The Rhetoric of Suffering provides a fresh approach to such topics as the rise of the novel, sociability of sentiment, and the communitarian emphasis in eighteenth-century literature. Lamb draws on the Book of Job as a touchstone for the contradictions and polemics found in various eighteenth-century works--poetry, philosophy, political oratory, accounts of exploration, commentaries on criminal law--which try to account for the relations between human suffering and systems of secular and divine justice. Deliberately downplaying questions of chronology or discursive coherence, genre, or topic, he offers considerations of Richardson and Fielding, Hawkesworth and the South Pacific, Goldsmith and Godwin, Hume and Bolingbroke, Blackstone and Bentham, Burke and Longinus, and Blackmore and Wright of Derby.

The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century

Literature & Fiction

Lamb, Jonathan

British & Irish

Clarendon Press

Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840

The violence, wonder, and nostalgia of voyaging are nowhere more vivid than in the literature of South Seas exploration. Preserving the Self in the South Seas charts the sensibilities of the lonely figures that encountered the new and exotic in terra incognita. Jonathan Lamb introduces us to the writings of South Seas explorers, and finds in them unexpected and poignant tales of selves alarmed and transformed. Lamb contends that European exploration of the South Seas was less confident and mindful than we have assumed. It was, instead, conducted in moods of distraction and infatuation that were hard to make sense of and difficult to narrate, and it prompted reactions among indigenous peoples that were equally passionate and irregular. Preserving the Self in the South Seas also examines these common crises of exploration in the context of a metropolitan audience that eagerly consumed narratives of the Pacific while doubting their truth. Lamb considers why these halting and incredible journals were so popular with the reading public, and suggests that they dramatized anxieties and bafflements rankling at the heart of commercial society.

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

The author of Tristram Shandy made frequent use of literary fragments from other writers, as part of his own style. Laurence Sterne's quotations, plagiarisms and allusions were often employed in the service of the pleonasm, or 'performed pun'. Jonathan Lamb describes Sterne's operation of the pleonasm as his 'double principle'. He sees this style not as the key to some clever puzzle whose clues we go on solving in the hope of total disclosure of meaning (as some critics have claimed); rather the opposite, that it is a consoling reminder that neither we nor the text can ever be complete. Lamb severs Sterne from the Locke tradition and frees him from the 'influence' oriented studies which have aimed to authenticate him through his borrowings. This allows us to read him as a writer eagerly exploring the turns and paradoxes of associationist thought and adapting the rhetoric of the sublime to the stutterings of ordinary speech.

Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought, Series Number 3)

Cambridge University Press

The author of Tristram Shandy made frequent use of literary fragments from other writers, as part of his own style. Laurence Sterne's quotations, plagiarisms and allusions were often employed in the service of the pleonasm, or 'performed pun'. Jonathan Lamb describes Sterne's operation of the pleonasm as his 'double principle'. He sees this style not as the key to some clever puzzle whose clues we go on solving in the hope of total disclosure of meaning (as some critics have claimed); rather the opposite, that it is a consoling reminder that neither we nor the text can ever be complete. Lamb severs Sterne from the Locke tradition and frees him from the 'influence' oriented studies which have aimed to authenticate him through his borrowings. This allows us to read him as a writer eagerly exploring the turns and paradoxes of associationist thought and adapting the rhetoric of the sublime to the stutterings of ordinary speech.

An intellectual history of scurvy in the eighteenth century
Scurvy, a disease often associated with long stretches of maritime travel, generated sensations exceeding the standard of what was normal. Eyes dazzled, skin was morbidly sensitive, emotions veered between disgust and delight. In this book, Jonathan Lamb presents an intellectual history of scurvy unlike any other, probing the speechless encounter with powerful sensations to tell the story of the disease that its victims couldn't because they found their illness too terrible and, in some cases, too exciting.
Drawing on historical accounts from scientists and voyagers as well as major literary works, Lamb traces the cultural impact of scurvy during the eighteenth-century age of geographical and scientific discovery. He explains the medical knowledge surrounding scurvy and the debates about its cause, prevention, and attempted cures. He vividly describes the phenomenon and experience of "scorbutic nostalgia," in which victims imagined mirages of food, water, or home, and then wept when such pleasures proved impossible to consume or reach. Lamb argues that a culture of scurvy arose in the colony of Australia, which was prey to the disease in its early years, and identifies a literature of scurvy in the works of such figures as Herman Melville, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Francis Bacon, and Jonathan Swift.
Masterful and illuminating, Scurvy shows how the journeys of discovery in the eighteenth century not only ventured outward to the ends of the earth, but were also an inward voyage into the realms of sensation and passion.

Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery

Princeton University Press

One of the new forms of prose fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century was the first-person narrative told by things such as coins, coaches, clothes, animals, or insects. This is an ambitious new account of the context in which these "it narratives" became so popular. What does it mean when property declares independence of its owners and begins to move and speak? Jonathan Lamb addresses this and many other questions as he advances a new interpretation of these odd tales, from Defoe, Pope, Swift, Gay, and Sterne, to advertisements, still life paintings, and South Seas journals.
 Lamb emphasizes the subversive and even nonsensical quality of what things say; their interests are so radically different from ours that we either destroy or worship them. Existing outside systems of exchange and the priorities of civil society, things in fact advertise the dissident obscurity common to slave narratives all the way from Aesop and Phaedrus to Frederick Douglass and Primo Levi, a way of meaning only what is said, never saying what is meant. This is what Defoe's Roxana calls "the Sense of Things," and it is found in sounds, substances, and images rather than conventional signs.
This major work illuminates not only "it narratives," but also eighteenth-century literature, the rise of the novel, and the genealogy of the slave narrative.

The Things Things Say

Humor & Satire

One of the new forms of prose fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century was the first-person narrative told by things such as coins, coaches, clothes, animals, or insects. This is an ambitious new account of the context in which these "it narratives" became so popular. What does it mean when property declares independence of its owners and begins to move and speak? Jonathan Lamb addresses this and many other questions as he advances a new interpretation of these odd tales, from Defoe, Pope, Swift, Gay, and Sterne, to advertisements, still life paintings, and South Seas journals. Lamb emphasizes the subversive and even nonsensical quality of what things say; their interests are so radically different from ours that we either destroy or worship them. Existing outside systems of exchange and the priorities of civil society, things in fact advertise the dissident obscurity common to slave narratives all the way from Aesop and Phaedrus to Frederick Douglass and Primo Levi, a way of meaning only what is said, never saying what is meant. This is what Defoe's Roxana calls "the Sense of Things," and it is found in sounds, substances, and images rather than conventional signs.This major work illuminates not only "it narratives," but also eighteenth-century literature, the rise of the novel, and the genealogy of the slave narrative.

Reference

The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies provides the first overview of significant concepts within reenactment studies. The volume includes a co-authored critical introduction and a comprehensive compilation of key term entries contributed by leading reenactment scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia. Well into the future, this wide-ranging reference work will inform and shape the thinking of researchers, teachers, and students of history and heritage and memory studies, as well as cultural studies, film, theater and performance studies, dance, art history, museum studies, literary criticism, musicology, and anthropology.

The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field (Routledge Handbooks)

History

Agnew, Vanessa

Tomann, Juliane

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Routledge

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lamb, Jonathan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lamb, Jonathan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lamb, Jonathan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century

Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840

Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840

Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought, Series Number 3)

Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle (Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought, Series Number 3)

Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery

The Things Things Say

The Things Things Say

Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery

The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field (Routledge Handbooks)