The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge

John Barrell's writings on the history and politics of culture in eighteenth-century Britain address an unusually wide range of cultural practices--painting, sculpture, poetry, the law, the division of labor. In The Birth of Pandora, Barrell discusses these in terms of the major discursive conflicts of the century and in relation to such issues as sexuality, the body and representation, and the distinction between public and private.
Barrell's topics here range from Thomas Rowlandson's comic representations of the rural poor to a sentence of interminable length in a text by William Collins; from the ability to understand the composition of landscape as a metaphor for the ability to understand the public interest to the proper way of representing Venus, image of all that the citizen should both reject and admire. In a piece appearing here for the first time, Barrell examines the famous treason trials of 1794 and the conflict they reveal between written legal codes and the common law; in the long title essay, also new to this volume, he brilliantly discusses the problems raised that the representation of the body by the theory of the division of labor, by the Western discovery of Hindu art, and the question of equal difference in the context of the French Revolution.
The individual chapters in The Birth of Pandora "continually return to one question in particular," notes Barrell, " a question about the nature of knowledge and of representation in a society which is (or which is represented as) a distinctively commercial one."
The Birth of Pandora will be of value to historians, literary critics, historians of art, and all those with an interest in cultural history and cultural studies.

JOHN BARRELL