| Dangerous Investigations: Experiment as Deep Play in Eighteenth-Century British Literature examines three mid-to-late eighteenth-century literary spaces in which writers, characters, readers, and audiences use the language and roles embedded in the structure of experimental science as a framework for investigating philosophical problems. Acting as experimental investigator is a gamble, a form of deep play: success promises profound philosophical insights, but with only a slight shift, the experimenter can, and often does, become experimental subject. I begin by reading Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-8) in the context of experimental vivisection. The primary male character, Lovelace, gambles experimentally on his belief in the principle that women are primarily body, not mind. By tormenting and, as I argue, vivisecting his beloved Clarissa, he plays too deeply, and both lose their lives. My next chapter locates the rhetorical effects of Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) in the context of other liminal "gothic entertainments" of the time, scientific shows that place their audience members in the role of experimental subject. By reexamining one of the key terms in critical discussion of Radcliffe, the "explained supernatural," I show how Emily, the heroine, plays investigator in an attempt to understand the nature of the artificial world of the gothic novel that surrounds her. Emily's experimental reality testing reveals a surprising kinship between her own deep play and that of the villains of the novel. Finally, entering the early Romantic period, the divisions between scientist, subject, and audience fully break down. In my chapter on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the pioneering chemist Humphry Davy, I look at how the various laboratory and literary spaces, both communal and solitary, of the two writers function as spaces of deep play. Coleridge and Davy experiment with perceptual games as part of an aesthetic and philosophical act, revealing that in order to find aesthetic pleasure and inspiration in becoming the subject, one's perceptual accuracy and will are compromised. This dissertation critically examines how the discourses of natural philosophy inform the language and concerns of literature and the greater culture of the period. |
