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New Conceptions of Time and the Making o... - Document (1 M) |
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| Author |
Witherbee, Amy |
| Title |
New Conceptions of Time and the Making of a Political-Economic Public in Eighteenth-Century Britain |
| Date created |
2009 |
| Abstract |
This project argues that the British financial revolution ushered in a new way of conceptualizing time based in mathematic innovations of the seventeenth-century. As it was employed in financial instruments and government policies, mathematics' spatialized representation of time conflicted with older, more intuitive experience of time associated with consciousness and duration. Borrowing from the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I examine how he interaction between these two temporalities reshaped conceptions of value, the public, and the body in the first half of the eighteenth century. The first two chapters of my study explore texts ranging from pamphlets that advocated for the establishment of banks to the periodical essays of The Spectator and The Tatler that advocated for political economic conceptions of time and value at the turn of the century. These texts reveal the subtle tensions and strange paradoxes created by the clash of disparate temporalities and open the door to new readings of fictional narratives like those of Daniel Defoe and Aphra Behn. My second two chapters focus on selected works by these two authors to explore how longer first-person narrative forms modeled both the possibilities and dangers of emerging political economic structures. My study concludes with two chapters that follow the development of the oriental tale in Britain. Making use of a seventeenth-century tradition that explores the tensions between representation and meaning in oriental fables, Arabian Nights' Entertainments follows on the heels of John Paul Marana's Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy and reshapes the genre to reflect the new concerns of a global marketplace in which deferral has become essential to the production of value. I conclude these chapters with readings of Johnson's Rasselas, Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet, and Frances Sheridan's Nourjahad, three tales that foreshadow late-eighteenth-century efforts to manage the public and its temporal paradoxes through an attention to the body. |
| Use Restrictions |
I hereby allow Boston College to include and preserve my dissertation/thesis in electronic form in the Boston College Institutional Repository, which shall include the right to publicly post my dissertation/thesis on the World Wide Web. I will retain copyright ownership, but I grant to Boston College the non-exclusive right to copy, distribute, and publicly display my dissertation/thesis in any form as may be necessary or convenient in the future as file formats, storage media, and distribution mechanisms evolve. |
| Subject |
Behn |
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Defoe |
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Eighteenth Century |
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Oriental Tale |
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Time |
| Publisher |
Boston College |
| Link to Item |
2345/675 |
| Thesis Advisor |
Kowaleski Wallace, Elizabeth |
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Richardson, Alan |
| Degree Name |
PhD |
| Degree Grantor |
Boston College. Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. |
| Sys. No. |
000010553 |
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