GWS Event 2/22
Come by tomorrow, Wednesday February 22 at noon for a great lecture by our own Dr. Joseph Drury. Co-sponsored by the Gender & Women's Studies and English departments. "Libertines and Machines in Enlightenment Britain" Dr. Drury's talk is drawn from a section of his forthcoming book, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain. It reads the seduction fiction of Eliza Haywood, published in the 1720s, as a critique of male libertinism that responds to the two competing interpretations of Hobbes's materialism circulating in early eighteenth-century Britain. Like Hobbes, Haywood's characters are machines, whose wills are entirely determined by the desires produced in them by external objects. But her characters draw very different conclusions from this basic premise. Her male characters tend to be "libertine machines," who claim that because their transgressions are determined by external causes, they cannot be blamed or...
