"""The face of things"": the posthumanist imagination in eighteenth-century Britain"

"""The Face of Things: The Posthumanist Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Britain"" examines how eighteenth-century British subjects negotiated their identities in response to the increased contact with nonhuman agents—plants, animals, diseases, and automata—facilitated by global networks of commerce and science. Throughout the project, I argue that such transactions that reckon the agency and vitality of ""things""—the broadly construed nonhuman—led British writers like Defoe, Swift, and Barbauld to question anthropocentric and Eurocentric ideas and practices, by collapsing key conceptual distinctions between the human and the nonhuman, the British and their colonial others. Building on the new-materialist understanding that ""things"" exhibit an agency independent of human intent, this project reveals British subjectivity as anxious and unstable, thereby contradicting the image of enlightenment writers as asserting a confident, rational mastery over their environs. As this dissertation engages with recent turns toward posthumanism and environmental ethics in literary studies by highlighting both the autonomy of marginalized objects and animals and the interconnectedness of the human and nonhuman, the ultimate stakes of the project are political and ethical."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2016

Author dc:creator

• Ha, In Hye

Contributors dc:contributor

• Pollock, Anthony
• Markley, Robert
• Blackwell, Mark
• Rabin, Dana

• posthumanist imagination
• eighteenth-century British subjectivity

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2016 In Hye Ha

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90915

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/90915