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The Hand: Grasping Embodiment in British Literature 1690-1746

Abstract

“The Hand: Grasping Embodiment in British Literature 1690-1746” challenges the narrative that dualism is the totalizing account of thought in the Restoration and eighteenth century via a discussion of the hand in works of literature and philosophy from the period. The central question, then, of my dissertation is what and how can the hand “grasp” in this period. The double sense in “grasp" captures the interrelated components of mental comprehension and manual action. I argue that the hand allows us to see ways in which thought and action are essentially embodied in literature and philosophy of the Restoration and first half of the eighteenth century. My concerns are ultimately phenomenological and epistemological, which, I argue, amount to much the same thing in the eighteenth century: bodily experience and knowledge are intrinsically linked. To pursue these linkages, I study appearances of the hand in literature and philosophy beginning in 1690, the year in which Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and ending in 1746, the year James Thomson published his revised and expanded The Seasons. In addition to these texts, I analyze the hands of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 texts Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year. These observations allow me to speak to the nature of eighteenth-century modernity, the vexing question of the relationship between subjects and objects, and the nature of thought and action.

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