Abstract Roxana is Defoe¡¦s last novel and his only one that ends in tragedy. In the eighteenth century when the idea of realism prevailed, the novel was a reflection of social reality. Unlike a romance in which love and imaginary adventures are depicted, a novel depicts ordinary people and their ordinary life. Based on this idea of realism, Defoe¡¦s Roxana touches its readers. This novel is mainly about how the heroine Roxana, a deserted woman, struggles to make money and how her mental state changes. Yet reading through the story, what readers learn is not only Roxana¡¦s tragedy in fighting through her life, but also, beyond that, the relationship between a woman and the society she lives in. Under the control of patriarchy, a woman, whether reliant on a man or independent, is doomed to be a loser. In order to give as full as possible a perspective about the process of Roxana¡¦s making money, I put many issues in the thesis, including gender, capital, marriage, morality and psychology. This thesis falls into six parts. The introduction gives a general idea of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century and of Defoe¡¦s life. The first chapter deals with Roxana¡¦s marriage, exploring the reasons for her refusal of marriage and the possible results she may have to face if she remains unmarried. In the second chapter, I will discuss Roxana¡¦s business of prostitution, focusing on how she succeeds in making money by her body and beauty. In Chapter Three, I attempt to analyze the two Roxanas¡Xthe public Roxana and the private Roxana¡Xto see how she takes advantage of disguise in presenting a public self but still possesses a guilty feeling when she is alone. Here, I would like to apply Bakhtin¡¦s two terms ¡§centrifugal¡¨ and ¡§centripetal¡¨ to Roxana¡¦s public self and private self respectively. In the last chapter, I intend to use Freud¡¦s psycho-analysis to explain the three characters¡XRoxana, Amy and Susan¡Xand conclude with the unbalanced mental state that brings about Roxana¡¦s psychological chaos.

Scholars argue that Coetzee’s novels critique and disavow the origins and legacy of the novel tradition and its influence on the contemporary novel. They also claim that J.M. Coetzee’s novels herald in the demise of the contemporary novel. These interpretations are motivated by the political readings of postcolonialism and postmodernism. The premise of this dissertation is to depart from those postcolonial and postmodern approaches and offer close readings of Coetzee’s novels through the origins and legacy of the early eighteenth-and nineteenth century novel. My study argues that several of Coetzee’s novels allude to the intellectual, historical, and cultural legacies of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novel. I argue that the origin and rise of the English novel and its subgenres provide Coetzee with ideas to use in his own novels. These paradigms in Coetzee’s novels espouse —rather than renounce — the influence and tradition of the early novel, showing that its inspiration remains relevant in the contemporary novel. Thus, the general premise of this dissertation is that Coetzee does not necessarily “write back” to the canon and the origins of English novel, but rather he writes through and with those enduring forms and structures. This study shows that there are literary connections between the early beginnings of the novel and the contemporary novel that offer cogent examinations —examinations that find compromise between the past and present rarely made through postcolonial or postmodern approaches.

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Scholars have long since identified a quixotic mode in fiction, acknowledging the widespread influence of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-15) on subsequent texts. In most cases, “quixotic” signifies a preponderance of allusions to Don Quixote in a given text, such that most studies of “quixotic fictions” or “quixotic influence” are primarily taxonomic in purpose and in outcome: they name and catalogue a text or group of texts as “quixotic,” then argue that, by virtue of the vast and protean influence of Don Quixote, the quixotic mode in fiction is always divided, lacking any semblance of ideological consistency. I argue, however, that the very characteristics of Don Quixote that make him such an attractive literary model for such a broad range of narratives—his bookish idealism, his fixation on the upper-classed grandiosity of the lives of noble knights—also form the consistent, ideological groundwork of quixotism: the exceptionalist substitution of fictive idealism for material reality. By tracing the ways in which quixotes become mouthpieces for various exceptionalist arguments in eighteenth-century British and American texts, like Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), Tobias Smollett's Launcelot Greaves (1760), Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792-1815), and Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), among others, I demonstrate the link between quixotism and exceptionalism, or between fictive idealism and the belief that one (or one's worldview) is an exception to the scrutiny of the surrounding world.

Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, has been noted as an unconventional eighteenth-century novel and it has long been considered unadaptable and unfilmable. In the last decade, however, two popular adaptations of Tristram Shandy have appeared in new media forms: Martin Rowson’s 1996 graphic novel and Michael Winterbottom’s 2005 film. Since Sterne’s text denies the kind of transfer typical of literary adaptations, Rowson and Winterbottom adapt the conceptual elements. Through adaptation and media theory, this thesis defines the Shandean elements of Sterne’s novel and locates the qualities of the text retained in adaptation. Rowson and Winterbottom adapt the conceptual properties of Tristram Shandy, ‘the spirit of the text,’ into two distinct mediums. In an exploration of the conventions of each medium, this thesis argues that the adaptations of Tristram Shandy are true to its spirit, and both successfully adapt the unadaptable novel.

