SENSITIVE WITNESSES

Feminist Materialism in the British Enlightenment

KRISTIN M. GIRTEN

What grounds the fictional world of a novel? Or is such a world peculiarly groundless? In a powerful engagement with the latest debates in novel theory, Daniel Wright investigates how novelists reckon with the ontological status of their works. Philosophers who debate whether fictional worlds exist take the novel as an ontological problem to be solved; instead, Wright reveals the novel as a genre of immanent ontological critique.

Wright argues that the novel imagines its own metaphysical “grounds” through figuration, understanding fictional being as self-sufficient, cohesive, and alive, rather than as beholden to the actual world as an existential anchor. Through philosophically attuned close readings of novels and reflections on writerly craft by Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Colson Whitehead, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Henry James, and Akwaeke Emezi, Wright shares an impassioned vision of reading as stepping into ontologically terraformed worlds, and of literary criticism as treading and re-treading the novel’s grounds.

Daniel Wright is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and the author of Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel (2018).

Kristin M. Girten tells a new story of feminist knowledge-making in the Enlightenment era by exploring the British female philosophers who asserted their authority through the celebration of profoundly embodied observations, experiences, and experiments.

This book explores the feminist materialist practice of sensitive witnessing, establishing an alternate history of the emergence of the scientific method in the eighteenth century. Francis Bacon and other male natural philosophers regularly downplayed the embodied nature of their observations. They presented themselves as modest witnesses, detached from their environment and entitled to the domination and exploitation of it. In contrast, the philosopher-authors that Girten takes up asserted themselves as intimately entangled with matter—boldly embracing their perceived close association with the material world as women. Girten shows how Lucy Hutchison, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Smith took inspiration from materialist principles to challenge widely accepted “modest” conventions for practicing and communicating philosophy.

Forerunners of the feminist materialism of today, these thinkers recognized the kinship of human and nonhuman nature and suggested a more accessible, inclusive version of science. Girten persuasively argues that our understanding of Enlightenment thought must take into account these sensitive witnesses’ visions of an alternative scientific method informed by profound closeness with the natural world.

Kristin M. Girten is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

JANUARY 2024 224 pages | 5.5 x 8.5

1 halftone

Paper $26.00 (£21.99) SDT 9781503637559

Cloth $85.00 (£73.00) SDT 9781503636835 eBook 9781503637566

Literary Studies

FEBRUARY 2024 240 pages | 6 x 9

1 halftone

Cloth $65.00 (£56.00) SDT 9781503633032 eBook 9781503637696

Literary Studies