A Funny Thing

Eugenia Zuroski is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Ontario. She is the author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (2013) and Editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry, Kintail Beach (2022) and Hovering, Seen (2019).

• Part I. The Anamorphic: 1. Carried Away; 2. Affective Risks; 3. The Fascinum; 4. Anamorphic Vision; 5. The Reading Medusa; 6. Sapphic Study; 7. An Interlude; Part II. The Ludic: 8. Mapping the Mundus Ludibundus; 9. The Art of Sinking; 10. This Giddy Bark; 11. Animal Spirits; 12. Visceral Quickenings; 13. Flesh and Blood at Sea; 14. The Cat-Arion; 15. Dreaming Together; 16. Twickenham's Depths; 17. An Opening; Part III. The Orificial: 16. Perverting the Novel; 17. I Blush for My Folly!; 18. Evelina's Orifice; 19. A Monstrous Good Stare; 20. Enjoying His Mortification; 21. Tickling, or the Unbearable; 22. The Novel's Queerer Theories; 23. Undoing Whiteness; 24. Grinning and Sweating; 25. Enjoying His Mortification (Wig Reveal Version).

'Eugenia Zuroski develops the idea of 'a funny thing' to get us to pay attention to what is absurd – those peculiar things that populate the eighteenth-century archive, that refuse to be explained away by any number of rationalist dictums, that provoke laughter, unease, reorientation, that exist outside of disciplinary logic. While the stakes of Zuroski's arguments are high, engaging with the urgency of anti-colonial, anti-racist scholarship, one simultaneously finds great humor and intellectual generosity within. A Funny Thing will be a major book in the field of eighteenth-century studies and beyond.' Tita Chico, Professor of English, University of Maryland