I work on the literature and culture of the eighteenth century, with emphasis on Great Britain and a secondary focus on France. My interests are the rise and theory of the novel, the modern humanities crisis, and the intellectual history of the Enlightenment. I focus on the fraught continuities between the eighteenth century and modernity — those long trends that have slowly brought us to where we are — including the emergence of prose fiction as a prominent literary form, the history of secularization, the rise of scientific racism and sexism, and the separation between the humanities and the sciences. I am also interested in the discontinuities between life in eighteenth-century Europe and in modern Western societies. Eighteenth-century culture can be strange and even alienating, and its oddities bring into focus the impact of three centuries of history, for the better and for the worse.
My first book, Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel (Palgrave, 2016), is a study of the social relevance of prose fiction. Eighteenth-century novelists from Henry Fielding to Jane Austen worked hard to defend novels as a source not only of pleasure but of knowledge, developing sophisticated arguments to show that fiction can tell the truth about real life. Their theories of the novel, I argue, were responding to a certain suspicion of fiction that became dominant with the rise of the empirical sciences. In turn, the eighteenth-century clash between novelists and their critics anticipated, in content and purpose, the conflicts that currently set the humanities against their critics. For a sample review click here.
My second book, provisionally entitled The Enlightenment Crisis of Values, will be the first full-length study of Enlightenment relativism. For many observers at the time, the secular tendencies of eighteenth-century culture were leading in dangerous directions. Pursued to their logical end, they argued, they would leave us with a universe made of indifferent atoms, where humans were no more special than sticks and stones, and where there would be no difference between right and wrong or beautiful and ugly. A few radical figures, such as the exile Alberto Radicati and John, Lord Hervey, embraced this view, claiming that actions only acquire valence in relation to local customs, and that there is nothing ultimately wrong about killing one’s neighbor or feasting on human flesh. For the most part, however, authors in both Britain and France — men and women, philosophers and litterateurs, Christians and skeptics — tried to prevent this descent into radical relativism. By secularizing the distinction between right and wrong or beautiful and ugly, however, they simultaneously refashioned old and more nefarious distinctions — between men and women and between Europeans and a range of others variously described as “Barbarians” or “savages.” Responses to relativism, the book shows, shaped the Enlightenment’s double legacy as the source of values we remain invested in (such as secular ethics and universal human entitlements) and of racial and gender prejudices that, recast in a secular idiom, continue to shape modern societies.
Born and raised in Brazil, I hold an M.A. in English Literary Studies from the University of São Paulo (2006) and a PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University (2015). (My surname, should you decide to use it, is pronounced “My Olly,” but I am comfortable with first names as well.) I have articles and book reviews in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Modern Intellectual History, SEL– Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, The Shandean, The Scriblerian, Literature Compass, and Digital Defoe. I also have an extensive output as an English–Portuguese translator, having prepared among many others the first Brazilian edition of Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on topics including secularism, the rise of the British novel, literature and ethics, the Enlightenment, Jane Austen, and representations of the self. Other than Austen and the eighteenth-century usual suspects, I am a fan of Elizabeth Gaskell, Machado de Assis, William Somerset Maugham, Jorge Luis Borges, and Donald Duck.
Contact
- office: Turlington Hall 4338
- voice: (352) 294-2841
- fax: (352) 392-0860
- Professor Maioli’s website
- email: <rmaiolidossantos@ufl.edu>