This thesis examines the development of didactic literary authority in women's writing between the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century. This authority developed as a result of changing social pressures, in which women were increasingly associated with the domestic sphere, and had to align their writing practice with this domestic respectability. Women writers used didacticism, with its roots in the moral philosophy of the mid-Eighteenth century, to claim that their writing was primarily interested in promoting the sensibility associated with the domestic sphere. Didacticism allowed writers to make distinctions between themselves and another kind of writing which, they claimed, produced the "wrong" sensibility, usually constructed as the self-indulgent, morally lax emotionalism associated with the sentimental movement. By contrast, what didactic writers claimed to be doing was performing a useful and beneficial task, writing which would produce positive, rational and domestic feelings in the reader. Didactic authority often took the Highlands as its object. Constructed as being less "civilised" than the rest of Britain, the Highlands allowed the writer to claim to be providing a "correction" to the damage done to our "original" sensibility by describing the "simple" and uncorrupted lifestyle of the Highlanders. Writing about the Highlands then appeared to be a source of didactic authority which many women were keen to exploit. But at the same time, this kind of writing was beset with difficulties, particularly in its claim to be emerging either out of the writer's "simple" response to the Highlands or by being a purely descriptive, non-fictional discourse. One influential work examined in this thesis, for example, is Anne Grant's <i>Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders </i>(1811), which, in spite of the authoritative title, achieves little in the way of ethnographic objectivity, and is beset by a series of problems associated with Grant's negative associations with women's writing.

Although social historians have always valued the diaries and novels of Fanny Burney for the detailed, finely-observed panorama of eighteenth-century life which they depict, their value as a source of information about the language of the period has remained unexplored. In fact, as this thesis demonstrates, Fanny Burney's contribution to the English language was considerable, particularly in matters of vocabulary, and she affords striking proof of Henry Bradley's claim that there can be no relation between a writer's literary reputation and her impact on the language with which she is working. As might be expected from such an indefatigable recorder of the social scene, Fanny Burney's writings are rich in the vocabulary of everyday life---in modernistic innovations like living-room, tea-party, schoolgirl and agreeability, the nuances of casual speech, rare idioms addition, a small but much used stock of dialect words seems to reflect Fanny Burney's childhood in Kings Lynn. But she was not content merely to record, and chose to express her personality through an adventurous, almost cavalier attitude to word-formation. By contrast with Jane Austen, whose formations seem to spring from an awareness of language as a social instrument, Fanny Burney's coinages, often startlingly facetious, suggest that she was motivated by a slightly self-indulgent verbosity; she was, in Virginia Woolf's phrase, "immensely susceptible to the power of words". From 1793, when she married an emigre, Fanny Burney's style and vocabulary were increasingly aflected by her knowledge of French, and friends and critics alike were quick to notice the intrusion of French idioms and turns of phrase; stylistic influences are impossible to quantify, but the prominence of French vocabulary in her later writings provides more concrete evidence of the Important place which that language came to hold in her life.

My dissertation deals with eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophy, particularly its discussion of sociability. My dissertation draws attention to what I call the ‘private vices, public benefits’ controversy in Scottish social thought, and presents an aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment thought as a critical response to Bernard Mandeville’s paradoxical thesis, ‘private vices, public benefits’. My discussion first traces how Mandeville tried to show that the wealth of a modern commercial society was generated only from such vices as pride, vanity and ambition and that wealth and virtue were therefore contradictory each other. I present how Mandeville made his arguments concerning government and economic policies, such as a highly mercantilist policy of aiming at a favourable trade balance, based on his paradoxical thesis, ‘private vices, public benefits’. My dissertation next tries to present Francis Hutcheson’s moral and political theories as his criticism of Mandeville. I emphasise that Hutcheson’s moral theory argued that human nature was not vicious as Mandeville had argued, but was capable of approving moral virtue in benevolence and guaranteeing the moral neutrality of generating wealth. I then focus on Hutcheson’s political theory of duty, and present it as seeking the way of achieving both wealth and virtue by fulfilling the two sets of duties: the moral duty of being virtuous and the economic duty of being prosperous. My dissertation then traces how David Hume shifted the controversy from the issues concerning the moral legitimacy of human nature and commercial opulence towards the disputes of words. I examine how Hume’s moral theory argued that whatever useful to public benefits could not be called ‘vices’ but good and that human nature was capable of forming such true moral ideas as justice, public interest, political authority and industry in view of their utility as the standard of morals. I present Hume’s political and economic theory as aiming at the refinement of taste and seeking to purge rages from commerce so as to let the industry of private interests form the moderate ideas of public interests and political authority and pursue maximum utility.

