| Waste and Restoration investigates the relationship between material waste, a civic and social problem in the early eighteenth-century, and literary texts in which waste is a trope for failure, dysfunctionality or breakdown. The problem of waste, manifest in urban disaster, agricultural change and political crises after the Restoration, gives rise to the idea that social renewal and civic regeneration are connected to the control of various kinds of material effluent. The visible control or expulsion of bodily waste, of garbage, of rubble and pollution in the city, or of rural wasteland, offers contemporary writers a metaphorical vocabulary for representing ideological and political expulsion. Restoration and Augustan writers use vocabulary drawn from current theories about the eradication of waste-matter to represent civic and literary renewal. I have discovered that waste is itself restorative, a sign of cultural invigoration and imaginative abundance, even when it appears to symbolize civic, economic and political failure. My argument challenges our intuitive association of "enlightenment" culture with political and social improvement, scientific and commercial progress and the growth of an international luxury economy.;I consider five major writers from the Restoration and early eighteenth-century: Milton, Dryden, Swift, Pope and Defoe. Each writer fashions a literary persona based on civic engagement and involvement in an emergent "public sphere" through images of leftover or remaindered matter, drawn from contemporary culture. Dryden manipulates images of urban residues in Annus Mirabilis to frame a critique of Charles II's politics, while Milton uses descriptions of wasteland in Paradise Lost to criticize contemporary analyses of the production of waste, which were affiliated with political ideologies he rejected. In the early eighteenth-century, Swift's cherished self-identity as loyalist and reformer relied partly upon his examination of material remainders in Ireland, while Pope and Defoe transformed London into a mythical wasteland in order to invent a poetics of the professionalized marketplace. Major texts such as Paradise Lost and the Journal of the Plague Year are read alongside scientific, medical and theological writing from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries dealing with the problem of waste. |
