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The miscellaneous: Toward a poetics ...

Stanford University.

The miscellaneous: Toward a poetics of the mode in British literature, 1668--1759.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	The miscellaneous: Toward a poetics of the mode in British literature, 1668--1759.
Author:	Wilkinson, Emily Colette.
Description:	214 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-01, Section: A, page: 0192.
Notes:	Adviser: Terry Castle.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International70-01A.
Subject:	Literature, English.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3343902
ISBN:	9780549993032

The miscellaneous: Toward a poetics of the mode in British literature, 1668--1759.
Wilkinson, Emily Colette.

The miscellaneous: Toward a poetics of the mode in British literature, 1668--1759. - 214 p.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-01, Section: A, page: 0192.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2009.

This dissertation argues for the importance of the "miscellaneous" as a major literary mode in Britain from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. Modern or miscellaneous writing became in this era the locus of debates about the value of mixed, disorganized, and polymorphous forms---not just in terms of literary aesthetics, but also in terms of personal, social, and cultural identity.

ISBN: 9780549993032Subjects--Topical Terms:

212435
Literature, English.

The miscellaneous: Toward a poetics of the mode in British literature, 1668--1759.
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100 1 $a Wilkinson, Emily Colette. $3 492761
245 1 4 $a The miscellaneous: Toward a poetics of the mode in British literature, 1668--1759.
300 $a 214 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-01, Section: A, page: 0192.
500 $a Adviser: Terry Castle.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2009.
520 $a This dissertation argues for the importance of the "miscellaneous" as a major literary mode in Britain from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. Modern or miscellaneous writing became in this era the locus of debates about the value of mixed, disorganized, and polymorphous forms---not just in terms of literary aesthetics, but also in terms of personal, social, and cultural identity.
520 $a Miscellaneous writers mixed genres, digressed, disregarded chronology, moved desultorily from subject to subject, interrupted their work to address the reader with asides, and stuffed their writings with commonplaces and borrowed verses and stories---theirs was a casual, confused (and often confusing) approach to literary form and intellectual purpose. My project offers a poetics of this unruly and previously overlooked literary-aesthetic idiom.
520 $a My first chapter describes the intellectual and cultural contexts that framed ideas about miscellaneousness. I argue that Shaftesbury, Pope, Swift and others distrusted miscellaneous writing because they saw it as a figure for and a means of fostering intellectual and moral disorder. I explain this confusion of the aesthetic, moral, and intellectual through the idea of "uniformity"---which in this era meant both aesthetic regularity and unity and the state of having an orderly, consistent, character that was the mark of spiritual well-being. Miscellaneous writing was the literary idiom of those who rejected uniformity as a personal and literary ideal---those who saw chaos and flux as the defining principles of existence; those who embraced their own protean potential and intellectual uncertainty; those willing to submerge and dissolve themselves in the "Miscellany of Mortality" to be found in the London streets. In this embrace, the miscellaneous undermined such standards of neoclassicism as the Stoic ideal of self-consistency in feeling and action, Aristotle's strict view of genres as rule-bound and inviolably discrete, and Horace's insistence on balance, unity, and simplicity as the essence of beauty. This first generation of literary Moderns turned away from the aesthetic first principles of the Ancients in attempts to represent the disorder they found to be the true condition of intellectual, personal, and civic life.
520 $a In my second chapter, I turn to Swift's Tale of a Tub (1684-1710). In Swift's critical parody of Modern writing, he appropriates miscellaneous techniques to reveal the destructive power of Modern aesthetics. Modern authors were---quite literally---taking to pieces the works of the Ancients, as Swift's Modern Grub Street persona demonstrates in such details as the shards of classical learning (badly chosen commonplaces taken from ancient Latin texts) that he strews throughout his Tale. For Swift, miscellaneous aesthetics are not merely aesthetic, they are symptoms of other more terrifying forms of destruction and disorder---madness, sin, and revolution. Through a series of readings, I draw connections between the Tale's parody of Modern writing in its fragmentary structure and its monomaniacal thematic preoccupation with broken and disfigured forms.
520 $a Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) bears out some of Swift's fears in turning to the miscellaneous for its mimetic power in the representation of chaos. For Defoe, the 1665 outbreak of plague in London brought about a state of disorder so profound that the difference between the survival of a single individual and the survival of London as a whole became identical. To represent this chaos, Defoe turns to miscellaneous techniques: confused chronology, the collection and interpolation of public documents and the stories and relics of lives other than that of its protagonist. Thus a literary work that might have been a novel (the form emblematic of individualism and self-interest in the early eighteenth century) becomes something more akin to the collective and chaotic form of the miscellany.
520 $a While Defoe used the miscellaneous to represent public, civic disorder, Charlotte Charke, in her 1755 A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, used it to represent her own protean nature and her conflicted attitudes toward her herself and her estranged father, the famous actor, playwright, and Drury Lane manager, Colley Cibber. A cross-dresser both on and off the stage who tried her hand at everything from acting to pig farming, Charke reveals a miscellaneous self: a self unwilling to settle into fixed categories of any kind, whether sexual, professional, or affective. I argue that Charke's protean elusiveness is a meaningful iteration of selfhood akin to that found in Tristram Shandy (1759), if lacking in Sterne's self-consciousness.
520 $a The Miscellaneous delineates a literary-formal mode that was the inverse of the aesthetic neoclassicism still too often taken to be the dominant aesthetic idiom of the age. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
590 $a School code: 0212.
650 4 $a Literature, English. $3 212435
690 $a 0593
710 2 $a Stanford University. $3 212607
773 0 $t Dissertation Abstracts International $g 70-01A.
790 1 0 $a Castle, Terry, $e advisor
790 $a 0212
791 $a Ph.D.
792 $a 2009
856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3343902