Maria Edgeworth's Déjà-Voodoo: Interior Decoration, Retroactivity, and Colonial Allegory in <i>The Absentee</i>

Tuite, Clara

doi:10.3138/ecf.20.3.385

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

2008

DOI: 10.3138/ecf.20.3.385

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Maria Edgeworth's Déjà-Voodoo: Interior Decoration, Retroactivity, and Colonial Allegory in The Absentee

Clara Tuite

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Cited by 3 publications

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“…The secondary literature on this concept is considerable. For its use in a literary context, see Bode 2004; Leask 2002;Tuite 2008. Britain's ruin (even if it is not clear about exactly where in North or South America succeeding empires will arise), but one advantage of imagining the unknown future as the repetition of the known past in a different location is that through such a process the present and the future are always experienced as a repetition of the past and hence as potentially knowable. The fantasy of ruins in the classical model makes recognizable an increasingly unfamiliar modernity.…”

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confidence: 99%

Future! Decline

Sachs¹

2016

Poetics Today

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What sort of temporality does a prediction about the future suggest? What does it mean specifically to predict decline and to imagine the absence of a future? How does the meaning of the present change in the face of anxieties about decline and an uncertain or absent future that become more common in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? This essay addresses these questions through a reading of two poems that fantasize the imagined ruins of London: Thomas Littleton's "The State of England and the Once Flourishing City of London. In a Letter from an American Traveller, Dated from the Ruinous Portico of St. Paul's in the Year 2199, to a Friend Settled in Boston, the Metropolis of the Western Empire" (1780) and Anna Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812). Imagining the absence of a future in their place of composition, these poems attempt to make sense of their present moment. The displaced future and present emphases of these poems manifest anxiety about how to assess a range of concrete circumstances, affects, and intuitions to articulate a sense of what is happening and what might follow from that assessment of the present. The poetry of Littleton and Barbauld thus dovetails with the contemporary concerns of much recent work on the historiography of the present but in a way that suggests that this sort of history itself has a history, and the essay closes with an assessment of what that might mean.

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confidence: 99%

Future! Decline

Sachs¹

2016

Poetics Today

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Reading Post-Union Material Culture: "The Bodkin Is Particularly Deserving Our Notice"

Taylor¹

2018

Éire-Ireland

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Anachronistic Aesthetics: Maria Edgeworth and the “Uses” of History

Mullen¹

2013

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

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author Scholars often understand Maria Edgeworth as a belated Enlighten ment writer in a Romantic age because she seeks to organ ize both her fiction and the history it represents so that they can be put to use. In this article, however, I argue that Maria Edgeworth's Irish writing legitimates lived relationships be tween past and present that her politics wished to eradicate. Although she attempts to peri odize within her fiction to shape a useful history-separating past and present in order to bring about an imagined future-her anach ronistic aesthetics un settle her historical periods and show the political value of dis cor dance, contingency, and his torical misuse. Focusing especially on An Essay on Irish Bulls and Castle Rackrent, I consider how Edgeworth's anachronisms imagine political possi bilities that do not simply support either union with England or Irish nation al ism. The heterogeneity created by portable aesthetic forms-whether literary language that tran scends its historical con text or forms of metalepsis that propel readers forward and back ward in time-foster transhistorical rela tion ships that expand our understanding of the present and imagine a more open future.

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Maria Edgeworth's Déjà-Voodoo: Interior Decoration, Retroactivity, and Colonial Allegory in The Absentee

Cited by 3 publications

References 19 publications

Future! Decline

Future! Decline

Reading Post-Union Material Culture: "The Bodkin Is Particularly Deserving Our Notice"

Anachronistic Aesthetics: Maria Edgeworth and the “Uses” of History

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