Making Waste : Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

"This brief book on an unlikely topic is packed with insights. By focusing on 'waste,' Gee has found an original way to look at the literature of the Restoration and early 18th century... Best of all, she always writes clearly, making her book accessible even to beginners."--Choice "For a book concerned largely with filth, Making Waste is stylistically pristine. Gee writes with an elegance and fluency that buoys her thinking from one topic to the next... Rarely does criticism read so well."--Jonathan Kramnick, Studies in English Literature "Dazzling in its range of reference and implications, Making Waste springs to life like Swift's gaudy tulips, mixing memory and desire like lilacs bred out of the dead land, and inviting us to feast on the rich literary and theoretical harvest Ms. Gee has gleaned from the leftover."--Lynn Festa, Scriblerian