Ruined by Design Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility [Paperback]

By examining the motif of ruination in a variety of late-eighteenth-century domains, this book portrays the moral aesthetic of the culture of sensibility in Europe, particularly its negotiation of the demands of tradition and pragmatism alongside utopian longings for authenticity, natural goodness, self-governance, mutual transparency, and instantaneous kinship. This book argues that the rhetoric of ruins lends a distinctive shape to the architecture and literature of the time and requires the novel to adjust notions of authorship and narrative to accommodate the prevailing aesthetic. Just as architects of eighteenth-century follies pretend to have discovered authentic ruins, novelists within the culture of sensibility also build purposely fragmented texts and disguise their authorship, invoking highly artificial means of simulating nature. The cultural pursuit of human ruin, however, leads to hypocritical and sadistic extremes that put an end to the characteristic ambivalence of sensibility and its unusual structures.

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Sensibility and its Discontents

Chapter One: Redeeming Ruin

Chapter Two: The Anatomy of Follies

Chapter Three: Reading Ruin

Chapter Four: Constructing Human Ruin

Afterword: The Luxuries of Distress

Notes

Index

2009 Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award

Ruined by Design provides a brilliant analysis of the philosophical shift from reason and order toward imagination and feeling in both landscape innovations and literary experimentation during the eighteenth century.

-Laurie Kaplan, George Washington University

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