A Funny Thing: Eighteenth-Century Literature Undisciplined

Eighteenth-century literature is weirder than we realize. A Funny Thing invites readers to be taken by its oddities, its silliness, and its absurdities – both because reading this way is fun, and because this challenges colonialism's disciplinary epistemes of propriety that have consistently bound liberal selfhood to extractive capitalism. Focusing on three aesthetic modes largely unnamed in existing studies of the period's literature – the anamorphic, the ludic, and the orificial – this book offers fresh readings of work by Haywood, Walpole, Bentley, and Burney that point to unexpected legacies from the so-called Age of Reason. This book is for any reader curious about the wilder flights of fancy in eighteenth-century fiction, the period's queer sense of humour, and how writing and art of the time challenge colonial reality. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Table of Contents:
Part I. The Anamorphic: 1. Carried Away; 2. Affective Risks; 3. The Fascinum; 4. Anamorphic Vision; 5. The Reading Medusa; 6. Sapphic Study; 7. An Interlude; Part II. The Ludic: 8. Mapping the Mundus Ludibundus; 9. The Art of Sinking; 10. This Giddy Bark; 11. Animal Spirits; 12. Visceral Quickenings; 13. Flesh and Blood at Sea; 14. The Cat-Arion; 15. Dreaming Together; 16. Twickenham's Depths; 17. An Opening; Part III. The Orificial: 16. Perverting the Novel; 17. I Blush for My Folly!; 18. Evelina's Orifice; 19. A Monstrous Good Stare; 20. Enjoying His Mortification; 21. Tickling, or the Unbearable; 22. The Novel's Queerer Theories; 23. Undoing Whiteness; 24. Grinning and Sweating; 25. Enjoying His Mortification (Wig Reveal Version).

About the Author :
Eugenia Zuroski is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Ontario. She is the author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (2013) and Editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry, Kintail Beach (2022) and Hovering, Seen (2019).

Review :
'Eugenia Zuroski develops the idea of 'a funny thing' to get us to pay attention to what is absurd – those peculiar things that populate the eighteenth-century archive, that refuse to be explained away by any number of rationalist dictums, that provoke laughter, unease, reorientation, that exist outside of disciplinary logic. While the stakes of Zuroski's arguments are high, engaging with the urgency of anti-colonial, anti-racist scholarship, one simultaneously finds great humor and intellectual generosity within. A Funny Thing will be a major book in the field of eighteenth-century studies and beyond.' Tita Chico, Professor of English, University of Maryland 'A Funny Thing is a queer academic monograph that takes its reader on a journey from Augustan satire to RuPaul's Drag Race via flying penises and wig reveals. It is also a deeply impressive book. It is learned, analytically astute, thrillingly deft and well (sometimes hilariously) written. It is also a book that imprints upon the reader's mind a familiar yet largely unexplored eighteenth-century culture full of political and aesthetic energies that are not easily assimilable within conventional literary-historical paradigms. I have never read anything like A Funny Thing before, but I know I want to read it again and I want my colleagues and students to do the same.' Jennie Batchelor, Professor of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies, University of York