Performing Factuality in John Dunton’s Athenian Cosmos

Starting from the fundamental epistemological shifts characterising the seventeenth century, this book explores the re-conceptualization of the notion of truth and asks how factuality, along with other truth-carrying discourses, was appropriated by a range of texts to generate credibility. Tracing the numerous ways in which authors such as John Dunton, Charles Gildon, François Perreaud, Thomas Brown, or Joseph Addison and Richard Steele deliberately toyed with the truth effects generated by their participation in discourses such as proto-science, medicine, philosophy, law and religion, this monograph argues that truth is not a monolithic constant. Performing Factuality proposes that truth is protean, ever-emerging from a simultaneously conventionalised yet constantly mutating set of practices, something which not simply is but something which is actively done. This performative dimension finds one of its most powerful examples in the case of Dunton and his handful of collaborators working on the Athenian Mercury, which set the tone in periodical publication for decades if not centuries to come. Jaroslaw Jasenowski is an independent scholar affiliated with the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg, Germany. His research interests include Documentary and Mockumentary Film, Epistolary Culture, Holocaust Studies, Victorian Popular Culture and Smell Studies. Previous publications include the co-authored article “Dragging out the Truth: Restoration Periodicals and the Textual Creation of Gendered Identities” in Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 79 (2019), the co-edited Special Issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies on “Restoration Epistolarity”, as well as other articles in progress.