Chapter One explores the classification of the grotesque and its disruptive role in natural and philosophical taxonomic systems. I argue that the grotesque served as a useful repository for the marvellous, the hybrid and the preternatural. Further, as a product of mind., the grotesque had nominalist status which was used to undermine essentialist classification, as well as to disrupt the referential relation between words and things. Moreover, grotesque hybrids, and fantastic beings were characteristic of the plenitude of nature and of the imagination. Chapter Two therefore moves on from spatial considerations of where the grotesque should be placed, to explore how it is generated and where it comes from. The becomingness of the grotesque is explored in relation to notions of chaos and metamorphosis; in a less tangible sense, I argue that the grotesque process can be understood in relation to metempsychosis and incomplete structuring. In this regard I demonstrate the sportive and playful operation of the grotesque within natures as examples of the lusus naturae. Chapter Three builds on the preoccupations of the first chapter, exploring how the grotesque manipulated different kinds of inner space; I show that an emphasis on the pictorial is insufficient for a proper understanding of the category; rather, the grotesque plays or sports with the underlying concept of representation. Chapter Four moves out from the mental and private spheres of representation to discuss how notions of category and process were brought together in a variety of constructions of the grotesque body. I argue that the body was subject to a novelization, a grotesque welding of forces. The fifth chapter explores the public manifestations of the grotesque in pantomime, fairs and masquerade; I argue that these served as sites of exchange and negotiation and that the grotesque therefore reflects the evolving commercial system. Chapter Six considers the judgment of the grotesque in relation to a range of legalities. The grotesque disrupted notions of legality just as it played within systems. These arguments are tested in the light of Scriblerian satire, with special attention devoted to Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope throughout.

This thesis discusses key qualitative developments in the history of letter writing that took place as a direct result of the introduction - during the revolutionary Interregnum - of a national postal service available to the general public. An examination is made of repeated and vivid imaginations after this date of what can be termed epistolary spaces, which are a consequence of the newly regulated, mostly reliable, but governmentally controlled gaps in time between addressers and addressees of letters. These imaginations, analogous to the cyberspaces of our own era, are seen to be fuelled by increasingly cheaper, faster, and more efficient postal services developed throughout the period. They are by no means utopian spaces, however, and often become the scenes of strife and surveillance. The thesis demonstrates the existence of such imaginations by means of a detailed study of five real correspondences and of the fictional letters that constitute Samuel Richardson's novel <i>Clarissa; or the History of a Young Lady </i>(1747-8). Attention is paid to what epistolary spaces in these letters are like; how they are set up; and how maintained. They are variously seen as an arena in which vicariously to explore the new urban culture of London in Dorothy Osborne's <i>Letters to Sir William Temple </i>(1652-4); as a courtly enclave in the diplomatic letters of the dramatist Sir George Etherege (1685-89); as a venue within which to champion the cause of the Walpolian Whigs in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's <i>Turkish Embassy Letters </i>(1716-18); as an aristocratic redoubt in the correspondence between two retired courtiers of the reign of George II, the Countesses of Hertford and Pomfret (1738-41); and as an equivalent of the aristocratic levee in the impoverished clergyman Lucius Henry Hibbins's letters to the Duke of Newcastle (1741-58). The investigation of such spaces is often of great social, cultural, and political interest and it is in these terms that the letters are read. Finally, the artistic achievement of Richardson's greatest novel is seen to have been aided by almost a century of imaginations of epistolary spaces; which are shown also to be found in the fictional letters of Clarissa Harlowe, Anna Howe, and Robert Lovelace.

