Paperi V

Dopo lo studio dell'ignoranza, quello della sporcizia!!

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Montreal, Quebec
March 30 - April 2, 2006


Filthy Ideas and Indecent Expressions

This panel invites papers that examine British writing’s investment in the profane, obscene and scatological. In an era preoccupied with politeness, what drives the seeming compulsion to cross what Norbert Elias calls “the threshold of embarrassment and shame?” In the wake of Samuel Richardson’s coining of the term “indelicate” in Pamela, how do breaches of decorum mark
the politicized boundaries of good taste and conduct? How are identities, social relationships, and the body politic negotiated in what Daniel Cottom calls “the bowels of Enlightenment”? Papers might explore a variety of literary and cultural transgressions, from representations of sex to fecal imagery to ballroom faux pas—all “things which,” in Jonathan Swift’s words, “must not be expressed" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).
Please send abstracts of 300 words to jason.solinger@citadel.edu