This study revises a dominant narrative of the eighteenth-century, in which a secular modernity emerges in opposition to religious belief. It argues that a major challenge for writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and for English subjects generally, was to grasp the object world--including the modern technological object--in terms of its spiritual potential. I identify disputes around the liturgy and common prayer as a source of a folk psychology concerning mental habits conditioned by everyday interactions with devotional and cultural objects. Swift and Defoe therefore confront even paradigmatically modern forms (from trade items to scientific techniques) as a spiritual ecology, a network of new possibilities for practical piety and familiar forms of mental-spiritual illness. Texts like A Tale of a tub (1704) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) renew Reformation ideals for the laity by evaluating technologies for governing a nation of souls. Swift and Defoe's Protestantism thus appears as an active guide to understanding emotions and new experience rather than a static body of doctrine. Current historiography neglects the early modern sense that sectarian objects and rituals not only discipline religious subjects, but also provoke ambivalence and anxiety: Swift's Tale diagnoses Catholic knavery and Puritan hypocrisy as neurotic attempts to extract pleasure from immiserating styles of material praxis. Crusoe, addressed to more radical believers in spaces of trade, sees competent spiritual, scientific and commercial practice on the same plane, as techniques for overcoming fetishistic desires. Swift's orthodoxy of enforced moderation and Defoe's oddly worldly piety represent likeminded formulae for psychic reform, and not--as often alleged--conflicts between sincere belief and political or commercial interests. Gulliver's travels (1726) and A Journal of the plague year (1722) also link mind and governance through different visions of Protestant polity. Swift sees alienation from the national church--figured by a Crusoe or Gulliver--as refusal of common sense and problem solving. Defoe points to religious schism, exemplified by dissenters' exclusion from state church statistics, as a moral and medical failure: the city risks creating selfish citizens who also may overlook data needed to combat the plague. / text

The Long Eighteenth Century was a period in which change was constant and proceeding the Restoration Era; this sense of change continued throughout the era. Charles II created an era in which women were allowed on the theatre stage, and his mistresses accompanied him to court; Charles II set the stage for the proto-feminist ideas of the eighteenth century that would manifest themselves in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. These novels showcase the enlightenment of women and some of their male contemporaries and the beginning struggles of female agency. The eighteenth century was a time in which the separate sphere mentality grew ever stronger within the patriarchal society, and yet, women began to question their subservient place in this society—although this struggle would continue to intensify throughout the nineteenth century and eventually come to fruition in the late nineteenth century.

Проблематика построения стабильного и процветающего государства является одним из основных направлений в общественно-политической и экономической мысли Англии конца XVII в. и первой трети XVIII в. Процесс становления национальных государств сопровождается внутренней рефлексией интеллектуалов, выраженной в построении общественно-политических теорий. Автор работы приходит к выводу, что взгляд Д. Дефо на место монарха в «политическом теле» не расходится с превалирующими среди вигов идеями о «равновесии сил в государственном устройстве» местом и ролью короля и парламента. Функция короля заключается в охране английской свободы и «древней английской конституции». Ограниченная, или парламентская монархия признается Даниэлем Дефо лучшей формой правления применительно к Англии. Основанная на системе противовесов власть венчается королем, который есть отражение идеалов общества. Не претендующий на тираническую власть, он является гарантом «общего блага». «Общее благо» понимается Д. Дефо как система процветания английской нации, где общество разделено на две неравные страты – низший класс и остальные (коммерсанты, интеллектуалы, благородные (титулованное и нетитулованное дворянство) и монарх). Выполнение функций, возложенных на каждую часть «политического тела», ведет нацию к всеобщему благоденствию. / The problem of building a stable and prosperous state is one of the main directions in the socio-political and economic thought of England at the end of the XVII century and the first third of the XVIII century. The process of formation of national states is accompanied by the internal reflection of intellectuals, expressed in the construction of socio-political theories. The author of the work comes to the conclusion that D. Defoe's view of the place of the monarch in the "political body" does not diverge from the ideas prevailing among the Whigs about the "balance of power in the state structure" of the place and role of the king and parliament. The function of the King is to protect English freedom and the "ancient English constitution". The limited or parliamentary monarchy is recognized by Daniel Defoe as the best form of government in relation to England. The power based on the system of counterweights is crowned by the king, who is a reflection of the ideals of society. Not claiming tyrannical power, he is the guarantor of the "common good". The "common good" is understood by D. Defoe as a system of prosperity of the English nation, where society is divided into two unequal strata – the lower class and the rest (merchants, intellectuals, noble (titled and untitled nobility) and the monarch). The fulfillment of the functions assigned to each part of the "political body" leads the nation to universal prosperity.

