Wanton Motion in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture
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- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date:
- 29 May 2026
- 09 July 2026
- ISBN:
- 9781009754422
- 9781009754439
- 9781009754477
- Dimensions:
- (229 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.5kg, 288 Pages
- Dimensions:
- (229 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.25kg, 288 Pages
- Subjects:
- Literature, English Literature 1700-1830
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- Literature, English Literature 1700-1830
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Book description
How can words capture what it feels like to be a body moving through space? In charting how the aesthetics of motion mattered to eighteenth-century literature, print culture, theatre, and legal debates, Sara Landreth refocuses the period's fascination with the abstraction of 'selfhood' toward embodied kinetic processes that reveal the fictionality of selfhood altogether. This important study makes the case for wantonness as an aesthetic category in its own right, one that captures quasi-intentional actions and vital but indeterminate forms of agency in a wide range of genres, from it-narratives and harlequinade flipbooks to travel novels and fiction about slaveocracy. Fresh readings of works by Cavendish, Hogarth, Dennis, Johnson, Diderot, Sterne, Smollett, and Wilberforce illuminate how authors from 1650 to 1810 radically redefined how characters and plots could and should move.
Reviews
‘As lively and energetic as its object of inquiry - motion in the eighteenth-century archive - Sara Landreth's study astutely teaches us that eighteenth-century aesthetics, narratology, the novel, and the book arts are rife with concerns and excitement about embodiment and wanton movement.'
Tita Chico - Professor of English, University of Maryland
‘Through a series of fresh and exciting discussions, and arresting materials, Landreth offers a new and rewarding understanding of the aesthetics of motion and wantonness in eighteenth-century literature and culture.'
Chloe Wigston Smith - Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York
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