Ruin, Memory, and the Social Body in Augustan Literature

Abstract

This dissertation explores the ground of, and practices of self-reflexivity behind, the often polemical contemporary debates that surround research practices and methodology in humanities and social sciences historiography. I focus on the unexamined reciprocity between conceptions of history and the linguistic and imagistic practices of remembering that affect and produce historiography in the eighteenth century: despite the identity of their epistemological foundation, in the long eighteenth century, ''history'' and "memory" begin to function as diverging truth-claims. By the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke's well-known articulation of tabula rasa--itself a divergence from the remarkably stable medieval and renaissance conceptions of memory as "storehouse" and tabula rasa--signals an epistemological shift in forms of objectivity and, consequently, the subject's experiences of her his interiority. I analyze aspects of the effects of this emerging epistemology on eighteenth century thinkers' reconstructions of the "social body." Across a number of authors' works and forms of representation--William Congreve's drama, Mary Wollstonecraft's political argumentation, picturesque theory and representation of nature, Locke, Hume, and Joseph Priestly's philosophical debates, and William Blake and Laurence Sterne's literary works--I attempt to trace significant shifts in the relation of, 'memory" and ''history.'' Throughout the chapters I focus on the relation of linguistic strategies of representation to shifts in various kinds of social and personal formations: from gender roles and political or cultural forms, to interpretations of causality, agency, and avenues for social change.