Book Description

My doctoral thesis is a study of amusement which makes an amusement out of study. Endeavouring to delight and instruct as well as "unbend" the mind, it describes the fascination of eighteenth-century writers with the "Reigning Diversions of the Town," while attempting to account for the enormous pleasure eighteenth-century readers seem to have taken in the literary representation of these diversions. As a noun diversion refers to any pastime, sport, or recreation that is engaged for the purposes of entertainment ( O.E.D. 4.b). As a derivative of the verb divert , however, diversion denotes a turning aside from the ordinary or due course of things, a deflection of attention from politics and business and study, and from all earnest labour and employment ( O.E.D. 2.a). I examine this semantic overlap between, as it were, "cultural diversion" and "discursive diversion"--between those social amusements which provide relief from the serious concerns of everyday life and those linguistic and textual devices which occasionally disrupt plain discourse. Drawing attention to the fact that the so-called "commercialization of leisure" happens to coincide with the development of literary "self-consciousness" in England, I analyze the interaction of cultural and discursive diversion in works published between approximately 1690 and 1760, a period during which the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake was gradually legitimized as well as a period during which intrusion, obstruction, and interruption first began to thrive as poetic and aesthetic techniques. In a series of case studies, I survey a range of works which take contemporary amusement as their subject, but which self-consciously represent this subject through false, abusive, or catachrestic wit, through typographical deficiencies and excrescences, and, most pervasively, through digression. Such works enact at the linguistic and textual level the nature and purpose of eighteenth-century diversion: they "unbend the mind," to use Samuel Johnson's definition, "by turning it off from care," and thereby achieve an ironic verisimilitude through a kind of "formal" parody of the "Reigning Diversions of the Town." One of the most important ways in which writers of the period gratified a reading audience increasingly avid for diversion was through discursive devices that themselves diverted --that turned aside from the ordinary course of things for the purposes of entertainment. If cultural diversions signify a delightful avocation of ordinary life, I argue that deviations from the straightforward and objective representation of this life correspondingly mark a pleasant excursion from ordinary discourse.