Fictive Domains

The focus of Fictive Domains is the period 1717-1770, during which nostalgia was just beginning to emerge as a cultural concept. Using psychoanalytic, feminist, and materialist theories, this book examines representations of bodies and landscapes in the cultural production of the early- to mid-eighteenth century. With considerable social anxiety surrounding changes in the structure of the family, the control of bodies within the family, and ownership and access to the land, nostalgia generated narratives that became the richly textured novels and long poems of the eighteenth century. In Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), social anxieties are played out on the body of Clarissa Harlowe; female passion is controlled in Alexander Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard" (1717) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761); questions of domesticity and family are explored in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1760); and an alternative domestic structure is proposed in Sarah Scott's A Description of Millenium Hall (1762).