"Poisoned Vestments": Rhetoric and Material Culture in England and France, 1660-1820.

A revision of my doctoral dissertation, this book project identifies an encounter between ancient rhetoric and commercial modernity across the canonical genres of the period, including poetry, drama, satire, and prose. In each of five chapters, this manuscript argues that rapid political, economic, and environmental change propelled major authors (Milton, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Byron, Austen, and Wheatley) to restyle the classical trope of figurative language as the “dress” of thought. From antiquity, this trope linked rhetorical language and dress as examples of kosmos, a term referring to the arrangement of words or things that names both the ordered universe wrested from chaos (the “cosmos”) and contrived arrangement (the “cosmetic”). Pastoral and “primitivist” discourses therefore criticized the “cosmetic” order of society as ideologically dominating and subject to historical flux—identifying chaos and kosmos as a double-sided coin. In examining the escalation of these tensions around 1800, my project enables us to track the history of rhetoric beyond its supposed “end” in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, adopting a feminist and postcolonial perspective, “Poisoned Vestments” promotes our understanding of the inter-animating relationship of rhetoric and history. Two chapters from this manuscript have recently appeared in Philological Quarterly  (Nov 2019) and European Romantic Review (Feb 2020).

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