A monster with a face between his feet: The corporeal culture of farce in early eighteenth-century Britain.

In the early eighteenth century, Britain was awash with questions of what counted as art, how to value it, and whose evaluations of it mattered. Philosophical aesthetics was just coming into being under the new empiricist regimes of experiential knowledge and sense perception, and the Collier controversy raged. During these decades, a new kind of representation made its way into the national urban popular consciousness. This dissertation investigates the eighteenth century concept of farce in a variety of visual, performative, and textual materials. I argue that farce emerges as a dominant conceptual category for the eighteenth century, but one that is significantly fraught with taxonomical angst; its instabilities are productive sites for the study of categorical thought, aesthetic valuation, and corporeal normativity. The discourse of farce is uniquely suited to this kind of inquiry because it uses the pleasures and problematics of human embodiment to both galvanize and explode distinctions between good and bad art. Farcical entertainments, enjoyed by patricians and plebians alike, become central to the emerging aesthetic vocabularies taught in the public sphere. The first chapter, The Body of Farce, argues that farce is inseparable from the body somehow deformed, diseased, less-than-human. The second chapter, 'Dextrously Counterfeiting': Farce, Fraud, and the Case of Mary Toft, examines a 1726 hoax that took on significance through the rhetoric of a single farcically reproductive body. In the third chapter, The Farcical (An)Aesthetic, I analyze play prefaces and other texts that shape a surprisingly coherent theory of farce as bad mimesis. The fourth and fifth chapters analyze a variety of popular stage farces. In the fourth, Tales that Dead Men Tell, I examine the patterns of excessive embodiment they exhibit, and in the fifth, The Aesthetic Consciousness of Farce, I turn to the sites at which farce self-consciously deploys language, creativity, authorship, and performance. Finally, I close the dissertation with a coda in which I look briefly at the farcical imperative in the novel.Ph.D.Communication and the ArtsComparative literatureEnglish literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern literatureTheaterUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125385/2/3192660.pd