Thursday, February 28, 2008

A Plurality of Corresponding Parts

"Literary Scholarship and Popular History" Lionel Gossman. Eighteenth Century Studies 7, 2 (1973) p 134.

"Indeed, a good case can be made for a metaphoric model allowing for the totality to be conceived as a plurality of corresponding parts, rather than a strongly unified whole in which the parts are hierarchically subordinated and subsumed"

What does it mean to say a British peasant lived in the eighteenth century rather than the seventeenth? Does that even make sense?