Duhaime 1

Douglas Duhaime

25 August 2013

Examination Lists and Rationale

My primary field is British literature from the Restoration through the long eighteenth

century, and I have largely adopted the Department's list for this period. My main area of concern

within this historic field is the relationship between literary and natural philosophical texts, and I

have therefore populated my supplemental list with works that address the development of this

relationship within the eighteenth century. The supplemental list includes canonical works that

rest at the intersections of literature and science—such as Sprat's History of the Royal Society

and Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes—as well as works that speak to my more

focused interest in the eighteenth-century medical politics, such as the texts by Mandeville,

Smollett, and Defoe. In pursuit of a balanced portrait of eighteenth-century natural philosophy, I

have also included a number of works that speak to often-overlooked dimensions of eighteenth

century philosophy, including the development of the esoteric arts, as well as works intended to

popularize the new science by such writers as Goldsmith. This list contains a healthy dose of

primary source material because I value primary historical records and because I wished to

provide some counterbalance for the preponderance of secondary works in my special topics list.

I have titled my special topics list “The Politics of Science in the Long Eighteenth

Century” because the list addresses the ways literary works can help us understand the

intersections of natural philosophy and politics within “Newton's century.” This list sets

canonical scholars of literature and science (Marjorie Nicolson, George Rousseau) into

conversation with intellectual historians (Arthur Lovejoy, Otto Mayr) as well as heavyweights

from the history of science (I. B. Cohen, Allen Debus) in order to develop a synoptic view of the

ways in which “the new science” transformed and was transformed by cultural currents of the

Duhaime 2

period. While striving to achieve a representative portrait of the literary-cum-scientific circles

active in the eighteenth century, this list also includes a more focused subset of works that speak

to the question that has motivated much of my work, namely: In what ways do our scientific

models shape our political inclinations, and in what ways do our political inclinations shape our

scientific models? My pursuit of these questions has gained greatly from the pioneering work of

scholars such as Andrea Finkelstein and John Rogers, and I have therefore included their books

and other treatises that take up similar projects in my special topics list. All told, the purpose of

this list is to foreground some of the ways literary works can help us track the conceptual

congruence of scientific and political models during the long eighteenth century. Once I can

articulate the ways various scientific methods and models helped set in motion new political

ideologies (and vice versa), I will be better prepared to investigate what I currently envision as

the focal point of my dissertation, namely the intersections of medical philosophy and political

economy within the works of such literary doctors as Mandeville, Arbuthnot, Goldsmith,

Smollett, and Darwin.

If Robert Creeley spoke correctly when he said “form is never more than an extension of

content,” then it seems fitting that my methods section should focus on quantitative approaches

to literary history. Subsuming a variety of practical and theoretical texts under the rubric “Digital

Humanities and Text Analytics,” this list brings together both theoretical and technical works that

address the ways in which we can use computational methods to augment the extant record of

literary scholarship. One of the chief motivations for this list is my fear that even the greatest

scholars of Enlightenment-era intellectual history have necessarily been limited by their human

faculties, which severely restrict the number of works one can analyze in a career. Thus we often

make claims of an age on the back of a few dozen authors, who are deemed to be representative

of one or more strains of Enlightenment thought. By harnessing the growing power of natural

Duhaime 3

language processing techniques, I hope to show how we can use computational methods to create

a more inclusive canon of Enlightenment-era literary history. More particularly, I plan to

demonstrate how we can use machine classification techniques to address the intersections of

scientific and political models across the eighteenth century. Algorithmically identifying the

metaphorical convergence of science and politics in literary works like J. T. Desaguliers's

“Newtonian System, the Best Model of Government” will allow me to track macroscopic trends

in the intellectual development of the Enlightenment, and these trends might prove useful

elaborations of extant literary histories of the period. In the end, then, my methods list evokes the

quantitative spirit that much of the eighteenth century celebrated and denigrated in turn, in the

hopes that such methods can help bring us closer to an adequate understanding of the age.

Duhaime 4

I. Primary Departmental List: Restoration and Eighteenth Century

John Dryden: “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy” (1668)

The Conquest of Granada Part I (1670)

“Absalom and Achitophel” (1681)

“Mac Flecknoe” (1682)

“Religio Laici” (1682)

“To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” (1684)

“To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew” (1686)

“A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” (1687)

“Alexander’s Feast” (1697)

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: “A Satyr Against Mankind” (~1674)

“Letter from Artemisia in Town to Chloe in the Country” (~1675)

Aphra Behn: “The Disappointment” (1680)

Oroonoko (1688)

William Wycherley: The Country Wife (1675)

Sir George Etherege: The Man of Mode (1676)

John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)

Thomas Otway: Venice Preserv'd (1682)

John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

William Congreve: The Way of the World (1700)

Nicholas Rowe: The Fair Penitent (1703)

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: “The Spleen” (1701)

“A Sigh” (1703)

“Upon the Hurricane” (1704)

“The Agreeable” (1712?)

