ODSECS 2: Eugenia Zuroski, "Haywood's fascinum" скачать в хорошем качестве

ODSECS 2: Eugenia Zuroski, "Haywood's fascinum"

Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai is a curiously elaborate joke: an intricate oriental romance as vehicle for a relatively straightforward satire of Robert Walpole and his political ascendance. As Ros Ballaster has observed, the tale contains “anarchic and perverse comic energies” that tend to overwhelm, even counteract, the story’s political orientations. In this paper, I consider how, in its more anarchic and perverse moments, Eovaai theorizes “unseriousness” as an epistemological and political approach to the world—an unexpected utopian promise in the prospect of being “carried away” by literature’s most fascinating and least plausible objects. Tracing Haywood’s engagement with the Roman fascinum, I show the unexpected conceptual heights a well-deployed penis joke might take us. Dr. Eugenia Zuroski is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. She is Editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford University Press, 2013) and the poetry chapbook Hovering, Seen (Anstruther Press, 2019). This talk presents material from her current book project, "A Funny Thing," which examines the epistemological effects of the silly and strange in work by Eliza Haywood, Richard Bentley, Horace Walpole, and Frances Burney.