Thesis advisor: Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace / Thesis advisor: Alan Richardson / This project argues that the British financial revolution ushered in a new way of conceptualizing time based in mathematic innovations of the seventeenth-century. As it was employed in financial instruments and government policies, mathematics' spatialized representation of time conflicted with older, more intuitive experience of time associated with consciousness and duration. Borrowing from the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I examine how he interaction between these two temporalities reshaped conceptions of value, the public, and the body in the first half of the eighteenth century. The first two chapters of my study explore texts ranging from pamphlets that advocated for the establishment of banks to the periodical essays of The Spectator and The Tatler that advocated for political economic conceptions of time and value at the turn of the century. These texts reveal the subtle tensions and strange paradoxes created by the clash of disparate temporalities and open the door to new readings of fictional narratives like those of Daniel Defoe and Aphra Behn. My second two chapters focus on selected works by these two authors to explore how longer first-person narrative forms modeled both the possibilities and dangers of emerging political economic structures. My study concludes with two chapters that follow the development of the oriental tale in Britain. Making use of a seventeenth-century tradition that explores the tensions between representation and meaning in oriental fables, Arabian Nights' Entertainments follows on the heels of John Paul Marana's Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy and reshapes the genre to reflect the new concerns of a global marketplace in which deferral has become essential to the production of value. I conclude these chapters with readings of Johnson's Rasselas, Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet, and Frances Sheridan's Nourjahad, three tales that foreshadow late-eighteenth-century efforts to manage the public and its temporal paradoxes through an attention to the body. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

For years, scholars have focused on the serious narrative of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and have been unable to reconcile the episodes of ironic humor within the larger serious narrative. By reading Rasselas as an imitation of Ecclesiastes rather than an Oriental tale, critics can begin to identify the humor in Rasselas through the embellishment of the story of Ecclesiastes. The failures of the character Koheleth in Ecclesiastes become the genesis for the failures of Rasselas and his companions; however, the failures of Rasselas and more elaborate and comedic. How Johnson embellishes these failures to create humorous irony in Rasselas becomes clearer for the reader through this new categorization of genre, which can hopefully unite the two opposing views of criticism surrounding this book.

La dissertazione si pone due principali obiettivi: la ricostruzione della biografia della scrittrice settecentesca Clara Reeve e la presentazione della sua vasta produzione letteraria nella quale l'autrice sperimenta diversi generi, dalla poesia (Original Poems on Several Occasions) al saggio di critica (The Progress of Romance), dal romanzo gotico e storico (The Old English Baron, Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon) al romanzo pedagogico-sentimentale (The Two Mentors, The School for Widows, Plans of Education, The Exiles, Destination), cimentandosi in svariate tecniche espressive quali l'epistolario, il dialogo e la conversazione, il memoriale. Le opere sono state affrontate seguendo principalmente l'ordine cronologico al fine di valorizzare le peculiarità di ciascuna e al contempo rappresentare il processo di maturazione della scrittrice. Ne deriva una monografia inedita che pone particolare enfasi sul contesto storico e sull'ambiente culturale in cui le opere fecero la loro apparizione al fine di comprendere meglio i processi di ricezione presso i lettori e i critici coevi. Chiudono lo studio tre importanti appendici: la prima fornisce i contenuti delle opere reeviane in sintesi; la seconda propone l'integrale trascrizione dai manoscritti della corrispondenza di Clara Reeve a Joseph Cooper Walker; la terza offre una consistente documentazione fotografica. / The dissertation focuses on two main objectives: the reconstruction of Clara Reeve's fragmentary biography and the presentation of this eighteenth century authoress' literary production in which she attempts different literary genres, from poetry (Original Poems on Several Occasions) to the essay (The Progress of Romance), from the gothic and historical novel (The Old English Baron, Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon) to the sentimental and didactic novel (The Two Mentors, The School for Widows, Plans of Education, The Exiles, Destination), experimenting different forms such as the epistle, the dialogue and the memoir. The analysis of the text is based on a chronological perspective in order to emphasize the peculiarity of each work and simultaneously to present the progress of an artist. The result is an unprecedented monograph which stresses the historical context and the cultural environment in which Clara Reeve's works appeared so as to understand the dynamics of her public and critical reception. Three important appendixes close the dissertation: the first offers the plots of the works; the second proposes the full text transcription from the manuscripts of Clara Reeve's letters to Joseph Cooper Walker; the third collects documents and illustrations.