The Wreckage of Intentions

"In his fine new book, [Alff] recovers a rich history of social, economic and agricultural improvement ventures . . . There was a time when this sort of book would have arrived at bleak conclusions about technocratic control and domination. Alff, in contrast, prefers to dwell on possibility . . . Most projects fail, but some succeed, and a portion of the successes are utterly disastrous for the Earth and human well-being. David Alff rebalances the scales, but academic debate, itself an abiding project will surely continue." (Times Literary Supplement) "[A] superb first book . . . The combination of superb close reading and impressive scholarly research, of historical depth and literary power, features in every elegant and gripping chapter . . . Wreckage of Intentions makes a compelling argument about the power of paying attention to the debris of the past, of the might-have-beens before they were killed off. The Wreckage of Intentions makes us question the historical ground we're standing on." (Studies in English Literature 1500-1900) "Alff's ambitious study recovers a genre—the project—whose permeable boundaries have made it difficult for previous literary critics not only to delimit their analytic object but also to measure a project's influence. The importance of Alff's book is how it furthers our definition of what, precisely, imagination means during the civic-minded eighteenth century, before imagination is reconceived by Romantic poets to mean a subjectively creative faculty of the individual mind." (Eighteenth-Century Studies) "[A]n impressive analysis of an overlooked body of work, full of insights, balanced judgements and sensitive readings about project literature, with much to say about economics, histories and the role of imagination in shaping the future. Virginia Woolf observed that words 'hate making money', and while plans for improvement rarely produce great literature, the clarity of Alff 's sentences, his well-judged phrases and striking expressions make this a project so elegantly written it is unlikely to suffer the waste-basket fate of so many of the texts it surveys." (Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies) "Elegantly organized and incisive in its analysis, The Wreckage of Intentions opens up the narrative cage that our stories of progress and modernization have locked us into. David Alff's close reading of tracts, pamphlets, and treatises that propose various improvements, from insurance to agriculture, enables us to understand the ways in which future possibility and change were imagined in early modern Britain." (Wolfram Schmidgen, Washington University in St. Louis)