Fictive Domains: Body, Landscape, and Nostalgia, 1717-1770

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Bucknell University Press, 2007 - 191 pages
The focus of this book is the period 1717-1770, during which nostalgia was just beginning to emerge as a cultural concept. Utilizing psychoanalysis, feminist, and materialist theories, this book examines representations of bodies and landscapes in the cultural production of the early- to mid-eighteenth century. With considerable social anxiety surrounding changes in the structure of the family, the control of bodies within the family, and ownership and access to the land, nostalgia generated narratives that became the richly textured novels and long poems of the eighteenth century. In Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), social anxieties are played out on the body of Clarissa Harlowe; female passion is controlled in Pope's Eloisa to Abelard (1717), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761);

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Contents

Introduction Toward a Theory of Nostalgia
13
Pronouncing her case to be grief Nostalgia and the Body in Clarissa and Sir Charles Granduon
33
Desire Body and Landscape in Popes Eloisa to Abelard and Rousseaus Julie
67
The Secret Pleasure of the Picturesque
103
In a world so changed Feminine Nostalgia and Sarah Scotts A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent
136
Notes
159
Bibliography
176
Index
185
Copyright

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Page 130 - As some fair female unadorned and plain, Secure to please while youth confirms her reign, Slights every borrowed charm that dress supplies, Nor shares with art the triumph of her eyes ; But when those charms are past, for charms are frail, When time advances, and when lovers fail, She then shines forth, solicitous to bless, In all the glaring impotence of dress.
Page 129 - And, pinched with cold, and shrinking from the shower, With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour When idly first, ambitious of the town, She left her wheel and robes of country brown.
Page 130 - The various terrors of that horrid shore ; Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray, And fiercely shed intolerable day ; Those matted woods, where birds forget to sing, But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling ; Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crowned, Where the dark scorpion gathers death around ; Where at each step the stranger fears to wake The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake...
Page 174 - Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action...
Page 129 - All but yon widowed, solitary thing That feebly bends beside the plashy spring; She, wretched matron, — forced in age, for bread, To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread...
Page 79 - But o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves, Long-sounding isles, and intermingled graves, Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws A death-like silence, and a dread repose: Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene, Shades every flower, and darkens every green, Deepens the murmur of the falling floods, And breathes a browner horror on the woods.
Page 129 - Now lost to all, her friends, her virtue fled Near her betrayer's door she lays her head...
Page 113 - The time shall come, when free as seas or wind Unbounded Thames ° shall flow for all mankind ; Whole nations enter with each swelling tide, And seas but join the regions they divide ; Earth's distant ends our glory shall behold, And the new world launch forth to seek the old.
Page 110 - Not thus the land appear'd in ages past,-. A dreary desert, and a gloomy waste, To. savage beasts and savage laws a prey, And kings more furious and severe than they...
Page 76 - Thou, Abelard ! the last sad office pay, And smooth my passage to the realms of day ; See my lips tremble, and my eye-balls roll, Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul...

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