This dissertation discusses rational feminism as part of the eighteenth century's call for the improvement of the condition of women. Rational feminism is based on a belief in the rational capacity of women and the necessity of developing it. Criticism of the eighteenth century has often associated rational feminism with two key figures, Mary Astell (A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 1694) and Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792), whose works form bookends enclosing the century. Other texts by Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox demonstrate that rational feminism appears variously in the middle of the century. These novelistic forms suggest that as an expression of feminism, reason becomes separated from publicity and politics, and united with domesticity and marriage in the midcentury years. Chapter one provides a critical, historical, and intellectual background for rational feminism as well as distinguishing between its manifestations in Astell and Wollstonecraft. Chapter two examines Haywood's Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (1736), which portrays reason in a dichotomous relationship with the body and identifies this dichotomy as an artificial choice imposed by patriarchy whereby private and public roles for women become mutually exclusive. Chapter three argues that in Fielding's Governess: or, The Little Female Academy (1749), the body and publicity are dissociated from women. Reason comes into the home to produce rational motherhood as well as pleasure, which Haywood linked to the body. In chapter four's The Female Quixote (1752), Lennox makes reason a source of male heterosexual desire and the very basis of the companionate marriage. Lennox questions the terms of such marriage, which demands a specifically female form of rationality, just before Wollstonecraft embraces it as a locus of female rational fulfillment. The conclusion defines the project's intervention in the use of reason as a concept and the historiography of feminism in the eighteenth century.

The shift from a traditional, being-based Christian cosmology---in which God creates all things through an ontologically-invested reason in which man shares---to a voluntarist, will-based Christian cosmology---in which God creates all things through an arbitrary act of will knowable to man only through experience---is considered crucial to the rise of empiricism and its related experimental method, two cornerstones of the Scientific Revolution. This dissertation examines how the shift from a being- to a logos-based cosmology, with its entailed shift from a realist to a nominalist ontology, affected this world's relation to a next. It explores this issue by considering the resurrection views of three writers whose works, taken together, span the seventeenth-century both temporally and intellectually, from the vestigial medieval scholasticism of John Donne (1572--1631) through the Renaissance neo-Platonism of Thomas Browne (1605--1682) to the Early-Modern mechanism of Robert Boyle (1627--1691). This dissertation argues that the traditional, being-based cosmologies shared by Donne and Browne underlie their teleological understandings of natural processes and, in doing so, allows them to find evidence in this world for resurrection to the next. Boyle's voluntarist cosmology, on the other hand, banishes inherent teleology from the natural world and thereby silences this world with regard to a next. This dissertation further argues that this shift in cosmology and more specifically, the entailed shift from a realist to a nominalist ontology, allowed man to make nature speak a new, operational language that could be used to man's benefit. By considering works written around the time of London's 1665 plague, we will see how mechanistic medicine produced such operational knowledge through the use of human-made instruments and methods, including experimentation. Although such knowledge provides no intelligence about a next world, it does allow humanity to make its way better in this one.

This dissertation draws upon performance theory and new historicism to read Victorian literature and culture. By fusing the gender consciousness and social constructionist agenda of the former with the rigorous dedication to historical specificity of the latter, I am able both to ground potentially amorphous theoretical assertions and, through readings of novels, nonfiction prose, and other historical documents, to comment upon the constructedness of what the Victorians fought to maintain as "natural" aspects of character. The focus on gender that defines so much work in performance theory is a prominent concern here, but it is not the organizing principle of the dissertation; rather, following the lead of recent feminist criticism, I explore masculinity and femininity within the contexts of other social categories such as class, work, sanity, and race. The first chapter locates Victorian antitheatricality within the context of industrial culture. Reading political tracts alongside conduct books, I attribute Victorian antipathies to visibly repetitive or rehearsed behavior to the monotonous actions of the machines that increasingly replaced human labor. The second chapter reads the Victorian fantasy of class transcendence against the fear of fraud, focusing on the conflicting pressures in narratives of upward mobility to reshape oneself to conform to a new class standing and yet to maintain a "genuine" self. The third chapter explores the performances that constituted professional identity and the tremendous latitude the Victorians allowed theatricality so long as "acting" was troped as "activity." The fourth chapter focuses on the demise of moral treatment (a form of therapy that sought to cure the mad by teaching them to behave sane), to examine sanity and shifting strategies for treating and explaining madness. My final chapter unsettles the stability of skin as a reliable determinant of racial identity, exploring the performative aspects that enabled white Victorians to seem racially invisible and the acts and attributes that risked that invisibility. The dissertation examines texts by many authors, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, Dinah Mulock Craik, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, and Mrs. Henry Wood.

