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"Rank Corpuscles": Soil And Identity In Eighteenth-Century Representations, Nina Patricia Budabin Mcquown

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I analyze scenes of encounter between human beings and human dust in eighteenth-century texts. Ploughmen exhume bones and armor in the arable, consumers taste other people’s excrement in their vegetables, and improvers lime the earth to break down ancient corpses. In process, I find that eighteenth-century British authors recognized the soil as an agent of continuity, with the capacity to preserve, mobilize, and disseminate the material constituents of identity from one body into another. At times, the soil’s powerful co-operative agency is threatening to the integrity of the human self, but I argue that authors negotiate between …