Traveling Women and Consuming Place in Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters and Journals considers how various women-authored travel narratives of the long eighteenth century employ food in the construction of place and identity. Chronologically charting the letters and journals of Delarivier Manley, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Janet Schaw, and Frances Burney, I argue that the “critical food moments” described in their letters and journals demonstrate material, cultural, and social implications about consumption. My interdisciplinary project is located at the intersection of three seemingly divergent topics: food studies, human geography, and women-authored travel narratives. Approaching “place” as a way of being-in-the-world, my project traces the connection between verbal constructions of place and issues of identity, national and gender, across the eighteenth century. Looking at what I term “critical food moments” during travel allows us particular insight into how food simultaneously serves a literal (intended for consumption) and a figurative (used as a literary topic and device) function, and how tropes of food—such as digestion—function as lexicons which offer women writers opportunities to better understand and criticize the nation and their own identities within the nation. I argue that food-centered moments allow us to better understand the lived experiences of women traveling in the eighteenth century, to analyze how material and sensory conditions influenced and shaped women’s understandings of themselves and their positions (places) in the world. Taken together, these four women authors represent a wide-range of perspectives from various social and economic backgrounds, and yet, what they have in common is crucial: a connection with the food, communities, and places they travel.

The eighteenth century is primarily known for the development of codes of etiquette, the refinement of manners and the artistic cultivation of the beautiful and the sublime, but there is at the same time a strand of highly visceral, often stomach-turning texts and images that coexist alongside the push for a much more polite and urbane culture. My dissertation, “Evoking Disgust in the Eighteenth Century,” looks at a wide range of scientific, literary and ephemeral texts to excavate the ways that disgust both persisted and transformed across the century. These range from the poems of Jonathan Swift, the novels of Tobias Smollett, Evelina by Frances Burney, and George Psalmanazar’s An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. I argue that disgust served as both a boundary line that can tell us the kinds of behaviors, objects and bodies that should not be tolerated in society, and as an emotion that could be trained and cultivated to guide the disgust reactions of readers.

This thesis examines US protectionism in the 1980s from Canadian and American perspectives, and its role in Canada’s pursuit of the historic 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. It analyzes the perceived “threat” of protectionism and evaluates the agreement’s provisions against Canada’s goal of securing access to the US market. It contends that US protectionism was crucial in the Mulroney government’s decision to negotiate a bilateral agreement and was a contentious issue for the agreement’s critics. US sources, unexamined in existing historiography, confirm the increased threat of American protectionism, but emphasize a distinction between the threat and implementation of protectionist trade law. Although the agreement did not shield Canada from US trade remedies, Canada gained important presence in the trade dispute process. These conclusions are drawn from Canadian and American media and government documents, 1980s academic and think-tank commentary, legal documents, the memoirs and diaries of major players, and select archival sources.

This thesis examines US protectionism in the 1980s from Canadian and American perspectives, and its role in Canada’s pursuit of the historic 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. It analyzes the perceived “threat” of protectionism and evaluates the agreement’s provisions against Canada’s goal of securing access to the US market. It contends that US protectionism was crucial in the Mulroney government’s decision to negotiate a bilateral agreement and was a contentious issue for the agreement’s critics. US sources, unexamined in existing historiography, confirm the increased threat of American protectionism, but emphasize a distinction between the threat and implementation of protectionist trade law. Although the agreement did not shield Canada from US trade remedies, Canada gained important presence in the trade dispute process. These conclusions are drawn from Canadian and American media and government documents, 1980s academic and think-tank commentary, legal documents, the memoirs and diaries of major players, and select archival sources.

A Romantic Bildung: The Development of Coming-of-Age Novels in the Romantic Period (1782-1817) explore la naissance et le développement du roman de formation en Europe à l’époque romantique. Celle-ci est le témoin de nombreuses discussions sur les Droits de l’homme et de la montée du nationalisme en Europe. Au même moment, la littérature se transforme pour laisser plus de place à la subjectivité du personnage. Tout cela donne naissance à un nouveau genre littéraire : le Bildungsroman, ou roman de formation et d’éducation. Contrairement à la définition actuelle du genre, le Bildungsroman est transnational, c’est-à-dire qu’il ne provient pas exclusivement d’Allemagne, mais de partout en Europe. A Romantic Bildung se penche donc sur le sujet en analysant de façon thématique la trame narrative de Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), Mansfield Park (1814), Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), Emma (1815), ainsi que d’Ormond, a Tale (1817) et sur leur appartenance au roman de l’époque romantique. En comparant les étapes d’éducation, d’indépendance, et de retour à la société des protagonistes, ces romans font ressortir les similitudes qui caractérisent le Bildungsroman. / A Romantic Bildung: The Development of Coming-of-Age Novels in the Romantic Period (1782-1817) explores the birth and development of the Bildungsroman during the Romantic period. The latter is characterized by the numerous discourses on the Rights of men as well as the rise of nationalism. At the same time, Romantic writers transform literature by increasing the protagonist’s subjectivity and in turns, create a new genre of narrative: the Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist’s development and growth is the main focus. Contrary to current definition of the genre, the Bildungsroman—or coming-of-age novel—is a transnational product: it is obviously found in Germany, but also in France, England, Ireland, and Scotland, to name a few, during the Romantic period. Through a thematic analysis of Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), Mansfield Park (1814), Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), Emma (1815), and Ormond, A Tale (1815), A Romantic Bildung traces the narrative structure of the genre and it locates its essence in the Romantic novel. By comparing the narrative’s steps of education, independence, and return to society, the characteristics of the genre are revealed.

Romantic heroes are questers, according to Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye. Whether employing physical strength or relying on the power of the mind, the traditional Romantic hero invokes questing for some sense of self. Chapter 1 considers this hero-type, but is concerned with defining a non-questing British Romantic hero. The Romantic hero's identity is problematic and established through contrasting narrative versions of the hero. This paper's argument lies in the "inconclusiveness" of the Romantic experience perceived in writings throughout the Romantic period. Romantic inconclusiveness can be found not only in the structure and syntax of the works but in the person with whom the reader is meant to identify or sympathize, the hero(ine). Chapter 2 explores Byron's aesthetics of literature equivocation in The Giaour. This tale is a consciously imbricated text, and Byron's letters show a purposeful complication of the poet's authority concerning the origins of this Turkish Tale. The traditional "Byronic hero," a gloomy, guilt-ridden protagonist, is considered in Chapter 3. Byron's contemporary readers and reviewers were quick to pick up on this aspect of his verse tales, finding in the Giaour, Selim, Conrad, and Lara characteristics of Childe Harold. Yet, Byron's Turkish Tales also reveal a very different and more sentimental hero. Byron seems to play off the reader's expectations of the "Byronic hero" with an ambiguous hero whose character reflects the Romantic aesthetic of indeterminacy. Through the accretive structure of The Giaour, Byron creates a hero of competing component characteristics, a focus he also gives to his heroines. Chapters 4 and 5 address works that are traditionally considered eighteenth-century sentimental novels. Mathilda and Evelina, both epistolary works, present their heroines as worldly innocents who are beset by aggressive males. Yet their subtext suggests that these girls aggressively maneuver the men in their lives. Mathilda and Evelina create a tension between the expected and the radical to energize the reader's imagination.

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There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.