UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

Ruin, Memory, and the Social Body in Augustan Literature

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.71548/14046

Authors

McConnell, Will

Reported year

1998

Reported language

en

Source type

dissertation

First detected

2026-11-09T19:10:34.547524+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:10:53.789864+00:00

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Documentary abstract — original language

This dissertation explores the ground of, and practices of self-reflexivity behind, the often polemical contemporary debates that surround research practices and methodology in humanities and social sciences historiography. I focus on the unexamined reciprocity between conceptions of history and the linguistic and imagistic practices of remembering that affect and produce historiography in the eighteenth century: despite the identity of their epistemological foundation, in the long eighteenth century, ''history'' and "memory" begin to function as diverging truth-claims. By the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke's well-known articulation of tabula rasa--itself a divergence from the remarkably stable medieval and renaissance conceptions of memory as "storehouse" and tabula rasa--signals an epistemological shift in forms of objectivity and, consequently, the subject's experiences of her his interiority. I analyze aspects of the effects of this emerging epistemology on eighteenth century thinkers' reconstructions of the "social body." Across a number of authors' works and forms of representation--William Congreve's drama, Mary Wollstonecraft's political argumentation, picturesque theory and representation of nature, Locke, Hume, and Joseph Priestly's philosophical debates, and William Blake and Laurence Sterne's literary works--I attempt to trace significant shifts in the relation of, 'memory" and ''history.'' Throughout the chapters I focus on the relation of linguistic strategies of representation to shifts in various kinds of social and personal formations: from gender roles and political or cultural forms, to interpretations of causality, agency, and avenues for social change. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Thesis

Identifiers

DOI

10.71548/14046

OPENAIRE

doi_dedup___::bda8884b162fd9faa5d7bc441bc6994f

OPENALEX

W1536245686

Documentary context

Documentary family

Thesis

Source-reported types

Thesis · dissertation

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAIRE · Record 1 · Record 2

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2 · Record 3

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.71548/14046
• Document · https://dx.doi.org/10.71548/14046
• Document · http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape11/PQDD_0002/NQ42750.pdf
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W1536245686

Documentary status

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