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The eighteenth century is primarily known for the development of codes of etiquette, the refinement of manners and the artistic cultivation of the beautiful and the sublime, but there is at the same time a strand of highly visceral, often stomach-turning texts and images that coexist alongside the push for a much more polite and urbane culture. My dissertation, “Evoking Disgust in the Eighteenth Century,” looks at a wide range of scientific, literary and ephemeral texts to excavate the ways that disgust both persisted and transformed across the century. These range from the poems of Jonathan Swift, the novels of Tobias Smollett, Evelina by Frances Burney, and George Psalmanazar’s An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. I argue that disgust served as both a boundary line that can tell us the kinds of behaviors, objects and bodies that should not be tolerated in society, and as an emotion that could be trained and cultivated to guide the disgust reactions of readers.

This study takes a structuralist approach to the development of the novel, arguing that eighteenth-century writers build progressive narrative by rendering abstract, then conflating, literary theories of gendered time that originate in the Renaissance with seventeenth-century scientific theories of motion. I argue that writers from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century generate and regulate progress-as-product in their narratives through gendered constructions of time that corresponded to the generation and regulation of economic, political, and social progress brought about by developing capitalism.