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.
Table of Contents
Part I. The Literary Sensorimotor: introduction, a wanton chase; 1. Literary aesthetics of motion and sensorimotor forms; Part II. Wanton Forms: 2. Contours of the swarm: how autonomous vehicles narrate causality; 3. Hyperkineticism: vital impersonality and the aesthetics of pantomime; Part III. Sensorimotor Selfhood: 4. Eccentric novels: motor-disorders and the dance of death in Sterne and Smollett; 5. Wanton cruelty: racialized flexibleness and abolition debates; Bibliography.
