About
Biography
Clement Hawes holds a joint position in History and English. He specializes in British literature and history 1660-1800, writing broadly about the problematic of periodizing the Enlightenment and more closely about such authors as Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. One of his consistent interests has been in the literature of enthusiasm harking back to the English Revolution, which produced such unprecedented writers as the "Ranter" Abiezer Coppe. Another preoccupation has been with the cultural dynamics of early empire: the making of an imperial Britishness as it informs historical narrative and explanation. Recently he has expanded on a personal liking for travel by studying early modern travelogues. This has led to a renewed concern with changing conception of sovereignty from the events in 1649, a revolutionary claim to popular sovereignty, to the Lockean underwriting of colonial sovereignty over indigenous land and peoples. Professor Hawes was educated at Yale University (Ph.D., English literature, 1986) and Hendrix College (B.A., English Literature, 1978). His publications include, in addition to numerous articles, the two monographsMania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge,1996) and The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (2005); and the three edited volumes Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment (St. Martin's, 1999), Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), and Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters (Bucknell, 2008), coedited with Kumkum Chatterjee. Among his works in progress is a monograph about geographical scale as a mode of inquiry and justification in the long eighteenth century. He also coedited, along with Robert Caserio, The Cambridge History of the English Novel.
Affiliation(s)
Field(s) of Study
- Restoration and eighteenth-century satire
- Early modern novel
- Eighteenth-century visual caricature
- 'Madness' and early modern political rhetoric
- Travel, travelogues, and sovereignty
- Early imperialism and resistance
- The Enlightenment
