Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

206 Pages·2010·0.751 MB·English

by  Sophie Gee

M a k i n g Wa s t e
e

M a k i n g Wa s t e
leftovers and
the eighteenth-century
imagination
e
Sophie Gee
Princeton University Press
Princeton & Oxford
Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gee, Sophie, 1974–
Making waste : leftovers and the eighteenth-century imagination /
Sophie Gee.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-13984-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism.
2. Waste (Economics) in literature. 3. Literature and society—Great
Britain—History—18th century. 4. Refuse and refuse disposal
in literature. 5. Great Britain—Civilization—18th century.
6. Consumption (Economics) in literature. I. Title.
PR448.W37G44 2010
820.9'3553—dc22 2009032667
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond
Printed on acid-free paper. b
press.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
c o n t e n t s
acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Making Waste 1
1. The Invention of the Wasteland: Civic Narrative
and Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis 18
2. Wastelands, Paradise Lost, and Popular Polemic
at the Restoration 41
3. Milton’s Chaos in Pope’s London: Material
Philosophy and the Book Trade 67
4. The Man on the Dump: Swift, Ireland, and the
Problem of Waste 91
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

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
Making Waste is based on the doctoral dissertation I wrote at Harvard
under the supervision of Barbara Lewalski, Marjorie Garber, and James
Engell. I thank them for their mentoring, encouragement, and friend-
ship when I was a student and for ongoing support in later years. Several
senior colleagues at Princeton have also given advice and support for
which I am very grateful: Claudia Johnson, Susan Wolfson, Oliver Ar-
nold, Jeff Nunokawa, and Nigel Smith.
Fellowships from Harvard and Princeton universities enabled me to
research and write this book at home and abroad. A good deal of the
work was completed while I was an Ahmanson-Getty Fellow at the Clark
Library in Los Angeles; my thanks to UCLA for that award. I thank the
Huntington Library in California for a fellowship that supported ad-
ditional work for the project. Helen Deutsch at UCLA offered much
appreciated friendship during that period.
Friends and colleagues in the profession have helped me and guided
my work at crucial moments. My thanks to Anna Henchman, Julie Park,
Lynn Festa, Cedric Reverand, Cynthia Wall, Jayne Lewis, Dror Wahr-
man, Jonathan Sheehan, Eduardo Cadava, April Alliston, Diana Fuss,
Benj Widiss, Tamsen Wolff, Daphne Brooks, Jeff Dolven, and Tony
Miller.
Thanks, finally, to my editor, Hanne Winarsky, my wonderful copy-
editor, Vicky Wilson-Schwartz, and the team at Princeton University
Press.
vii
viii a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as “The Invention of the
Wasteland: Civic Narration in Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis,” Eighteenth-
Century Life 20, no.1 (2005): 82–108. I would like to thank the editors
for allowing me to reprint this essay. An earlier version of chapter 3 was
published as “Milton’s Chaos in Pope’s London,” in Science, Literature,
and Rhetoric in Early Modern London, ed. Juliet Cummins and David
Burchell (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007).
M a k i n g W a s t e
e