Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Realignment of the Repertoire, 1780-1800

Daniel O Quinn's Corrosive Solace argues that the loss of the American colonies led to a complex reorganization in sociability and politics in the British metropole, which has had long-lasting effects on British national and imperial culture. He examines how the analysis of feeling or affect can be deployed to address the inchoate causal relation between historical events and their mediation. He also tracks how the loss of the American War forced Britons to refashion the repertoire of cultural signs and social dispositions that had subtended its first empire in the Atlantic world in a way more suited to its emergent empire in South Asia.

Format: Hardback
Length: 376 pages
Publication date: 11 October 2022
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Daniel O. Quinn contends in his book Corrosive Solace that the loss of the American colonies in the 18th century brought about a significant transformation in British sociability and politics, which had far-reaching effects on British national and imperial culture. He explores how the analysis of feeling or affect can be employed to address the complex causal relationship between historical events and their mediation. The book's objectives are twofold: first, to outline the methodologies necessary for dealing with the affective recognition of historical crisis; and second, to make the historically familiar strange again, thereby highlighting key avenues for discussion that have remained dormant. Both of these objectives hinge on recognition: How do we theorize the implicit affective recognition of crisis in a distant historical moment? And how do we recognize what we, in our present moment, cannot discern? Corrosive Solace addresses this complex cultural reorientation by focusing less on new cultural products and more on the theoretical and historical problems posed by examining the transformation of old plays and modes of performance. These old plays, such as Shakespeare, post-Restoration comedy, and she-tragedy, were a vital part of the cultural patrimony, and much of O Quinn's analysis revolves around how tradition was recovered and redirected to meet urgent social and political needs. Throughout Corrosive Solace, he traces how the loss of the American War compelled Britons to reshape the repertoire of cultural signs and social dispositions that had supported their first empire in the Atlantic world in a manner more suited to their emerging empire in South Asia.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781512823110