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Space and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel
In this challenging and illustrated study, first published in 1990, Simon Varey relates the idea of space in the major novels of Defoe, Fielding and Richardson to its use in the theory and practice of eighteenth-century architecture. Concepts of divine design, expressed in the work of philosophers and theologians, introduced an ideological element to the notion of space which gave it a heightened significance in contemporary thought. Professor Varey's central argument is that space becomes a political instrument used to establish conformity, assert power and give form to the aspirations of social classes. He draws on a wide range of architectural books, both English and European, and on the example of Bath (focusing in particular on its chief architect in the eighteenth century, John Wood). The discussion of novels such as Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones and Clarissa examines narrative as a form of spatial design, the use of architectural imagery to describe people, and the political control of social space.
Joseph Andrews
Unlike some critics, who have viewed Joseph Andrews as Fielding's declaration of a personal moral ethic, Varey seeks to locate the novel in the context of 18th-century Britain and thereby show how the text operates as a satire on the developing bourgeois mentality. The book analyzes the novel by theme, and showing the link between the work and the society it portrays, argues that the novel is a valuable cultural artefact.
Writing the New World
International Studies Association Theory Section Best Book Award In Writing the New World, Mauro Caraccioli examines the natural history writings of early Spanish missionaries, using these texts to argue that colonial Latin America was fundamental in the development of modern political thought. Revealing their narrative context, religious ideals, and political implications, Caraccioli shows how these sixteenth-century works promoted a distinct genre of philosophical wonder in service of an emerging colonial social order. Caraccioli discusses narrative techniques employed by well-known figures such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Bartolomé de Las Casas as well as less-studied authors inc...
Humanities
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The Tame and the Wild
Marcy Norton tells a new history of the European colonization of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the center of the story. She reveals that it was, above all, the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life that transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Perfection of Nature
A deep history of how Renaissance Italy and the Spanish empire were shaped by a lingering fascination with breeding. The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted era of history. The same men and women who offered profound advancements in European understanding of the human condition—and laid the foundations of the Scientific Revolution—were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural world. Tracing early modern artisanal practice, Mackenzie Cooley shows how the idea of race and theories of inheritance developed through animal breeding in the shadow of the Spanis...
The House of Fiction as the House of Life
In recent years, the interest in the house has grown irresistibly, to the point that in many ways houses seem to be situated at the very core of the creative, artistic and cultural domains of contemporaneity. Their presence sprawls across the media, from magazines to TV programmes, and across the globe, possibly because as repositories of the human, houses have a long-standing and profound connection not only with men and women but, at a deeper level, with the ways of representing man’s world, across its declinations of gender, class, and race. Houses – the perennial, ubiquitous and silent background to our daily lives – could many “a tale unfold”: the tales of their inhabitants an...
Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe
Expert food historians provide detailed histories of the creation and development of particular delicacies in six regions of medieval Europe-Britain, France, Italy, Sicily, Spain, and the Low Countries.
Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire
Early modern Spain was a global empire in which a startling variety of medical cultures came into contact, and occasionally conflict, with one another. Spanish soldiers, ambassadors, missionaries, sailors, and emigrants of all sorts carried with them to the farthest reaches of the monarchy their own ideas about sickness and health. These ideas were, in turn, influenced by local cultures. This volume tells the story of encounters among medical cultures in the early modern Spanish empire. The twelve chapters draw upon a wide variety of sources, ranging from drama, poetry, and sermons to broadsheets, travel accounts, chronicles, and Inquisitorial documents; and it surveys a tremendous regional ...
Secret Science
The discovery of the New World raised many questions for early modern scientists: What did these lands contain? Where did they lie in relation to Europe? Who lived there, and what were their inhabitants like? Imperial expansion necessitated changes in the way scientific knowledge was gathered, and Spanish cosmographers in particular were charged with turning their observations of the New World into a body of knowledge that could be used for governing the largest empire the world had ever known. As María M. Portuondo here shows, this cosmographic knowledge had considerable strategic, defensive, and monetary value that royal scientists were charged with safeguarding from foreign and internal enemies. Cosmography was thus a secret science, but despite the limited dissemination of this body of knowledge, royal cosmographers applied alternative epistemologies and new methodologies that changed the discipline, and, in the process, how Europeans understood the natural world.
