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Burlesque Natural Philosophers: Eighteenth-Century Satires of Science and Social Innovation

Leading up to the eighteenth century horology showed a clear progression from approximation to precision, whereby the measure of time no longer varied by season and the clock turned unequal hours into equal ones. This thesis is going to elucidate the important cultural role of the timepiece during the era by reading works of literature and art within the context of an increasingly time-conscious society. In doing so I highlight the often-overlooked role of timepieces, clocks, and watches in culture and introduce new ways of seeing familiar texts and images. The structure of the thesis has been arranged so the global context of the timepiece is explored first, with each subsequent chapter narrowing the clock’s sphere of influence. From the public, to the private and finally to the personal timekeeper, each iteration of the clock creates a new or distinctive type of time to be studied. Through the analysis of authors such as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, Chapter 1 frames the clock as a vehicle of imperial time, which allows Britain to impose its temporal order on the ‘timeless’ across the globe. Chapter 2 establishes the timepiece as an important device for co-ordinating social action in public spaces and shows how industrial time was imposed over natural cycles. This is going to be achieved through analysing texts written by, among others, Mary Collier and Thomas Legg. In Chapter 3, reading Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), I examine the clock in domestic life and show how it reinforces wider notions of implicit hierarchical spheres. This will be supported by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Elizabeth Inchabald’s A Simple Story (1791) and Nicolas Lancret, The Four Times of Day: Morning (1739). Finally, in Chapter 4, I highlight how the pocket watch provides an insight into the criminal economy that grew in conjunction with the ever-changing refinement of eighteenth century fashion. I use Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) to introduce this argument, before Mary Meeke’s The Sicilian, A novel in four volumes (1798) and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), along with examples of prosecutions from the Old Bailey archives, furthers the discussion.

Telling timepieces : representations of the timepiece within literature and visual culture of the eighteenth century

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children has been widely seen as typifying both postmodernism and postcoloniality. As such, it has been taken to represent a new, \"de-totalizing\" way of writing history, specifically, the history of India as a modern nation-state. The novel figures prominently, for instance, in Linda Hutcheon's The Politics of Postmodernism, where it exemplifies a structure that both installs and subverts \"the teleology, closure, and causality of narrative, both historical and fictive\" (63). Rushdie's postmodern techniques of narration, in this view, express a self-reflexive and wary detachment from all totalizing modes of historical thought. For Hutcheon, the combination of a contemporary self-reflexivity plus the relativizing juxtaposition of \"Eastern\" and \"Western\" modes of thought seems to sum up Midnight's Children. Rushdie's novel \"works to foreground the totalizing impulse of westernÂ—imperialisticÂ—modes of history-

Leading History by the Nose: The Turn to the Eighteenth Century in Midnight's Children

Scholars have rightly asserted that the cannibal motif of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is the mechanism by which the author covertly addresses colonialist pillaging in Ireland. Less attention has been paid to an unresolved problem, that of the satire’s audience. This article claims that its publication in Dublin at the height of the Irish parliamentary session of 1729 suggests that Anglo-Irish legislators were its target readers. If so, the figure of the cannibal may signify how national debt and the mortgaging of future public revenues needed to amortize that debt metaphorically devoured the posterity of the colonized Irish natives. Given that the famine conditions of 1729 had reduced revenues and produced a crisis in paying Ireland’s “debt of the nation,” the satire’s calendar for the harvesting and slaughtering of Ireland’s babies could be taken as mimicry of the debates over how to raise new taxes and schedule their collection and expenditure. (SM)

Devouring Posterity: A Modest Proposal, Empire, and Ireland’s “Debt of the Nation”

It is very usual for Civiliz’d and Polite Nations to look upon all others as barbarous. . . . Europe now being the Seat of Learning, and Science, wherein learned Academies are set up for the Discovery of Hidden Secrets in Nature, we take all the Rest of Mankind for meer Barbarians: But Those who have Travel’d into China and Japan, must confess those People far surpass us in the endowments, both of body and mind.—Jean Crasset, The History of the Church of Japan

Gulliver and the Japanese: The Limits of the Postcolonial Past

A cluster of related questions haunts the commentary on Gulliver's Travels. There has been frequent debate about whether or not Gulliver is a genuine character who undergoes conflict and change. Gulliver has many of the trappings of "character"'-a proper name, an obtrusively present physique, a family of middling status, a particularized education and profession, national pride, traits of curiosity and wanderlust, an idiosyncratic and unfailing gift for languages-and yet his outlook is disturbingly unstable. Challengers of Gulliver's personhood thus argue that "Gulliver" is no more than an inconsistently used vehicle for satire, a mere mask to be dropped and reassumed at the whim of the author.2 A significant domain of interpretation is at stake: for if Gulliver is not seen as a "character"-and if Gulliver is thus not read both with

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1354099.pdf

Clement Hawes

Papers

Three Times Round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial Discourse