“A Nocturnal Reverie” (1713)

“To the Nightingale” (1713)

Jonathan Swift: A Tale of a Tub (1704)

“A Description of the Morning” [urban georgic] (1709)

“A Description of a City Shower” (1710)

“A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General” (~1722)

Duhaime 5

“Stella's Birthday” (1719-1727)

Gulliver's Travels (1726)

“A Modest Proposal” (1729)

“The Lady's Dressing Room” (1732)

“A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1734)

“Verses Occassioned on the Death of Dr. Swift” (1738)

George Farquhar: The Beaux' Stratagem (1707)

Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: Selections from The Tatler (1709-1710)

Selections from The Spectator (1711-1712)

John Gay: Trivia [Book II] (1716)

The Beggar's Opera (1728)

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: “The Small Pox” (~1716)

“Epistle from Arthur Gray the Footman” (1747) [1721]

“The Lover: A Ballad” (1747) [~1721-5]

“Verses Addressed to the Imitator of Horace” (1733)

“Verses on Self-Murder” (1736)

“An Epistle to Lord Bathurst” (1748)

“A Hymn to the Moon” (1750)

Alexander Pope: “An Essay on Criticism” (1711)

“The Rape of the Lock” (1712)

“Eloisa to Abelard” (1717)

“Epistles to Several Persons” (1731-1735)

“An Essay on Man” (1732-1734)

“Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735)

Susanna Centlivre: A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1717)

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719)

Moll Flanders (1722)

John Dyer: “Grongar Hill” (1726)

George Lillo: The London Merchant (1731)

Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740)

Henry Fielding: Shamela (1741)

Joseph Andrews (1742)

Duhaime 6

Tom Jones (1749)

Thomas Gray: “Sonnet on the Death of Richard West” (1742)

“Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1742)

“Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” (1747)

“Ode on the Spring” (1748)

“Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751)

“The Progress of Poesy” (1757)

“The Bard, A Pindaric Ode” (1757)

William Collins: “Ode on the Poetical Character” (1747)

“Ode to Evening” (1747)

“Ode to Liberty” (1747)

“The Passions, An Ode for Music” (1747)

Mary Leapor: “Dorinda at Her Glass” (1748)

“An Epistle to a Lady” (1748)

“The Enquiry” (1748)

“Man the Monarch” (1751)

“An Epistle to Artemesia, on Fame” (1751)

“Crumble Hall” (1751)

Samuel Johnson: “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749)

“Rambler 60” (1750)

Rasselas (1759)

“Preface to the Plays of William Shakespeare” (1767)

Lives of Savage, Milton, Collins (1779-1781)

Eliza Heywood: Betsy Thoughtless (1751)

David Hume: Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740)

“Of the Standard of Taste” (1757)

“The Natural History of Religion” (1757)

Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry (1757)

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Christopher Smart: “Song to David” (1759-1760)

“Jubilate Agno” (1759-1763)

Duhaime 7

“On a Bed of Guernsey Lilies” (1763)

Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy (1759-1767)

Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Tobias Smollett: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)

Anna Letitia Barbauld: “Corsica” (1773)

“A Summer Evening's Meditation” (1773)

“To Mr. Coleridge” (1799)

“To Mr. Barbauld” (1825)

“The Rights of Woman” (1825)

“To a Little Invisible Being Who Is Expected Soon to Become Visible” (1825)

Oliver Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer (1773)

“The Deserted Village” (1770)

Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The School for Scandal (1777)

Frances Burney: Evelina (1778)

George Crabbe: The Village [Book I] (1783)

Robert Burns: “To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest, with the Plow” (1785)

“The Vision” (1786)

“To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church” (1786)

“Holy Willie's Prayer” (1789)

“Tam o' Shanter” (1793)

William Cowper: “The Task” (1785)

“Yardley Oak” (1791)

“On the Ice Islands Seen Floating in the Germanic Ocean” (1803-1804)

“The Cast-Away” (1803-1804)

Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1790)

William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793)

Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794)

James Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility (1811)

II. Supplemental List: Natural Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century Literature

Duhaime 8

Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan (1651)

Robert Hooke: Micrographia (1665)

Margaret Cavendish: Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666)

The Blazing World (1668)

Thomas Sprat: History of the Royal Society (1667)

Molière: Le malade imaginaire (1673)

Thomas Sydenham: Medical Observations (1676)

Thomas Shadwell: The Virtuoso (1676)

Bernard de Fontenelle: Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686)

John Locke: Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689)

Samuel Garth: The Dispensary (1699)

Daniel Defoe: The Storm (1704)

Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

Isaac Newton: Optics (1704)

Bernard Mandeville: Treatise on Hypochondria (1711)

John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, John Gay: Three Hours After Marriage (1717)

John Desaguliers: “Newtonian System, the Best Model of Government” (1728)

George Cheyne: The English Malady (1733)

Mark Akenside: The Pleasures of Imagination (1744)

Voltaire: Micromégas and other Tales (1752)

Laurence Sterne (?): The Life and Opinions of Jeremiah Kunastrokius, Doctor of Physic (1760)

Tobias Smollett: The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760);

Adventures of an Atom (1769)

Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

History of the Natural World (1774)

Survey of Experimental Philosophy (1776)

Denis Diderot: D’Alembert’s Dream (1769)

William Godwin: St. Leon (1799)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faustus (1808)

Elective Affinities (1809)

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)

Duhaime 9

III. Special Topics: The Politics of Science in the Long Eighteenth Century

Brown, Robert: The Nature of Social Laws: Machiavelli to Mill. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1986.

