My book in progress, Enlightenment Anecdotes argues that the anecdote became a vital intellectual tool in the British Enlightenment, playing a central role in the rethinking of human nature and human history over the long eighteenth century. Enlightenment Anecdotes gathers together a wide archive of texts, including philosophical treatises and popular journals, novels and anecdote collections, travel narratives and biographies in order to investigate how anecdotes helped reshape humanistic knowledge. Phone: +353 857 753 404 Address: School of English Arts Building Trinity College Dublin Dublin 2 IRELAND
This essay argues that the Crusoe trilogy works to bring the character Robinson Crusoe close to t... more This essay argues that the Crusoe trilogy works to bring the character Robinson Crusoe close to the earth, even to the point of merging him with a vital earthiness more powerful than he. In doing so, Daniel Defoe draws on the Genesis account of humanity's origin in the earth and destiny to return to it. He also follows early modern scientists in departing from the Aristotelian understanding of the earth as an inert element, instead viewing it as a dynamic substance comprised of heterogeneous parts. The Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) envisages the earth as an agent that mediates between the novel's spiritual and material worlds. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) uses the ambiguities of the terms "China" and "earth" as a means of moving from individual colonial and commercial projects to the planet as a whole. The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720) attempts to bring the work of spiritual self-examination down to earth through anecdote and metaphor.
Reproduces the anecdote that inspired Wordsworth's Peter Bell as printed in Aris's Birmingham Gaz... more Reproduces the anecdote that inspired Wordsworth's Peter Bell as printed in Aris's Birmingham Gazette and The Sporting Magazine. It also speculates on how the man named Kirby who drowned in the Worcester Canal might have prompted Wordsworth to associate the story of the ass who refuses to move from the body of his master with the story Wordsworth had heard in his youth of David Kirby's abandonment of a woman who he had impregnated that forms another narrative strand of Peter Bell.
This essay argues that William Molyneux's experience of friendship within the late seventeenth-ce... more This essay argues that William Molyneux's experience of friendship within the late seventeenth-century "republic of letters" informed the rhetorical strategies he used to argue for the Irish Parliament's legislative independence from Westminster in The Case of Ireland. Focusing in particular on Molyneux's friendship with John Locke, I show how a common language of friendship underlies Molyneux's and Locke's letters and Molyneux's political pamphlet. I argue for the importance of writing as a medium for negotiating relationships between persons and relationships between political communities. I also emphasize how the publication of The Case of Ireland exposed a dissonance between the personal and the political realms, a dissonance which is played out in the traces that survive of Molyneux's friendships in letters and books.
This essay argues that the king’s body politic in Richard II depends not only by the king’s physi... more This essay argues that the king’s body politic in Richard II depends not only by the king’s physical body but also on the many human bodies and material possessions that comprise the kingdom. Richard II presents the legal fictions of sovereignty and state and the illocutionary force of speech acts as ultimately resting on material bodies and objects. These bodies and objects tend to fall to the ground and fail to meet their owners’ intended purposes. While in the fiction of the play bodies and objects are mostly ineffectual, from a dramaturgical perspective it is precisely because bodies and objects do not align with their owners’ intentions that they appear to draw level with them as agents of dramatic action. People thus become like props in the play, and props become like people. Power is shown to be diffused away from the figure of the king towards the bodies and objects around him and the king himself is revealed to be a kind of prop.
This essay argues that the Crusoe trilogy works to bring the character Robinson Crusoe close to t... more This essay argues that the Crusoe trilogy works to bring the character Robinson Crusoe close to the earth, even to the point of merging him with a vital earthiness more powerful than he. In doing so, Daniel Defoe draws on the Genesis account of humanity's origin in the earth and destiny to return to it. He also follows early modern scientists in departing from the Aristotelian understanding of the earth as an inert element, instead viewing it as a dynamic substance comprised of heterogeneous parts. The Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) envisages the earth as an agent that mediates between the novel's spiritual and material worlds. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) uses the ambiguities of the terms "China" and "earth" as a means of moving from individual colonial and commercial projects to the planet as a whole. The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720) attempts to bring the work of spiritual self-examination down to earth through anecdote and metaphor.
Reproduces the anecdote that inspired Wordsworth's Peter Bell as printed in Aris's Birmingham Gaz... more Reproduces the anecdote that inspired Wordsworth's Peter Bell as printed in Aris's Birmingham Gazette and The Sporting Magazine. It also speculates on how the man named Kirby who drowned in the Worcester Canal might have prompted Wordsworth to associate the story of the ass who refuses to move from the body of his master with the story Wordsworth had heard in his youth of David Kirby's abandonment of a woman who he had impregnated that forms another narrative strand of Peter Bell.
This essay argues that William Molyneux's experience of friendship within the late seventeenth-ce... more This essay argues that William Molyneux's experience of friendship within the late seventeenth-century "republic of letters" informed the rhetorical strategies he used to argue for the Irish Parliament's legislative independence from Westminster in The Case of Ireland. Focusing in particular on Molyneux's friendship with John Locke, I show how a common language of friendship underlies Molyneux's and Locke's letters and Molyneux's political pamphlet. I argue for the importance of writing as a medium for negotiating relationships between persons and relationships between political communities. I also emphasize how the publication of The Case of Ireland exposed a dissonance between the personal and the political realms, a dissonance which is played out in the traces that survive of Molyneux's friendships in letters and books.
This essay argues that the king’s body politic in Richard II depends not only by the king’s physi... more This essay argues that the king’s body politic in Richard II depends not only by the king’s physical body but also on the many human bodies and material possessions that comprise the kingdom. Richard II presents the legal fictions of sovereignty and state and the illocutionary force of speech acts as ultimately resting on material bodies and objects. These bodies and objects tend to fall to the ground and fail to meet their owners’ intended purposes. While in the fiction of the play bodies and objects are mostly ineffectual, from a dramaturgical perspective it is precisely because bodies and objects do not align with their owners’ intentions that they appear to draw level with them as agents of dramatic action. People thus become like props in the play, and props become like people. Power is shown to be diffused away from the figure of the king towards the bodies and objects around him and the king himself is revealed to be a kind of prop.
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