Ascetic Citizens: Religious Austerity and Political Crisis in Anglo-American Literature, 1681-1799, attends to a number of scenes of voluntary self-restraint in literary, political, and religious writings of the long eighteenth century, scenes that stage, what Alexis de Tocqueville calls, “daily small acts of self-denial” in the service of the nation. Existing studies of asceticism in Anglo-American culture during the period are extremely slim. Ascetic Citizens fills an important gap in the scholarship by re-framing religious practices of seclusion and self-denial as a broadly-defined set of civic practices that permeate the political, religious, and gender discourses of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. This thesis focuses on the transatlantic relevance of the ascetic citizen—a figure whose rhetorical utility derives from its capacity, as a marker of political and religious moderation, to deploy individual practices of religious austerity as a means of suturing extreme political binaries during times of political crisis. My conception of asceticism’s role in Anglo-American society is informed by an understanding of ascetic citizenship as a cluster of concepts and cultural practices linking the ascetic’s focus on bodily control to republican theories of political subjectivity. The notion that political membership presupposes a renunciation of personal liberties on the part of the individual citizen represents one of the key assumptions of ascetic citizenship. The future guarantee of individual political rights is ensured by present renunciations of self-interest. As such, the ascetic citizen functions according to the same economy by which the religious ascetic’s right to future eternal reward is ensured by present acts of pious self-abnegation. That is to say, republican political liberty is enabled by what we might call an ascetic prerequisite in which the voluntary self-sacrifice of civic rights guarantees the state’s protection of such rights from the infringements of one’s neighbour. While the abstemious nature of ascetic practice implies efficiency grounded in economic frugality, bodily self-restraint, and physical isolation, the ascetic citizen functions as the sanctioned perversion of a normative devotional practice that circumvents the division between profane self-interest and sacred disinterestedness. The relevance of ascetic citizenship to political culture is its political fluidity, its potential to exceed the ideological functions of the dominant culture while revealing the tension that exists between endorsement of, and dissent from, the civic norm. Counter-intuitively, the ascetic citizen’s practice is marked by a celebration of moderation, of the via media. Forging a space at the threshold between endorsement/dissent, the ascetic citizen maps the dialectic movement of cultural extremism, forging a rhetorically useful site of ascetic deferral characterized by the subject’s ascetic withdrawal from making critical decisions. Ascetic Citizens provides a detailed investigation of how eighteenth-century Anglo-American authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Hannah Webster Foster, and Charles Brockden Brown conceive of individual subjectivity as it exists in the pause or retired moment between competing political orders.

