| In eighteenth-century England, waste was ubiquitous. Londoners dumped their vessels in the street. Corpses from plagues and fires created innumerable problems for overfull cemeteries. Advances in medicine meant extraneous teeth, blood, and other unsavory items need to be disposed of after their extraction. Despite this ubiquity, however, scholars have only recently begun to interrogate how people understood and experienced bodily waste. In this study, I show that three writers -- Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Tobias Smollett -- each tried to understand waste through embodied knowledge and affects. In doing so, they situated themselves in direct conversation with the Enlightenment's shifting understanding of emotional and sensorial experience, where deep feeling was increasingly decorporealized and subject to rationalization and reflection. Swift, Pope, and Smollett each recognized this affective change, and each writer sought to examine, critique, or even reify the Enlightenment's intellectual realignment. These writers used literary representations of waste to explore whether the Enlightenment could truly strip desire and disgust in particular of their ability to evoke multiple, full-bodied sensations and how this affective change would affect their world. |
