Disordered Bodies and Bodies-Politic in British Enlightenment Culture Azfar, Farid M. creator 2008 ix, 321 p. born digital Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009) Harris, Tim director Harris, Tim reader Cohen, Deborah reader Steinberg, Michael reader Brown University. History sponsor theses This dissertation uncovers an Enlightenment that occurred in Britain between 1720 and 1740, from the collapse of the South Sea Bubble to the War of Jenkin's Ear. It challenges the idea of a generic Enlightenment as ideological bedrock to a generic modernity. The event I describe was an extended, society-wide response to a particular manifestation of modernity: to the problems and tensions of commercial growth, metropolitan life, and political emancipation. It was non-specific to elite philosophical texts. The argument is anchored around fears of disordered bodies and bodies-politic as they shaped public debates over topics as diverse as medicine, bridge-building, grain distribution, and foreign policy. The five chapters progressively trace the transmutation of these fears, as manufactured and manipulated by the participants in these debates, into recognizably enlightened sensibilities. Ideals of equity, balance, and restraint deepened in response to visions of the fragile interdependence between peoples, states, cities, and rivers. Three of the Enlightenment's most critical ideals ? activity, happiness, and a skeptical pursuit of certainty ? evolved and converged as the pressures of metropolitan life exacerbated fears of the spleen. Similar anxieties catalyzed the articulation of secular sensibilities of restraint, calibrated by notions of alienation, individualism, self-control, concealment, sociability, and venting. The last two chapters focus upon the 1730s ? a decade distinguished by an exceptionally vibrant political public sphere. An enlightened commercialism was culturally entrenched as Opposition propagandists distortedly exploited fears of weakness and enervation ? fears that were rooted in the very commercialism they were so aggressively propagandizing. An interest and investment in thinking ? perhaps the most prized of all Enlightenment ideals ? deepened as the skullduggery and sloganeering that surrounded the excise crisis of 1733 and anti-Spanish agitation of 1738-9 generated anxieties about the supposedly weak minds of the political public. Cultures of urban consumption amplified these anxieties and, as a consequence, deepened the investment. Collectively, these chapters recreate an Enlightenment composed of a cacophony of alternative voices, which, disturbed by the excesses of modernity, or the exploitation of political freedoms, rallied different forms of restoration, transformation, and regeneration. The Enlightenment Britain the body the city public sphere CommerceMasculinityAnxietySecularismGreat Britain RPB 20091218 engEnglish10.7301/Z07P8WS7In CopyrightCollection is open for research.dissertations