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Looking at nothing: Literary vacuity...

Baudot, Laura Jeanne.

Looking at nothing: Literary vacuity in the long eighteenth century.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Looking at nothing: Literary vacuity in the long eighteenth century.
Author:	Baudot, Laura Jeanne.
Description:	270 p.
Notes:	Advisers: Claudia Johnson; Jonathan Lamb; Sophie Gee.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-03, Section: A, page: 1006.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International66-03A.
Subject:	History of Science.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3169723
ISBN:	9780542055348

Looking at nothing: Literary vacuity in the long eighteenth century.
Baudot, Laura Jeanne.

Looking at nothing: Literary vacuity in the long eighteenth century. - 270 p.

Advisers: Claudia Johnson; Jonathan Lamb; Sophie Gee.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 2005.

I consider how nothing operates creatively and critically in texts by Swift, Fielding and Walpole. Each writer fashions nothing into a response to a dominant in literary and cultural trend. For Swift in A Tale of a Tub philosophical nothings and vacuum experiments capture the ironic proliferation of printed matter in the exhausted literary culture of the early eighteenth century. Nothing, at the same time, points to a possible escape from the work's own relentless materialism. In Joseph Andrews and the Essay on Nothing, Fielding uses nothing to create a narrative alternative to the verbal and visual plenum of Richardson's Pamela. Inspired by Fielding's re-signification of romance as negated history, Walpole, in his Hieroglyphic Tales, employs nothing to counter both the growing trend of fictional realism and the shrinking of imaginative possibilities ironically occasioned by voyages of discovery in the mid to late eighteenth century.

ISBN: 9780542055348Subjects--Topical Terms:

212526
History of Science.

Looking at nothing: Literary vacuity in the long eighteenth century.
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245 1 0 $a Looking at nothing: Literary vacuity in the long eighteenth century.
300 $a 270 p.
500 $a Advisers: Claudia Johnson; Jonathan Lamb; Sophie Gee.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-03, Section: A, page: 1006.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 2005.
520 # $a I consider how nothing operates creatively and critically in texts by Swift, Fielding and Walpole. Each writer fashions nothing into a response to a dominant in literary and cultural trend. For Swift in A Tale of a Tub philosophical nothings and vacuum experiments capture the ironic proliferation of printed matter in the exhausted literary culture of the early eighteenth century. Nothing, at the same time, points to a possible escape from the work's own relentless materialism. In Joseph Andrews and the Essay on Nothing, Fielding uses nothing to create a narrative alternative to the verbal and visual plenum of Richardson's Pamela. Inspired by Fielding's re-signification of romance as negated history, Walpole, in his Hieroglyphic Tales, employs nothing to counter both the growing trend of fictional realism and the shrinking of imaginative possibilities ironically occasioned by voyages of discovery in the mid to late eighteenth century.
520 # $a Looking at Nothing investigates the relationship between the eighteenth-century literary fascination with the topic of nothing and seventeenth-century philosophical debates over the possible existence of a vacuum in nature. It considers how the difficulty of arguing for a vacuum---a space containing nothing---for its vacuist advocates led to ironies, self-reflexive strategies, and experimental literary practices, which were explored and exploited by eighteenth-century authors. Locke, Charleton, and Bentley write about the vacuum in bookish ways in order to defeat their plenists opponents and meet the challenges of adopting the Epicurean notion of a vacuum to the linguistic ideals, empirical methods, and Christian world-view of the Royal Society. The centrality of nothing to a philosophical and scientific movement that professes devotion to the study of things and the paradoxical amount of volumes filled describing empty space, inspire eighteenth-century authors to fashion nothing into a response to modern literary and cultural phenomena. The critical use of "nothing" to expose the fundamental vacuity underlying an age preoccupied by things---objects to be experimented upon, written about, and acquired---accompanies a fascination with the generative and imaginative possibilities offered by nothing and its ability to inspire meta-reflections upon the writing process.
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790 1 0 $a Lamb, Jonathan, $e advisor
791 $a Ph.D.
792 $a 2005
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