Prof. Dr. Jacob Sider Jost

Geburtsjahr: 1983

Studium:
Goshen College, B.A. in English and German, 1999-2002
St. John’s College, Oxford, B.A. in English 2002-2004
Harvard University, PhD in English, 2005-2011

Wissenschaftliche Anstellungen bzw. Tätigkeiten:

Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, 2011-2014
Assistant and Associate Professor of English, Dickinson College, 2011-2021

The History of Life-Writing in Enlightenment Britain

Life-writing played a major role in eighteenth-century British culture, from inexpensive pamphlets narrating the adventures of notorious criminals to prestigious canon-making works such as Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1779-81). At IZEA I will begin a study that examines individual texts, authors, and genres of life-writing, proceeding in rough chronological order from Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1716-18) to The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789). Four major through lines will link these case studies: first, I discuss life-writing as a“non-fictional” mode—and thus as part of eighteenth-century debates about the nature of truth and knowledge. Second, I show how life-writing texts based on travel were crucial to the encounter between Britain and the non-British spaces of continental Europe, the Islamic world, and the Atlantic world of Africa and the Americas. Third, I show how life-writing texts such as conversion narratives and skeptical autobiographies witness to both the centrality and the fragilization of religious belief in the period. Finally, I show how life-writing is part of the efflorescence of new print genres, such as the magazine and the encyclopedia, dedicated to the wider diffusion of knowledge.

Selbständige Schriften

Interest and Connection in the Eighteenth Century: Hervey, Johnson, Smith, Equiano, University of Virginia Press, 2020

Prose Immortality, 1711-1819, University of Virginia Press, 2015.

Beiträge in Zeitschriften und Sammelbänden

“The Worldliness of Edward Young and the Metaphorics of Georgian Patronage” for a special issue in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Mark Pedreira (Bucknell University Press, 2021)

“Party Politics in Characteristics,” in Shaping Enlightenment Politics: The Political and Social Impacts of the First and Third Earls of Shaftesbury, ed. Patrick Müller (Peter Lang, 2018), 135-147.

“The Interest of Crusoe,” Essays in Criticism 66:3, 301-19 (July 2016)

“The Gentleman’s Magazine, Samuel Johnson, and the Symbolic Economy of Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” Review of English Studies 66:277, 915-35 (November 2015)

“David Hume, History Painter” ELH 81:1, 143-65 (Spring 2014)

Jacob Sider Jost and John Immerwahr, “Hume the Sociable Iconoclast: The Case of Four Dissertations” The European Legacy 18:5, 603-18 (July 2013)

“From Initiate to Individual: Grand Tour Narrative and Lejeunian Autobiography” Lifewriting Annual 3:95-118 (October 2012), ed. Tom Smith

“The Afterlife and The Spectator” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 51:3, 605-24 (Summer 2011)

“Hume’s Four Philosophers: Recasting the Treatise of Human Nature” Modern Intellectual History 6:1, 1-25 (April 2009)