This dissertation traces evidence of the competing epistemologies of the individual and the social through four Victorian novels and through the scientific, philosophical, and medical discourses that were emerging at the time that the novels were being written. Though the two types of epistemology are not necessarily inimical to each other, the heavily empirical and positivist climate of intellectual opinion between the years 1829--1876 fostered the notion that statistical observation was inherently superior to the study of individuals as individuals, a notion confronted by each of the studies my dissertation addresses. I describe how the discourses of medical statistics, natural history, physiology, and psychology inflected the narrative structures and styles of the industrial novel, sensation fiction, the high realist novel, debates about public health, and writings about the sciences themselves during a period of considerable scientific change, the years 1829--1876. The epistemological tensions I locate within the scientific discourses may better explain aspects of the novels that have been previously identified as thematic incoherences or confusions of genre. All of the chapters together provide a sense of both the Victorians' investment in and suspicion about the efficacy of empiricist claims of objectivity and certainty, particularly the suggestion that the intense empirical study of aggregate populations would necessarily lead to the identification of fixed laws of nature and social behavior. As my readings of both earlier and later novels indicate, some Victorians hoped to move from observable laws to an understanding of the unobservable and unpredictable, perhaps even to provide a language for those words and behaviors that could not be plainly spoken or readily classified. This dissertation shows, however, a conflicted philosophical and scientific vision produced in each of these novels as a result of their dual focus on individuals and aggregates, a double vision that for us brings into focus the Victorians' uncomfortable awareness of the limits of empiricist description.

This dissertation challenges the canon in British Romantic Poetry by establishing an interpretive methodology to account for the intertextual relationships that Charlotte Smith, Joanna Baillie, and Mary Tighe maintain with William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats. The interpretive model that I develop in the opening chapter builds upon the "rhizome" theory of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in order to replace the "influence" of Harold Bloom's Oedipal model with a complex network of root-like intertextual relationships. By subsuming Bloom's linear structure under a non-hierarchical discourse network, this model encourages us to look at literary history as an intricate "root-system," extending in multiple directions from a plurality of disparate nodes. The resulting paradigm shift enables this dissertation to re-examine one of the dominant aesthetic concepts of the Romantic Period--the sublime--in order to show how the figurative construction of women as signifiers of materiality effects their cultural exclusion from commercial engagement with the Romantic aesthetic of transcendental sublimity. The "material sublime" is the term I use to denote those moments either when the physical world disruptively announces itself within the textual gesture toward transcendence, or when the text itself foregrounds the materiality upon which the sublime experience is based. After developing these two theoretical constructs, this dissertation then argues that Smith's Elegiac Sonnets engages in the discourse of the material sublime by expressing the terror and alienation she encounters upon leaving her spendthrift husband in order to raise their ten children on her own. The chapter examining Baillie's 1798 "Introductory Discourse" to A Series of Plays argues that her aesthetic theory anticipates Wordsworth's valorization of powerful emotions, natural language, and rustic themes, and that it is her methodical formulation of the "sympathetic curiosity" that compels Wordsworth to codify his own theories in the "Preface" of 1800. The final chapter explores the thematic and stylistic concerns of Tighe's Psyche, a rare example of an extended narrative poem by a woman during the Romantic period, in order to map her recuperation of beauty as an aesthetic category.

Many recent studies have investigated the significance of early modern marriage, but none consider divorce and the debates it generated, although both were of central importance to the period. This dissertation demonstrates that Protestant debates about divorce following Henry VIII's annulment and subsequent religious break from Rome facilitated England's larger negotiation between medieval and modern values, institutions, and attitudes toward the state. Analyzing poems, plays, and courtly and religious literature by More, Sidney, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton and others, I argue that the early modern debate over divorce became a vehicle for exploring both the role of marriage in the state and the freedom of individuals within marriage. Through imagining the possibility of divorce, early modern English writers further explored questions about the individual's relation to God, law, government, and society. "After Marriage" fills a gap in scholarly discussions of early modern marriage. Although many critics have addressed the importance of ideas about marriage in literature and culture, almost none has explored the period's conflicting ideas about divorce or its significance for the literature and drama.

