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The thesis covers the period roughly between 1688 and the 1780s and is concerned with the construction and perfonnance of heterosexual male identity and the emergence, during that period, of what would become a culturally dominant model of an ideal masculinity. It is a model which is adapted to the requirements of a capitalising economy and is therefore inextricably linked to the rise of the middle classes and the Puritan tradition which informs their ethical perspective. The introductory chapter gives reasons why I regard the novel as particularly relevant in looking at the dissemination of culturally determined notions of gender. Chapter One is concerned with contemporary anxieties about identity and the attempts to forge a middle-class male identity, which is 'authentic' and differentiated from that of the upper classes Changes in the way gender identity was percei ved are also traced and the novels of Tobias Smollett are discussed to illustrate the struggle towards the definition of an ideal masculinity. Chapter Two examines the genesis of 'sensibility' and how it was modified and adapted by the novelists of sensibility to create a benevolent man of virtue who was dissociated from any notion of 'softness' and femininity. Chapter Three looks at the models of masculinity presented by Samuel Richardson in Clarissa (1748) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753/4) and the author's concern to discover and present the ideal model of a bourgeois patriarch. Chapter Four discusses the perceptions and representations of masculinity by women writers, how they portrayed gender relationships and what kind of critique they offered of a construction of gender which rendered women as passive and men as active.

This thesis is a study of the novelists of the Peninsular and Waterloo campaigns (veterans and non-veterans), the novelists of the naval war, and the novelists of the home front in the Napoleonic Wars.

This thesis discusses Christian orthodoxy in the English novel during the time period from 1930 to 1950.

This dissertation explores the subject of heredity and its novelistic treatment c. 1850-1900. Though hereditary phenomena had long been incorporated into literary works, heredity acquired an unprecedented significance with Darwin’s theory of evolution. It became a central fact of life, generating both fascination and fear, but its exact workings remained unknown until the turn of the century. This left novelists some experimental leeway in creating fictional universes and characters in accordance with the nascent naturalistic worldview and in struggling with its philosophical implications. While work on nineteenth-century literature and science has focused significantly on evolution, I demonstrate that heredity is a more immediate human concern and is more intuitive to the form of the novel. The works considered here by George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy grapple with an increasingly deterministic view of biology but also with other forms of inheritance, for most of the conditions that constitute and determine our lives are inherited. Chapter one discusses how the metaphor of inheritance became a powerful tool for portraying the complexities of life in a post-theological age. This dissertation is grounded in the history of science, and, beyond the common language shared between science, philosophy, and literature, I examine the role of narrative in the study of heredity, particularly in medical case histories, which formed an early point of contact with the novel. Chapter two is on Eliot’s treatment of the inextricable workings of legal, cultural, and biological inheritance in The Mill on the Floss, showing how the mismatch between theory and reality regarding these matters demoralizes the novel’s protagonists and inhibits their development. Chapter three contextualizes The Picture of Dorian Gray in the history of art and science, reading Dorian’s portrait as a device suggestive of metaphysical inheritance and the disruption of personal development, and the ancestral portraits in Dorian’s gallery as indications of the biological heredity that drives his self-destruction. Chapter four looks at Hardy’s technique of genealogical narrative and overdetermination in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the novel’s engagement with debates over the value of pedigree and the pessimistic view of determinism at the century’s end. / 2020-09-29T00:00:00Z

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O objetivo desta tese é um estudo comparativo dos romances Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-1749), do inglês John Cleland, e Margot La Ravaudeuse (1750), do francês Jean-Charles Fougeret de Monbron. Os dois romances fazem parte do conjunto de narrativas eróticas libertinas que inundaram o emergente mercado livreiro europeu durante o Iluminismo e contam as memórias de duas jovens prostitutas respectivamente em Londres e Paris em meados do século. Partindo do pressuposto segundo o qual as duas narrativas se organizam num contínuo que oscila entre a sociabilidade e a individualidade, o objetivo desta análise comparativa é compreender como estes dois temas, fundamentais na experiência setecentista e no processo de formação do romance moderno, são formalizados nas memórias de Margot e Fanny Hill através de procedimentos estruturais recorrentes na literatura da libertinagem. / The aim of this dissertation is a comparative study of the novels Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-1749), by John Cleland, and Margot la Ravaudeuse (1750), by Jean-Charles Fougeret de Monbron. Both novels are part of the body of erotic libertine narratives that flooded the emerging European book market during the Enlightenment and tell the memoirs of two young prostitutes respectively in London and Paris during the mid-18th-century. Assuming that the two narratives are organized according to a continuum which oscillates between sociability and individuality, the objective of this comparative analysis is to understand how these fundamental themes in 18th-century life as well as in the rise of the modern novel are formalized in the memoirs of Margot and Fanny through reccurring structural procedures found in libertine literature.

O objetivo desta tese é um estudo comparativo dos romances Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-1749), do inglês John Cleland, e Margot La Ravaudeuse (1750), do francês Jean-Charles Fougeret de Monbron. Os dois romances fazem parte do conjunto de narrativas eróticas libertinas que inundaram o emergente mercado livreiro europeu durante o Iluminismo e contam as memórias de duas jovens prostitutas respectivamente em Londres e Paris em meados do século. Partindo do pressuposto segundo o qual as duas narrativas se organizam num contínuo que oscila entre a sociabilidade e a individualidade, o objetivo desta análise comparativa é compreender como estes dois temas, fundamentais na experiência setecentista e no processo de formação do romance moderno, são formalizados nas memórias de Margot e Fanny Hill através de procedimentos estruturais recorrentes na literatura da libertinagem. / The aim of this dissertation is a comparative study of the novels Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-1749), by John Cleland, and Margot la Ravaudeuse (1750), by Jean-Charles Fougeret de Monbron. Both novels are part of the body of erotic libertine narratives that flooded the emerging European book market during the Enlightenment and tell the memoirs of two young prostitutes respectively in London and Paris during the mid-18th-century. Assuming that the two narratives are organized according to a continuum which oscillates between sociability and individuality, the objective of this comparative analysis is to understand how these fundamental themes in 18th-century life as well as in the rise of the modern novel are formalized in the memoirs of Margot and Fanny through reccurring structural procedures found in libertine literature.

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