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Eighteenth-Century Poetry And The Rise Of The Novel Reconsidered, Courtney Smith, Kate Parker Dec 2013

Eighteenth-Century Poetry And The Rise Of The Novel Reconsidered, Courtney Smith, Kate Parker

Courtney Weiss Smith

"Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered" begins with the brute fact that poetry jostled up alongside novels in the bookstalls of eighteenth-century England. Indeed, by exploring unexpected collisions and collusions between poetry and novels, this volume of exciting, new essays offers a reconsideration of the literary and cultural history of the period. The novel poached from and featured poetry, and the “modern” subjects and objects privileged by “rise of the novel” scholarship are only one part of a world full of animate things and people with indistinct boundaries. http://www.bucknell.edu/script/upress/book.asp?id=2501


A 'Foundation In Nature': New Economic Criticism And The Problem Of Money In 1690s England, Courtney Smith Dec 2011

A 'Foundation In Nature': New Economic Criticism And The Problem Of Money In 1690s England, Courtney Smith

Courtney Weiss Smith

This essay reconsiders new economic criticism’s assumptions about the role of nature in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century economic thought. I take the debates surrounding the English recoinage crisis as a test case. As I read economic tracts by John Locke, William Lowndes, Nicholas Barbon, and James Hodges alongside an array of anonymous polemical policy pamphlets, I demonstrate that many writers addressed the recoinage problem by turning with urgency to the created natural world. They believed that close attention to the material properties of silver bullion, for example, could access encoded clues about God’s will for human economic institutions. I …


Political Individuals And Providential Nature In Locke And Pope, Courtney Weiss Smith Dec 2011

Political Individuals And Providential Nature In Locke And Pope, Courtney Weiss Smith

Courtney Weiss Smith

While John Locke and Alexander Pope are often treated as political opposites, this essay contends that Locke's Two Treatises shares important conceptual ground with Pope's Essay on Man. Both writers give consenting individuals agency and the social contract transformative power, even as both also insist that the created world offers clues about how God wants societies to work. I propose that these unexpected similarities confirm recent work in ecocriticism and the history of science that suggests that eighteenth-century nature could have moral or political content. Indeed, the similarities raise far-reaching questions about the contours of the consent-giving subject in the …