Esta tese apresenta um estudo sobre a criação literária de Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoé, escrita em 1719. Seu estatuto de obra clássica com inúmeras adaptações inserea numa cadeia discursiva de porte extraordinário, na qual o personagem revela-se um mito. O presente estudo, alicerçado no conceito de compreensão criadora de Mikhail Bakhtin, buscou uma ampliação de sentidos na análise do objeto empírico, com os seguintes objetivos: questionar um possível uso de obras clássicas como fetiches, o esvaziamento de seus sentidos e averiguar a hipótese de Robinson Crusoé ser um protótipo do homem como ser de linguagem, metalinguístico. O levantamento de tal hipótese foi possível pela concepção da dialogia da linguagem, entendida no conceito do Círculo de Bakhtin. A metodologia utilizada constou de sucessivas leituras da obra em questão, seleção de atos de linguagem expressos pelo personagem e sua categorização. A partir daí foram buscadas as representações do Outro nos enunciados de Robinson durante o período de seu total isolamento na ilha em que naufragou; a procura foi norteada pelo conceito da constituição dialógica da palavra, dado que no contexto de enunciação não havia presença real de interlocutores. Como forma de enfatizar o caráter dialógico da linguagem, realizou-se, também, uma seleção de marcas do Outro no relato autobiográfico do personagem (a obra em seu todo), algumas delas explicitamente visualizadas. As reflexões de diferentes autores acham-se presentes neste estudo: Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, Jeanne Marie Gagnebin, Ivonne Bordelois, Zygmunt Bauman, Dominique Maingueneau, Fernando Savater, David Olson, George Steiner. Os resultados do trabalho atestam a propriedade da hipótese formulada e demonstram a força da linguagem na vida humana, confirmando a necessidade de valorização da palavra em meio à crise cultural presente na modernidade líquida. / The following thesis presents a study on Daniel Defoes literary creation Robinson Crusoe, written in 1719. Its status as a literary classic that has been the subject of endless adaptations gives Robinson Crusoe an extraordinary position in the discursive chain, revealing the character as a myth. The present study, based on Mikhail Bakhtins concept of creative understanding, sought to amplify the meanings in the analysis of its empirical object, with the following aims: to question the possible use of classic works as fetishes, to empty its meanings and to investigate the hypothesis of Robinson Crusoe being a prototype of man as a being of language, a metalinguistic being. This hypothesis was enabled by the concept of the dialogism of language, understood within the concept of Bakhtins Circle. The methodology employed consisted of successive readings of the work, the selection of acts of language expressed by the character, and their classification into categories. From this basis, the representations of the Other in Robinsons enunciations during his period of total isolation on the island where he was shipwrecked were sought; the search was guided by the concept of the dialogic constitution of speech, since within the context of the enunciation there were no actual conversational partners present. To stress the dialogic character of language, a selection was also made of the signs of the Other in the characters autobiographical account (the work as a whole), some of which were explicitly visualized. The reflections of different authors are present in this study: Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, Jeanne Marie Gagnebin, Ivonne Bordelois, Zygmunt Bauman, Dominique Maingueneau, Fernando Savater, David Olson, and George Steiner. The results of this study confirm the correctness of the hypothesis proposed and demonstrate the strength of language in human life, supporting the need to value speech in the midst of the cultural crisis of liquid modernity.

Ascetic Citizens: Religious Austerity and Political Crisis in Anglo-American Literature, 1681-1799, attends to a number of scenes of voluntary self-restraint in literary, political, and religious writings of the long eighteenth century, scenes that stage, what Alexis de Tocqueville calls, “daily small acts of self-denial” in the service of the nation. Existing studies of asceticism in Anglo-American culture during the period are extremely slim. Ascetic Citizens fills an important gap in the scholarship by re-framing religious practices of seclusion and self-denial as a broadly-defined set of civic practices that permeate the political, religious, and gender discourses of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. This thesis focuses on the transatlantic relevance of the ascetic citizen—a figure whose rhetorical utility derives from its capacity, as a marker of political and religious moderation, to deploy individual practices of religious austerity as a means of suturing extreme political binaries during times of political crisis. My conception of asceticism’s role in Anglo-American society is informed by an understanding of ascetic citizenship as a cluster of concepts and cultural practices linking the ascetic’s focus on bodily control to republican theories of political subjectivity. The notion that political membership presupposes a renunciation of personal liberties on the part of the individual citizen represents one of the key assumptions of ascetic citizenship. The future guarantee of individual political rights is ensured by present renunciations of self-interest. As such, the ascetic citizen functions according to the same economy by which the religious ascetic’s right to future eternal reward is ensured by present acts of pious self-abnegation. That is to say, republican political liberty is enabled by what we might call an ascetic prerequisite in which the voluntary self-sacrifice of civic rights guarantees the state’s protection of such rights from the infringements of one’s neighbour. While the abstemious nature of ascetic practice implies efficiency grounded in economic frugality, bodily self-restraint, and physical isolation, the ascetic citizen functions as the sanctioned perversion of a normative devotional practice that circumvents the division between profane self-interest and sacred disinterestedness. The relevance of ascetic citizenship to political culture is its political fluidity, its potential to exceed the ideological functions of the dominant culture while revealing the tension that exists between endorsement of, and dissent from, the civic norm. Counter-intuitively, the ascetic citizen’s practice is marked by a celebration of moderation, of the via media. Forging a space at the threshold between endorsement/dissent, the ascetic citizen maps the dialectic movement of cultural extremism, forging a rhetorically useful site of ascetic deferral characterized by the subject’s ascetic withdrawal from making critical decisions. Ascetic Citizens provides a detailed investigation of how eighteenth-century Anglo-American authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Hannah Webster Foster, and Charles Brockden Brown conceive of individual subjectivity as it exists in the pause or retired moment between competing political orders.

