{"product_id":"making-waste-by-sophie-gee-9780691139845","title":"Making Waste","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhy was eighteenth-century English culture so fascinated with the things its society discarded? Why did Restoration and Augustan writers such as Milton, Dryden, Swift, and Pope describe, catalogue, and memorialise the waste matter that their social and political worlds wanted to get rid of—from the theological dregs in \u003cem\u003eParadise Lost\u003c\/em\u003e to the excrements in \"The Lady's Dressing Room\" and the corpses of \u003cem\u003eA Journal of the Plague Year\u003c\/em\u003e?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eMaking Waste\u003c\/em\u003e, the first book about refuse and its place in Enlightenment literature and culture, Sophie Gee examines the meaning of waste at the moment when the early modern world was turning modern. Gee explains how English writers used contemporary theological and philosophical texts about unwanted and leftover matter to explore secular, literary relationships between waste and value. She finds that, in the eighteenth century, waste was as culturally valuable as it was practically worthless—and that waste paradoxically revealed the things that the culture cherished most.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe surprising central insight of \u003cem\u003eMaking Waste\u003c\/em\u003e is that the creation of value always generates waste. Waste is therefore a sign—though a perverse one—that value and meaning have been made. Even when it appears to symbolise civic, economic, and political failure, waste is in fact restorative, a sign of cultural invigoration and imaginative abundance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eChallenging the conventional association of Enlightenment culture with political and social improvement, and scientific and commercial progress, \u003cem\u003eMaking Waste\u003c\/em\u003e has important insights for cultural and intellectual history as well as literary studies.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47431525007596,"sku":"9780691139845","price":89.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9780691139845.jpg?v=1774557623","url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/products\/making-waste-by-sophie-gee-9780691139845","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}