1st Edition

The Afterlife of Used Things Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century

Edited By Ariane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua, Sophie Vasset Copyright 2015
    278 Pages 26 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    290 Pages 26 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Recycling is not a concept that is usually applied to the eighteenth century. “The environment” may not have existed as a notion then, yet practices of re-use and transformation obviously shaped the early-modern world. Still, this period of booming commerce and exchange was also marked by scarcity and want. This book reveals the fascinating variety and ingenuity of recycling processes that may be observed in the commerce, crafts, literature, and medicine of the eighteenth century. Recycling is used as a thought-provoking means to revisit subjects such as consumption, the new science, or novel writing, and cast them in a new light where the waste of some becomes the luxury of others, clothes worn to rags are turned into paper and into books, and scientific breakthroughs are carried out in old kitchen pans.

    Introduction: The Many Lives of Recycling  Ariane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua and Sophie Vasset  Part I: The Circulation of Goods  1. The Social Circulation of Luxury and Second-Hand Goods in Eighteenth-Century Parisian Shops  Natacha Coquery  2. Luxury and Country House Sales in England, c.1760-1830  Jon Stobart  3. Recycling the Wreckage of History: On the Rise of an "Antiquarian Consumer Culture" in the Southern Netherlands  Ilja Van Damme  4. Recycling Orientalia: William Beckford's Æsthetics of Appropriation  Laurent Châtel  Part II: The Stewardship of Objects and the Material Practices of Recycling  5. Recycling the City: Paris, 1760s-1800  Allan Potofsky  6. Renewing and Refashioning: Recycling Furniture at the Late Stuart Court (1689-1714)  Olivia Fryman  7. Invisible Mending?: Ceramic Repair in Eighteenth-Century England  Sara Pennell  8. Sentimental Economics: Recycling Textiles in Eighteenth-Century Britain  Ariane Fennetaux  9. Science and Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century  Simon Werrett  10. Recycling the Sacred: The Wax Votive Object and the Eighteenth-Century Wax Baby Doll  Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace  Part III: Textual Recyclings  11. Inventive Mendicancy, Thrift and Extravagance Manifested in Re-Circulated Material in an Eighteenth-Century Library  W. G. Day  12. Unstable Shades of Grey: Cloth and Paper in Addison’s Periodicals  Amélie Junqua  13. Black Transactions: Waste and Abundance in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.  Rebecca Barr  14. "Never Was a Thing Put to So Many Uses": Transfer and Transformation in Laurence Sterne’s Fiction (1759-1768)  Brigitte Friant-Kessler  15. Recycling a Medical Case: The Walpoles’ Stone and Gravel  Sophie Vasset

    Biography

    Ariane Fennetaux is Senior Lecturer in 18th-Century Studies at Université Paris Diderot.

    Amélie Junqua is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Amiens.

    Sophie Vasset is a Senior Lecturer at Université Paris Diderot.