Introduction. What is a project? -- Improvement's genre : Andrew Yarranton and the rhetoric of projection -- Company in paper : Aaron Hill's beech oil bust -- Projects beyond words : undertaking fen drainage -- Inheriting the future : georgic's projecting strain -- Swift's solar gourds and the antiproject tradition -- Coda. Imaginary debris in Defoe's new forest
Summary
The Wreckage of Intentions offers a comprehensive account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century projects--concrete yet incomplete efforts to advance British society during a period defined by revolutions in finance and agriculture, the rise of experimental science, and the establishment of constitutional monarchy