Cohen, I. Bernard: Interactions: Some Contacts Between the Natural Sciences and the Social

Sciences. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1994.

Cohen, H. Floris: The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry. University of

Chicago, 1994.

Debus, Allen: The Chemical Philosophy. New York: Dover, 1977.

---. The English Paracelsians. New York: Moffa Press, 1965.

---. The French Paracelsians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1979.

Fara, Patricia: Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in

Eighteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Finkelstein, Andrea: Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century

English Economic Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Foucault, Michel: The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Fox, Christopher (et al.): Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1995.

Groenewegen, Peter (ed.): Physicians and Political Economy: Six Studies of the Work of Doctor-

Economists. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Hessen, Boris (et al.): The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution. New York:

Springer, 2009.

Holmes, Richard : The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the

Beauty and Terror of Science. New York: Vintage, 2010.

Holmyard, E. J.: Alchemy. New York: Dover Books, 1990.

Hunter, Michael: Science and Society in Restoration England. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1981.

Jacob, Margaret : The Radical Enlightenment. New Orleans: Cornerstone Publishers, 2006.

Jardine, Lisa: Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution. New York: Anchor Books,

Duhaime 10

1999.

Kuhn, Thomas: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1962.

Levine, Joseph: Dr. Woodward's Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

---. The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1994.

Lovejoy, Arthur: The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Mayr, Otto: Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe. Baltimore:

The Johns Hopkins Press, 1989.

---. The Origins of Feedback Control. Cambridge: M.I.T. University Press, 1970.

Muri, Allison: The Enlightenment Cyborg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Nicolson, Marjorie: Newton Demands the Muse. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

Nicolson, Marjorie; Rousseau, George: This Long Disease, My Life. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1968.

Poovey, Mary: History of the Modern Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998.

Porter, Roy: Health for Sale: Quackery in England, 1660-1850. Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1989.

Rogers, John: The Matter of Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Schabas, Margaret: The Natural Origins of Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006.

Schabas, Margaret (ed.): Oeconomies in the Age of Newton. Annual Supplement to Volume 35 of

History of Political Economy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Shapin, Steve; Schaffer, Simon: Leviathan and the Air Pump. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2011.

Westfall, Richard: Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1958.

Yates, Frances: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1991.

---. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. New York: Routledge, 2001.

IV. Methodology: Digital Humanities and Text Analytics

Duhaime 11

Bieber, Douglas: “Representativeness in Corpus Design.” Literary and Linguistic Computing

Vol. 8, No. 4 (1993): 243-257.

Drucker, Johanna: “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities

Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 1 (2011): 1-23.

Fish, Stanley: “What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Horrible Things About It?” in

Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1980.

Gadd, Ian: “The Use and Misuse of Early English Books Online.” Literature Compass Vol. 6

(2009): 680–692.

Gold, Matthew K. (ed): Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2012.

Hirsch, Brett: Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics. Cambridge:

OpenBook, 2012.

Jockers, Matthew: Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Urbana-Champaign:

University of Illinois Press, 2013.

Jockers, Matthew: Text Analysis in R for Students of Literature. New York: Springer,

forthcoming.

Mayer-Schonberger, Viktor; Cukier, Kenneth: Big Data. New York: Harcourt Press, 2013.

Moretti, Franco: Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. New York: Verso,

2007.

Mueller, Martin: “Collaborative Curation of Early Modern plays by undergraduates.”

https://scalablereading.northwestern.edu/ Accessed 10 July 2013.

Perkins, Jacob: Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook. Birmingham: Packt

Publishing, 2010.

Proot, Gordon: “Estimating Editions on the Basis of Survivals” Papers of the Bibliographic

Society of America, Vol. 102, No. 2 (2008): 149-174.

Ramsay, Stephen: Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Urbana-Champaign:

University of Illinois Press, 2011.

Rudman, Joseph: “Authorship Attribution: Statistical and Computational Methods”

Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Vol. 1 (2006): 611-617.

---. “Cherry Picking in Nontraditional Authorship Attribution Studies” Chance,

Vol. 16, No. 2 (2003): 25.

Duhaime 12

---. “Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution Studies in Eighteenth-Century

Literature: Stylistics, Statistics, and the Computer” http://computerphilologie.uni-

muenchen.de/jg02/rudman.html Accessed July 1 2013

Schreibman, Susan; Siemens, Ray; Unsworth, John (eds.): A Companion to Digital Humanities.

Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Siemens, Ray; Schreibman, Susan (eds.): A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Oxford:

Blackwell, 2008.

Silver, Nate: The Signal and the Noise. New York: Penguin Press, 2012.

Tufte, Edward: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics

Press, 2001.

Wickham, Hadley: Ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. New York: Springer, 2010.