This dissertation focuses on the narrative representation of moments of blasphemy in the writings of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Sara Suleri, Carolyn Steedman, and Mukul Kesavan by focusing on the issue of 'what narrative energies motivate the production of blasphemy' and 'from where does the decision to blaspheme come'. By reading these representations of blasphemy in the context of 'blasphemy' as it was invoked in the "Rushdie affair" and the reactionary nationalist work it performed, I challenge the tendency to locate blasphemy in an act, intention, program, or a proper name. By drawing on the Foucauldian sense of transgression as that which is determined by, rather than an overcoming of the limits of law, I argue that the texts of Rushdie and Kureishi offer too narrow a view of blasphemy. This is because blasphemy here is tied to an exuberant iconoclasm that is assumed to generate a radical social agency. In contrast, the texts of Sara Suleri, Steedman, and Kesavan show up the problems involved in naming an act as transgressive. The texts of Suleri and Steedman show us the labor, body, and cost of transgression that is suppressed in Rushdie's texts by giving us a history of agency that does not cross over into visibility. A feminist and materialist analysis of the scene of blasphemy's production can produce new and productive ways of thinking about blasphemy. Such a reading tells us that blasphemy in Rushdie's texts emerges out of a male sexual anxiety about authorship and authority. Such a reading also shows how Kureishi's anxiety about imagination in the "post-Rushdie affair" predicament has forced him to transfix London as the natural site of modernity, secularism, and imagination. This becomes clear when we read this novel against his "pre-Rushdie affair" text, "Sammy and Rosie get Laid" where he lays bare the binding of London and Pakistan. If blasphemy in Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman and Suleri's Meatless Days takes the form of an exposure of nationalism's power to conscript woman's body as a cultural signifier for nation-making, in Kesavan's historical novel Looking Through Glass blasphemy is a metaphor for the failed activism of the ordinary people of Indian nationalist history.

<p> Utopias often elicit visions of full-fledged societies that operate more successfully in contrast to a society of the present based on a principle of cognitive estrangement where the daily routines of a new civilization strike readers as strange and advantageous. While William Shakespeare's drama rarely portrays radical societies that speak directly to the fantastic nature of utopia, it does feature moments that draw attention to desires for social change, presenting glimmers of the utopian impulse throughout his work. In this dissertation, I use utopia as critical approach for analyzing Shakespeare's comedies, romances, and tragedies, specifically <i>As You Like It, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet,</i> and <i>Macbeth.</i> While critics have approached the <i>The Tempest</i> as a utopian play, other works by Shakespeare do not receive much attention from this perspective. This dissertation addresses the lack of attention paid to other plays, illustrating the degree to which the health of the state as a theme featured prominently in his works. I argue that the desires expressed by characters in these plays capture the wishes and despairs of entire social ranks during the Elizabethan and Jacobean, connecting their wishes and fantasies to utopian and dystopian analysis. <i>As You Like It</i> and <i>The Tempest</i> feature utopic settings and address themes of colonialism and egalitarianism. Yet, rather than present locations of harmony, these plays explore the problems and contradictions that spring from the attempts to actualize a utopian climate. Characters in <i> The Taming of the Shrew,</i> <i>Twelfth Night</i>, and <i> Romeo and Juliet</i> possess radical aspirations, and they discover opportunities to transform their identities as it relates to their respective societies. However, these characters ultimately fail to rupture the ideologies of their societies. In my final chapter, I argue how dystopian themes arise from the depictions of tyranny and treachery in <i>Hamlet</i> and <i> Macbeth.</i> The transgressions of the Kings in both plays plague their kingdoms. Tackling Shakespeare from a utopian lens illustrates that rather than forming alternative, ideal societies, the concept can be understood as an ambiguous, unfinished dialectical process that strives for social betterment. </p>

<p> By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Great Britain led the European contest for imperial dominion and successfully extended its influence throughout Africa, the Americas, South East Asia, and the Pacific. National pride in the world's leading empire, however, was laced with an increasing anxiety regarding the unbridled frontier and the hybridization of Englishness and the socio-ethnic and cultural Other. H. Rider Haggard's <i> She,</i> Bram Stoker's <i>Dracula,</i> and Richard Marsh's <i> The Beetle,</i> three Imperial Gothic novels, personify the monstrosity of hybridity in antagonists who embody multiple races and cultures. Moreover, as representatives of various ancient empires, these characters reveal the fragile nature of imperial power that is anchored in the conception of human and cultural evolution. </p><p> Hybridity works to disrupt the fragile web of power structures that maintain imperial dominance and create a fissure in the construct of Britain's national identity. Yet, the novels ultimately contain the invasion narrative by circulating power back to the English characters through the hybrid, polyglot, and metamorphosing English language by which the enemy is disoriented and re-rendered as Other. Using New Historicist and Postcolonial theories, this work examines the aporia of linguistic hybridity used to overcome the threat of racial and cultural hybridity as it is treated in Haggard, Stoker, and Marsh's novels.</p>

<p> The stories in this collection are all connected by style, location, mood, and theme. They are introduced by a section which questions the distinction of "Southern" writing. The introduction argues that a story's simply taking place in the South is not enough for a work of fiction to be meaningfully classified as Southern. The introduction suggests that literature characteristically matching what most people think of as Southern is most often written out of affectation.</p>