The Salvaging Disposition: Waste and the Novel Form
My book-in-progress, The Salvaging Disposition: Waste and the Novel Form, offers a new account of the rise of the modern novel in eighteenth-century England, arguing that the novel developed in tandem with emergent thinking about waste. The Salvaging Disposition locates the advent of a modern sense of waste in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Baconian science and European colonialism began to conceive of the New World as an untapped spring of inexhaustible resources. As a part of this ideology of infinite growth, this period also witnessed a surge of interest in byproduct waste as a site of potential value. The book follows this salvaging impulse in eighteenth-century fiction. Rather than simply documenting the presence of waste materials in literary texts, The Salvaging Disposition demonstrates that the novel itself developed as a form for managing the waste generated by a rapidly shifting economy.