O escritor ganhador do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura John Maxwell Coetzee publicou Foe em 1987. Ao lermos esse romance, somos imediatamente levados à ilha de Robinson Crusoe - e, conseqüentemente, ao mundo ficcional de Daniel Defoe. O objetivo deste trabalho é tomar a leitura da obra Foe, de Coetzee, como um comentário sobre a estética de construção de um romance. Esta é uma dissertação argumentativa, dividida em três partes. O primeiro capítulo introduz o autor e contextualiza as discussões sobre a Escrita, a História e a Ficção. O segundo capítulo traz o suporte teórico, que consiste na apresentação das idéias de Linda Hutcheon sobre Historiografia e nas conceitualizações sobre Meta-ficção, de Patricia Waugh. Ambas conduzem à referência poética ao Anjo da História feita por Walter Benjamin. A terceira parte comenta o romance Foe e o insere no conjunto da obra de Coetzee, apontando elementos compartilhados com os outros romances do autor. Na conclusão, espero validar a tese proposta, de que Foe é realmente um romance auto-reflexivo que reflete as condições de produção de sua época. / Nobel prize winner John Maxwell Coetzee published Foe in 1987. When reading that novel, we are taken back to Robinson Crusoe’s island – and, consequently, to the world of Daniel Defoe’s fiction. The aim of this work is to undertake the reading of Coetzee’s Foe as a study on the aesthetics of novelmaking. This is an argumentative thesis, divided into three parts. Chapter one introduces the author and contextualizes the discussions on Writing, History and Fiction. Chapter two brings the theoretical background, that consists of the presentation of Linda Hutcheon’s ideas about Historiography and Patricia Waugh’s conceptualizations on Metafiction, both of them relating to Walter Benjamin’s poetic reference to the Angel of History. The third part submits an analysis of Foe, and connects this novel with the other works written by Coetzee. In the conclusion, I hope to validate the thesis proposed, that Foe is, ultimately, a self-reflexive novel that reflects the aesthetics of novel making of its own time.

O escritor ganhador do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura John Maxwell Coetzee publicou Foe em 1987. Ao lermos esse romance, somos imediatamente levados à ilha de Robinson Crusoe - e, conseqüentemente, ao mundo ficcional de Daniel Defoe. O objetivo deste trabalho é tomar a leitura da obra Foe, de Coetzee, como um comentário sobre a estética de construção de um romance. Esta é uma dissertação argumentativa, dividida em três partes. O primeiro capítulo introduz o autor e contextualiza as discussões sobre a Escrita, a História e a Ficção. O segundo capítulo traz o suporte teórico, que consiste na apresentação das idéias de Linda Hutcheon sobre Historiografia e nas conceitualizações sobre Meta-ficção, de Patricia Waugh. Ambas conduzem à referência poética ao Anjo da História feita por Walter Benjamin. A terceira parte comenta o romance Foe e o insere no conjunto da obra de Coetzee, apontando elementos compartilhados com os outros romances do autor. Na conclusão, espero validar a tese proposta, de que Foe é realmente um romance auto-reflexivo que reflete as condições de produção de sua época. / Nobel prize winner John Maxwell Coetzee published Foe in 1987. When reading that novel, we are taken back to Robinson Crusoe’s island – and, consequently, to the world of Daniel Defoe’s fiction. The aim of this work is to undertake the reading of Coetzee’s Foe as a study on the aesthetics of novelmaking. This is an argumentative thesis, divided into three parts. Chapter one introduces the author and contextualizes the discussions on Writing, History and Fiction. Chapter two brings the theoretical background, that consists of the presentation of Linda Hutcheon’s ideas about Historiography and Patricia Waugh’s conceptualizations on Metafiction, both of them relating to Walter Benjamin’s poetic reference to the Angel of History. The third part submits an analysis of Foe, and connects this novel with the other works written by Coetzee. In the conclusion, I hope to validate the thesis proposed, that Foe is, ultimately, a self-reflexive novel that reflects the aesthetics of novel making of its own time.

