The uncanny fear of losing one's eyes.. Untitled engraving by George Woodward, 1797.. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.. The assumption tacitly Freudi-an underlying all t
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Figure 1.2 The uncanny fear of losing one's eyes Untitled engraving by George Woodward, 1797 Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Obviously, as my subtitle suggests, I think we can The assumption (tacitly Freudi-an) underlying all the essays in this volume is not simply that the eighteenth century is "uncanny"—though that may be true—but that the eighteenth century
in a sense "invented the uncanny": that the very psychic and cultural transforma-tions that led to the subsequent glorification of the period as an age of reason or enlightenment—the aggressively rationalist imperatives of the epoch—also pro-duced, like a kind of toxic side effect, a new human experience of strangeness, anxiety, bafflement, and intellectual impasse The distinctively eighteenth-century