Unsevering the Plot: Literary Form and the London Foundling Hospital

Description

This article-in-progress begins from the premise that the London Foundling Hospital, established by Royal Charter in 1739, functioned as a site of contestation over the legitimacy of mercantile solutions to social ills. On the one hand, the Hospital claimed to restore “exposed and cast-off Children” to the status of social beings; on the other hand, it did so by severing the link between infants and their natal relations. My essay centers on novelistic responses to this fact of systematic rupture. I argue that Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson’s fictions each take issue with the displacements wrought by the Hospital—and by mercantile philanthropy generally. If the structure of charitable giving tended to disavow the constitutive relationship between mercantile activity and social harms (the products and byproducts, respectively, of early capitalism), the novel form, as it developed in the movement from Defoe to Richardson, insisted that the two were constitutively linked—the components of a single plot.

About the Speaker

Cass Turner is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where their research focuses on racial capitalism and literary form in the long eighteenth century. Their first book project, The Salvaging Disposition: Waste and the Novel Form, examines the impact of new thinking about waste on the rise of the modern English novel. The book shows how a new genre of fiction—the novel—developed in England in response to emergent capitalist logics that treated classed, raced, and gendered groups as differently "wasted" and in need of "disposal." Cass's essays have appeared in SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Eighteenth-Century Studies.

About the Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar Series

The Eighteenth-Century Seminar is designed to foster research and inquiry across the scholarly disciplines in eighteenth-century studies. It aims to provide a methodologically diverse forum for work that engages ongoing discussions and debates along this historical and critical terrain. Each year the seminar sponsors one public lecture followed by questions and discussion, and two works-in-progress sessions featuring pre-circulated papers.

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