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This thesis engages with the representations of property and ownership in women's sentimental and Gothic novels in the latter half of the eighteenth century. I investigate women~s relationship with . real property and legal inheritance as well as their connection with such concepts as 'cultural capital' and 'intellectual property'. Be~cing with John Locke's formulation ~f essenti~ ownership and Carole Pateman's assertion of the gendered basis of this 'possessive selP,.I argue.that narratives of ownership, fundamental to inclusion within communities ranging from the family to the nation, are '. broader and more complex than law or history can define. Recent critical work, from literary ~d historical perspectives, illuminates the multifaceted and shifting valences of consanguineal, affinal, and sentimental 'belonging'. Cultural, literary; and social p~adiginsof the eighteenth century, . .~..-. .: . particularly sensibility, romance, and the Gothic, b~th r~f~:r~~ and subvert legal constructions of the female (non)subject. By questioning and combining genres, the writers in this thesis tested the boundaries of narratives in order to re-assert women's self-possession and autonomy, whether married or single. Both private and public, writing allowed women to demoiIstrate their own . .acquisition of cultural capital in the process of creating new intellectual property andmaterial artefact. The curious property created through print, both intangible and material, offered women an image with which to eXplore their own contested subjectivity. Women's participation in the emerging print market signals both their identification with traditional, established narratives and their willingness to create alternative meanings and interpretations.

This thesis examines 'character' as the place where issues of public and private reputation and memoir and fiction meet, taking as its focus three of the late eighteenth-century's most notorious courtesans and memoirists - Elizabeth Gooch (1756 - post 1804), Mary Robinson (1758 - 1800) and Harriette Wilson (1786 1845). As figures who had publicly flouted the restraints of the period's conventional definitions of feminine identity, all three women came to write about their lives mindful of the rigorous discourses that governed the expression of female character. While tensions between the intemalisation or performance of culturally scripted femininities and the disclosure of a more subversive self in their autobiographical writing has begun to be critically mapped in recent years, there has been little consideration of their fictional texts. These were written contemporaneously with, or soon after, their memoirs as further sites in which they might negotiate the relationship between experience and its articulation. The thesis considers both of Gooch's autobiographical texts, An Appeal to the Public (1788) and The Life ofMrs. Gooch (1792), and her first novel The Contrast (1795); Robinson's 1799 novel The Natural Daughter is compared with her Memoirs, written during the same period and published posthumously in 1801 and Wilson's 1825 Memoirs are set against the short fiction published only two weeks later, Paris Lions and London Tigers and her last novel Clara Gazul (1830). All three women's novels contain characters and plots obviously informed by their personal experiences. Yet this semi-autobiographical facet has often led to the depreciation and dismissal of their fiction. Such an oversight has suppressed the significant questions that a comparison between the life-writing and fiction of these fascinating personalities might raise: questions concerning the constructedness of gender and the limitations and possibilities of literary genre with which to express the experience of gender.

Analyses of early modern Europe and the developing commercial print culture of the eighteenth century tend to divide their focus between, on one hand, the impact of print upon styles of reading, writing, and textual dissemination, and on the other, discussions of literacy and orality in relation to ‘popular culture’. Within this research model definitions of ‘oral’ and ‘orality’ are based on a legacy of anthropological, historical, and literary studies which places a particular emphasis on the relationship between oral and literate modes and theorises the difference between them primarily in terms of alternative forms of sensory apprehension. This thesis argues that such an approach is limited and limiting. It offers an analysis of the ways in which the oral was understood and represented during the eighteenth century. Through an exploration of the assumptions that were then made about oral modes and practices it indicates not only where there is room to challenge the biases of its current critical formulation, but also identifies how much can be missed by an anachronistic interpretation of eighteenth-century attitudes. Accounts of and advice on the ideal conversation, public oration, and sermon form the focus of the first three chapters, which discuss how contemporary oral practices were imaged, theorized, and represented during this period. The subsequent chapters assess the engagement of eighteenth century writers with what they deem to be historical forms of orality. The representation of bardic poetry and song is examined through a reading of various conjectural histories, accounts of the effect of music and poetry, and descriptions of the classical world. A comparison between two versions of one text – Henry Bournes’ <i>Antiquitates Vulgares</i> (1725) and its reformulation by John Brand as <i>Observations on Popular Antiquities </i>(1777) – facilitates a reassessment of the connection between oral tradition and ‘popular culture’.