O escritor ganhador do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura John Maxwell Coetzee publicou Foe em 1987. Ao lermos esse romance, somos imediatamente levados à ilha de Robinson Crusoe - e, conseqüentemente, ao mundo ficcional de Daniel Defoe. O objetivo deste trabalho é tomar a leitura da obra Foe, de Coetzee, como um comentário sobre a estética de construção de um romance. Esta é uma dissertação argumentativa, dividida em três partes. O primeiro capítulo introduz o autor e contextualiza as discussões sobre a Escrita, a História e a Ficção. O segundo capítulo traz o suporte teórico, que consiste na apresentação das idéias de Linda Hutcheon sobre Historiografia e nas conceitualizações sobre Meta-ficção, de Patricia Waugh. Ambas conduzem à referência poética ao Anjo da História feita por Walter Benjamin. A terceira parte comenta o romance Foe e o insere no conjunto da obra de Coetzee, apontando elementos compartilhados com os outros romances do autor. Na conclusão, espero validar a tese proposta, de que Foe é realmente um romance auto-reflexivo que reflete as condições de produção de sua época. / Nobel prize winner John Maxwell Coetzee published Foe in 1987. When reading that novel, we are taken back to Robinson Crusoe’s island – and, consequently, to the world of Daniel Defoe’s fiction. The aim of this work is to undertake the reading of Coetzee’s Foe as a study on the aesthetics of novelmaking. This is an argumentative thesis, divided into three parts. Chapter one introduces the author and contextualizes the discussions on Writing, History and Fiction. Chapter two brings the theoretical background, that consists of the presentation of Linda Hutcheon’s ideas about Historiography and Patricia Waugh’s conceptualizations on Metafiction, both of them relating to Walter Benjamin’s poetic reference to the Angel of History. The third part submits an analysis of Foe, and connects this novel with the other works written by Coetzee. In the conclusion, I hope to validate the thesis proposed, that Foe is, ultimately, a self-reflexive novel that reflects the aesthetics of novel making of its own time.

Proposing the concept of mimetic uncertainty, this project aims to provide a critical inquiry into the correspondence of unreliable narration and realism. Building on Springett (2013) and Olsen (2003), a distinction between narratorial unreliability and uncertainty is proposed to denote whether a narrator explicitly signals an awareness of their fallible narration. I thereafter indicate how narratorial uncertainty, on the one hand, can serve to evoke a “reality effect” (Barthes 1989) on a receptive aesthetic level; and on the other hand, can provide a form of historicity (Jameson 1985) and discursive realism (Auerbach 2003) on an expressive historical axis. Through this tripartite framework, realism is contextualised within the discourse of unreliable narration, as well as the specific debate which surrounds uncertainty and fallibility. The textual analysis focuses on three separate works—Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague year (1722), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), and finally, Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013)—with the twofold aim of (1) providing a model for approaching uncertain narration and (2) applying a historically contingent realist reading. I argue that in all three novels, emphasis on how readers may respond to uncertain narration provides insight into socio-historical and discursive points of friction surrounding their authors. The overarching ambition of this study is to provide a more substantial and historicized understanding of the stylistic devices of contemporary authorship, while more broadly signifying the unexpected critical acuity of mimetic approaches as well as the challenges and demands which metamodernist literature approaches.