Jonathan Lamb

The violence, wonder, and nostalgia of voyaging are nowhere more vivid than in the literature of South Seas exploration. Preserving the Self in the South Seas charts the sensibilities of the lonely figures that encountered the new and exotic in terra incognita. Jonathan Lamb introduces us to the writings of South Seas explorers, and finds in them unexpected and poignant tales of selves alarmed and transformed. Lamb contends that European exploration of the South Seas was less confident and mindful than we have assumed. It was, instead, conducted in moods of distraction and infatuation that were hard to make sense of and difficult to narrate, and it prompted reactions among indigenous peoples that were equally passionate and irregular. Preserving the Self in the South Seas also examines these common crises of exploration in the context of a metropolitan audience that eagerly consumed narratives of the Pacific while doubting their truth. Lamb considers why these halting and incredible journals were so popular with the reading public, and suggests that they dramatized anxieties and bafflements rankling at the heart of commercial society.

Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840

Nicholas Thomas

Vanessa Smith

This anthology places the works of such well-known figures as Captain James Cook and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside the writings of lesser-known explorers, missionaries, beachcombers, and literary travellers who roamed the South Seas from the late 17th through the late 19th centuries.

A South Seas Anthology, 1680-1900

Exploration and Exchange

Bridget Orr

Alex Calder

What actually happened as Europeans and peoples of the Pacific discovered each other? How have their respective senses of the past influenced their understanding of the present? And what are the consequences of their meeting? In this collection of essays, scholars from European, Polynesian, and Settler backgrounds provide answers to these questions. Writing from, and between, a variety of disciplines (history, anthropology, Maori Studies, literary criticism, law, cultural studies, art history, Pacific Studies), they show how the Pacific reveals a more various and contradictory history than that supposed by such homogenizing metropolitan myths as the introduction of civilization to savage peoples, the general ruin of indigenous cultures by an imperial juggernaut, or the mimicry of European models by an abject population. They examine contact from both sides of beaches throughout Polynesia, exposing the many inconsistencies from which Pacific history is made. Some of the essays consider the extent to which traditional European ideas about organizing and legitimizing claims to territory and power were invoked and problematized in the South Pacific; some consider the violence endemic in such scenes; others examine the aesthetic discourses with which early travelers and settlers attempted to make sense of the Pacific in the aftermath of "discovery." But rather than reiterate the myths and anti-myths of conquest, these essays show how local differences have made and do make a difference. They emphasize the Pacific's capacity to absorb and transform the impact of Europe, an impact that has been as notable for its ambivalence and confusion as for its single-minded pursuit of hegemony. The editors develop these themes in a wide-ranging introduction that relates Pacific concerns to a more global set of theoretical and methodological problems, including current work in post-colonial and subaltern studies.

Pacific Encounters, 1769-1840

Voyages and Beaches

Tim Chester

The risen Jesus brings a message of comfort and hope to those under pressure and a wake-up call to the compromised.

A Message from Jesus to the Church Today

Revelation 2-3

One of the new forms of prose fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century was the first-person narrative told by things such as coins, coaches, clothes, animals, or insects. This is an ambitious new account of the context in which these "it narratives" became so popular. What does it mean when property declares independence of its owners and begins to move and speak? Jonathan Lamb addresses this and many other questions as he advances a new interpretation of these odd tales, from Defoe, Pope, Swift, Gay, and Sterne, to advertisements, still life paintings, and South Seas journals. Lamb emphasizes the subversive and even nonsensical quality of what things say; their interests are so radically different from ours that we either destroy or worship them. Existing outside systems of exchange and the priorities of civil society, things in fact advertise the dissident obscurity common to slave narratives all the way from Aesop and Phaedrus to Frederick Douglass and Primo Levi, a way of meaning only what is said, never saying what is meant. This is what Defoe's Roxana calls "the Sense of Things," and it is found in sounds, substances, and images rather than conventional signs. This major work illuminates not only "it narratives," but also eighteenth-century literature, the rise of the novel, and the genealogy of the slave narrative.

The Things Things Say

Pablo Martinez

Gaetano Giacomo Carlo Di

In early 2020, a highly contagious virus made its way around the world. In a matter of days the things that many people relied on for security were shown to be flimsy sources of hope. Authors from three of the worst-affected countries in Europe have united in this book to reflect on the only comfort we have in life and death - Jesus Christ. Each taking a different aspect of what this hope looks like, they answer the question, what can we believe and hope for in times like this?

Faith and Hope in the Pandemic

The Only Comfort in Life and Death

"By listening to the things things say, Lamb succeeds in revealing just those aspects of the long eighteenth century we have been unable to apprehend because we have assumed literary culture's commitment to human interest stories. Lamb's vast knowledge of eighteenth-century literary history, philosophy of mind, political theory, and legal history is splendidly in evidence in this fascinating, panoramic study."--Deidre Shauna Lynch, University of Toronto "Jonathan Lamb's fascinating study of the bizarre eighteenth-century genre known as 'it narratives'--in which a watch, coach, insect, dog, or body part tells its story--leads him to consider whether authors themselves have things in common with things. After reading this book you will never again think of ink as just ink."--Janet Todd, president of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge "This is a real tour de force--a very learned and far-reaching book. It is far and away the best account of how eighteenth-century''it narratives' work and where they come from. But it is far more than that. Lamb is a very good close reader of texts, and his ability to join principles and ideas with individual traits and examples in texts is nothing short of dazzling."--J. Paul Hunter, University of Virginia "Passionately argued and electrifying in its intellectual capaciousness and theoretical scope, "The Things Things Say" offers an illuminating account of the enmity and intimacy that bound person and thing together in the literature and culture of the eighteenth century. Tracing the shifting thresholds between human and nonhuman, between authorial agent and intractable thing, Lamb unveils the way civil, political, and literary fictions of the person sought to describe what might be proper to the self while confronting all that obdurately cannot be claimed for one's own. This is a groundbreaking work of scholarship, an exhilarating and enchanting argument that is as provocative in the questions it raises as it is persuasive in the answers it tenders."--Lynn Festa, Rutgers University

This work represents a concise history of sympathy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the phenomenon of shared feeling from five related angles: charity, the market, global exploration, theatre, and torture.

The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century

Scurvy—a disease usually associated with long stretches of maritime travel—generated extraordinary sensations. Eyes dazzled, skin was morbidly sensitive, emotions veered between disgust and delight. In this book, Jonathan Lamb presents an intellectual history of scurvy unlike any other, probing its cultural impact during the eighteenth-century age of geographic and scientific discovery. Drawing on historical accounts from scientists and voyagers as well as major literary works, Lamb explains the medical knowledge surrounding scurvy and the debates about its cause, prevention, and attempted cures. He argues that a “culture” of scurvy arose in the colony of Australia, which was prey to the disease in its early years, and identifies a literature of scurvy in the works of such figures as Herman Melville, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Francis Bacon, and Jonathan Swift. Masterful and illuminating, Scurvy shows how eighteenth-century journeys of discovery not only ventured outward to the ends of the earth, but were also an inward voyage into the realms of sensation and passion.

The Disease of Discovery

Scurvy

Juliane Tomann

Vanessa Agnew

The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies provides the first overview of significant concepts within reenactment studies. The volume includes a co-authored critical introduction and a comprehensive compilation of key term entries contributed by leading reenactment scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia. Well into the future, this wide-ranging reference work will inform and shape the thinking of researchers, teachers, and students of history and heritage and memory studies, as well as cultural studies, film, theater and performance studies, dance, art history, museum studies, literary criticism, musicology, and anthropology.

Jonathan Lamb

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