{"product_id":"9780691284507-making-waste","title":"Making Waste","description":"\u003cmeta content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\" http-equiv=\"Content-Type\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLeftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination\u003cbr\u003eWhy was eighteenth-century English culture so fascinated with the things its society discarded? This book explains how English writers used contemporary theological and philosophical texts about unwanted and leftover matter to explore secular, literary relationships between waste and value.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe obsession with waste in eighteenth-century English literature\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhy was eighteenth-century English culture so fascinated with the things its society discarded? Why did Restoration and Augustan writers such as Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope describe, catalog, and memorialize the waste matter that their social and political worlds wanted to get rid of—from the theological dregs in \u003ci\u003eParadise\u003c\/i\u003e Lost to the excrements in \"The Lady's Dressing Room\" and the corpses of A \u003ci\u003eJournal of the Plague Year?\u003c\/i\u003e In \u003ci\u003eMaking Waste\u003c\/i\u003e, the first book about refuse and its place in Enlightenment literature and culture, Sophie Gee examines the meaning of waste at the moment when the early modern world was turning modern.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGee explains how English writers used contemporary theological and philosophical texts about unwanted and leftover matter to explore secular, literary relationships between waste and value. She finds that, in the eighteenth century, waste was as culturally valuable as it was practically worthless—and that waste paradoxically revealed the things that the culture cherished most.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe surprising central insight of \u003ci\u003eMaking Waste\u003c\/i\u003e is that the creation of value always generates waste. Waste is therefore a sign—though a perverse one—that value and meaning have been made. Even when it appears to symbolize civic, economic, and political failure, waste is in fact restorative, a sign of cultural invigoration and imaginative abundance. Challenging the conventional association of Enlightenment culture with political and social improvement, and scientific and commercial progress, \u003ci\u003eMaking Waste\u003c\/i\u003e has important insights for cultural and intellectual history as well as literary studies.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rarewaves","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57259412423030,"sku":"9780691284507","price":22.78,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0092\/7504\/8033\/files\/orig_40032646.jpg?v=1771483903","url":"https:\/\/www.rarewaves.com\/products\/9780691284507-making-waste","provider":"Rarewaves.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}