Introduction

This book examines the aesthetic insurrections enacted by “funny things” in eighteenth-century literature and material culture. It dwells with these details and their cultural associations to model a way of reading that resists the epistemological urge toward resolution . I submit that eighteenth-century fiction furnishes us with these invitations to think and feel in ways not oriented toward “making sense” of what we’ve encountered, and that this reading practice is important to any intellectual or interpretive commitment to resisting and refusing colonialist patterns of epistemological enclosure and appropriation. By disrupting the aesthetic and narrative effects that allowed British readers to experience the material world as mental property, these irreducible details indicate the possibility of ideological malfunctions in the systems of knowledge that took hold in the early stages of British imperialism. The book mounts its argument in three parts – “The Anamorphic,” “The Ludic,” and “The Orificial” – each focused on a specific mode of distorting the forms and logics of emergent liberal norms in the context of empire, including realism, empiricism, ownership, individualism, and gendered heterosexuality. In each of these sections, I approach a detail from an eighteenth-century text – focusing primarily on works by Eliza Haywood, Horace Walpole, Richard Bentley, and Frances Burney – as a prompt to consider the intertwined ways that funniness operates as an aesthetic, a heuristic method, and a reading praxis. The distortions that render things “funny,” I argue, generate a nascent politics that refuses the rigidity of given realities and their parameters of plausibility, and leans into the prospect – or, more accurately, the feeling – that the world as we know it could be otherwise.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.