The Afterlife of Used Things: Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century

by Ariane Fennetaux (Editor), Amélie Junqua (Editor), Sophie Vasset (Editor)

Overview

Recycling is not a concept that is usually applied to the eighteenth century. “The environment” may not have existed as a notion then, yet practices of re-use and transformation obviously shaped the early-modern world. Still, this period of booming commerce and exchange was also marked by scarcity and want. This book reveals the fascinating variety and ingenuity of recycling processes that may be observed in the commerce, crafts, literature, and medicine of the eighteenth century. Recycling is used as a thought-provoking means to revisit subjects such as consumption, the new science, or novel writing, and cast them in a new light where the waste of some becomes the luxury of others, clothes worn to rags are turned into paper and into books, and scientific breakthroughs are carried out in old kitchen pans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781317744979
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/03/2014
Series:	Routledge Studies in Cultural History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	290
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Ariane Fennetaux is Senior Lecturer in 18th-Century Studies at Université Paris Diderot.

Amélie Junqua is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Amiens.

Sophie Vasset is a Senior Lecturer at Université Paris Diderot.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Many Lives of Recycling Ariane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua and Sophie Vasset Part I: The Circulation of Goods 1. The Social Circulation of Luxury and Second-Hand Goods in Eighteenth-Century Parisian Shops Natacha Coquery 2. Luxury and Country House Sales in England, c.1760-1830 Jon Stobart 3. Recycling the Wreckage of History: On the Rise of an "Antiquarian Consumer Culture" in the Southern Netherlands Ilja Van Damme 4. Recycling Orientalia: William Beckford's Æsthetics of Appropriation Laurent Châtel Part II: The Stewardship of Objects and the Material Practices of Recycling 5. Recycling the City: Paris, 1760s-1800 Allan Potofsky 6. Renewing and Refashioning: Recycling Furniture at the Late Stuart Court (1689-1714) Olivia Fryman 7. Invisible Mending?: Ceramic Repair in Eighteenth-Century England Sara Pennell 8. Sentimental Economics: Recycling Textiles in Eighteenth-Century Britain Ariane Fennetaux 9. Science and Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century Simon Werrett 10. Recycling the Sacred: The Wax Votive Object and the Eighteenth-Century Wax Baby Doll Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace Part III: Textual Recyclings 11. Inventive Mendicancy, Thrift and Extravagance Manifested in Re-Circulated Material in an Eighteenth-Century Library W. G. Day 12. Unstable Shades of Grey: Cloth and Paper in Addison’s Periodicals Amélie Junqua 13. Black Transactions: Waste and Abundance in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Rebecca Barr 14. "Never Was a Thing Put to So Many Uses": Transfer and Transformation in Laurence Sterne’s Fiction (1759-1768) Brigitte Friant-Kessler 15. Recycling a Medical Case: The Walpoles’ Stone and Gravel Sophie Vasset