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Modes of the Flesh: A Poetics of Literary Embodiment in the Long Eighteenth Century

Owen, Kate Marie Novotny
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1494180648937066

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
Modes of the Flesh considers the ways that literary form—mode, in particular—shapes the representation of the human body in British literature from approximately 1660-1800. Focusing on the allegorical, satirical, pornographic, and gothic modes, this project aims to expand our conception of literary embodiment, establish the represented body as a formal element, and make embodiment central to our understanding of the textual representation of human beings. Because modally-inflected literary bodies engage the same kinds of ontological and epistemological questions entertained by this period’s empiricist philosophy, I argue that mode offers its own kind of philosophy of the body. But, because modal bodies engage these questions with a very different set of tools, the results are often provocatively at odds with mainstream philosophical discourse. Existing scholarship on the literary body tends either to analyze the way a body is represented in order to better understand the work’s themes or meanings, or to argue that the way a body is represented reflects historical or theoretical models of embodiment. This dissertation differs from the first tendency by offering a theory of the represented body, and therefore taking the body as an object, not an instrument, of study. It diverges from the second tendency by arguing that the way bodies are presented in literature has as much to do with the kind of text they appear in as with scientific, theological, social, or other extra-literary understandings of the body. In each chapter, I focus on a significant mode of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, and a particular aspect of literary embodiment. The first chapter, on the allegorical mode and bodily matter, thinks about the function of materiality in a mode commonly associated with abstraction and interpretation. The second chapter, which considers the satirical mode and bodily form, explores the role of abstract form in satirical conceptions of personhood and in the ordering of the satirical universe. The third chapter focuses on the pornographic mode and the body as sensation in order to re-think the mechanics and ethics of pornography. And, in the fourth chapter, I consider the gothic mode in terms of the two kinds of embodiment it pits against one another (the body as figure, and the body as subjectivity) in order to consider its fantastical exaggerations of empirical—and especially skeptical—epistemology. In the coda, I meditate on the desire for disembodiment and the fundamental importance of the body to the representation of human experience. In the course of developing a formal theory of the body in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, Modes of the Flesh challenges the tendency in literary studies to marginalize the body in favor of the mind. By foregrounding the body and mode, it expands the scope of character studies and challenges the centrality of the rise of the novel to the field of eighteenth-century studies.
Sandra Macpherson (Advisor)
David Brewer (Committee Member)
Robyn Warhol (Committee Member)
252 p.
British and Irish Literature; Literature
body; mode; character; form; allegory; satire; pornography; gothic; eighteenth century; Restoration; empiricism; poetics; theory; representation; Jonathan Swift; John Bunyan; John Milton; John Cleland; Ann Radcliffe; Jane Austen; Earl of Rochester

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Owen, K. M. N. (2017). Modes of the Flesh: A Poetics of Literary Embodiment in the Long Eighteenth Century [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1494180648937066

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Owen, Kate. Modes of the Flesh: A Poetics of Literary Embodiment in the Long Eighteenth Century. 2017. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1494180648937066.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Owen, Kate. "Modes of the Flesh: A Poetics of Literary Embodiment in the Long Eighteenth Century." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1494180648937066

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1494180648937066
371
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.