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Eliza Haywood.
Trade Review"Any one interested in the tradition of the modern novel not indebted to realism or how to artfully combine theory, politics, and literature will find much to admire in Loar's Political Magic. Exploring the way that magic, deceit, and sovereignty were habitually yoked in writers whose politics were as various as Cavendish, Behn, Defoe, Swift, and Haywood, Loar's book examines the way that their fictions repeatedly stage a foundational political moment that inaugurates a modern although ambiguous civilizing project, one fraught with technologically-enhanced violence, deferred violence, and magical instruments rather than reason or rhetoric as techniques of government. Loar shows through a series of persuasive close readings of political theory and fiction that liberalism, at its inception, registers pessimism about the tendency of sovereignty to exceed the law and turn subjects into enemies." -- -Roxann Wheeler The Ohio State University "As pyrotechnic as it is closely reasoned, this bold and convincing new book looks at the unlikely role that spectacular technologies of domination and enchantment played in the making of "modern" political community. Christopher Loar punctures the myth of modernity by reversing two standard narratives about the decline of magic and the rise of the liberal subject. That subject's story, disturbingly beholden to technologies of violence and enchantment, is told through insightful new readings of Swift, Defoe, Behn, and Haywood. "Political Magic" reunites these writers and their fictions with the political philosophy and savagely wondrous colonial practices of the seventeenth century." -- -Jayne Lewis University of California, Irvine
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Magical Government 1. Enchanting the Savage: The Politics of Pyrotechnics in the Cavendish Circle 2. Fire and Sword: Aphra Behn and the Materials of Authority 3. Talking Guns and Savage Spaces in Daniel Defoe 4. Doctrines Detestables: Jonathan Swift, Despotism, and Virtue 5. Savage Vision: Violence, Reason, and Surveillance in Eliza Haywood Coda: Enemies Notes Bibliography Index