In 1790s England, an expanding empire, a growing diaspora of English settlers in foreign territories, and spreading political unrest in Ireland and on the European continent all helped to contribute to a destabilization of British national identity. With the definition of “Englishperson” in flux, Ireland, France, and Italy—nations which are prominently featured in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—could be understood, similar to England’s colonies, as representing threats to the nation’s cultural integrity. Because the people of these European countries were stereotypically perceived as being economically impoverished victims of political and “popish” tyranny, it would have been easy to construct them in popular and literary discourse as being both socially similar to the “primitive” indigenous populations of colonized territories and as uneasy reminders of England’s own “premodern” past. Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is twofold. First, it attempts to account for the Gothic’s frequent—albeit subtle—use of imperialist rhetoric, which is largely encoded within the novels’ representations of sublimity, sensibility, and domesticity. Second, it claims that the novels under consideration are preoccupied with testing and reaffirming the salience of bourgeois English identity by placing English or Anglo-inflected characters in conflict with “monstrous” continental Others. In so doing, these novels use the fictions of empire to contain and claim agency over a revolutionary France, an uncertainlypositioned Ireland, and a classically-appealing but socially-problematic Italy.

The Culture of Sensibility permeates both Burney’s and Austen’s novels. Burney and Austen both use anomalous bodies and minds as a vehicle to explore the performative requirements of the Culture of Sensibility. The performance of disability, including bodily manifestations of nervous disorders, melancholy, and hypochondria, allows sensibility to become visible on the body. This dissertation examines the similarities between Burney’s and Austen’s portrayals of disability in order to understand how Austen’s texts engage and reflect Burney’s influence. Despite the frequency with which disability is necessary for the production of Sensibility, the connection between disability and Sensibility remains unexplored. This dissertation investigates the connection between various performances of disability with the Culture of Sensibility and exposes the narrative reliance on the anomalous body in both Burney’s and Austen’s novels. Through a combination of disability theory and performance theory, this dissertation examines the Culture of Sensibility’s reliance on the non-normative body for the performance of sentimental behaviour. Disability theory allows for the examination of the anomalous body beyond that of a strictly medical definition. Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price illustrates the difference between the medical and social construction of disability. Using only the medical model, Fanny’s debility represents her poor health; however, the social construction of disability connects Fanny’s debility to the fetishization of the anomalous body by the Culture of Sensibility. Disability features in Burney’s and Austen’s courtship narratives, as temporary physical and mental impairment provide opportunities for physical proofs of Sensibility, somatic communication of desire, and narrative resolution. Both Burney’s and Austen’s illness narratives of characters with permanent disabilities reveal concerns of the appropriation of the ii invalid’s favourable position within the Culture of Sensibility through an affected performance of disability. Male characters with temporary or permanent physical impairment suffer effeminization and exclusion from courtship narratives, whereas instances of female invalidism contribute to successful resolution of courtship narratives. I conclude that Burney’s and Austen’s reliance on the anomalous body to prove sensibility indicates that the late-eighteenth century sentimental novel normalizes the anomalous body.

Cette thèse étudie un corpus de romans anglais, encore peu étudiés en France et jamais étudiés collectivement, publiés entre 1782 et 1805 par des écrivains et des écrivaines se rattachant par leurs idées et, pour certains, leur militantisme actif, au mouvement radical qui se développe en Angleterre dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, s’amplifie et s’organise sous l’impulsion de la Révolution française, puis, sévèrement réprimé par le gouvernement de William Pitt, s’effondre à la fin de la décennie. Cette séquence historique laisse des traces profondes dans l’œuvre des romanciers radicaux, dont beaucoup, comme William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft et John Thelwall, sont philosophes ou polémistes avant d’être romanciers et prennent la plume pour défendre les droits de l’homme (et de la femme) dans le débat anglais sur la Révolution française qui oppose Edmund Burke à Thomas Paine. En croisant l’histoire des idées politiques, l’histoire sociale et culturelle du mouvement radical, l’histoire du livre et la narratologie classique, ce travail s’efforce de mettre en lumière la façon dont les romans encodent une certaine idéologie politique dans leurs formes – du discours des locuteurs au format de publication des romans, en passant par leurs narrateurs, leurs intrigues, leurs personnages, leur style et leurs silences signifiants. Un tel examen fait ressortir, plutôt qu’une idéologie radicale unifiée, une tension récurrente entre deux versions, libérale et jacobine, bourgeoise et plébéienne, du radicalisme, dont l’articulation conflictuelle revêt différentes formes d’un auteur à l’autre et d’un terme à l’autre de la période étudiée, à mesure que la réaction conservatrice enterre les espoirs radicaux de réformes. / This dissertation examines a corpus of English novels which have been little studied in France as yet and never as a whole. The novels were published between 1782 and 1805 by a group of writers who, by their ideas and in some cases active political commitment, belong to the radical movement which developed in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, gained impetus and structure in the wake of the French Revolution, and collapsed at the end of the decade when faced with repression from the government of William Pitt. Radical novelists, many of whom, like William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Thelwall, were philosophers and pamphleteers before they took to novel-writing, flew to the defence of the rights of man (and of the rights of woman) in the revolution controversy which pitted Thomas Paine against Edmund Burke – and their work bears the mark of the rise and demise of the radical movement. Combining intellectual history with classical narratology, book history, and the social and cultural history of radicalism, this dissertation seeks to highlight the way in which political ideology is built into the very forms of the novels – in the characters’ speech and the characters themselves, in the novels’ plot and narration type, in their style and publishing format, as well as in their meaningful silences. Such a study brings to light, rather than a coherent radical ideology, a recurring tension between two versions of radicalism, liberal and jacobin, bourgeois and plebeian, whose partly conflicting conjunction assumes different shapes from one novelist to the other and between the early 1780s and late 1790s, as radical hopes of reform sink under the conservative backlash.

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