Appearances are one of the main concerns in eighteenth-century novels, but most studies relegate them to a subordinate role, in relation to other issues. Following Slavoj Žižek's understanding of ideology, Alain Badiou's concept of logics of appearances and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, this thesis offers a sustained analysis of a series of issues of appearances in the eighteenth-century novel, through an exploration of sixteen defining traits, based on Samuel Johnson's definitions of ‘appearance', ‘appear' and ‘apparition'. The concept of appearances allows for an interrogation of ideas, beliefs and positions about most things, including appearances themselves, as they remain open, in their structure and logic, destabilising and deconstructing the ways of thinking that try to contain them. This thesis argues that eighteenth-century novels reproduce, resist and deconstruct the eighteenth-century ideology based on a desire to neutralise the effects of appearances. Through a wide range of eighteenth-century novels, from Robinson Crusoe to Evelina, it argues that novels destabilise the relationship between appearance and being, proposing the multiple appearances of beings and becomings. William Godwin's Caleb Williams is taken as a paradigm, shown to contain most of the issues of appearances in the eighteenth-century novel, revealing that whatever there is, it must be supplemented by appearances in order to appear as reality. This thesis argues that novels came to grasp such a truth of appearances from the beginning of eighteenth-century, by locating appearances subjectively, making more evident the multiplicity and extent of fictions, allowing readers an increased degree of awareness of the fictionality of reality. Thus, this thesis makes a significant contribution to the study of issues of appearance and ideology within literature studies by establishing the genre of the novel as the event of appearances in the eighteenth century.

This thesis presents an interpretation of David Williams' (1738-1816) Lessons to a young prince (1790) ostensibly from a publisher-centric viewpoint. Through close analysis of its English-language editions it argues that Lessons has been consistently misattributed, misread, and otherwise taken out of context. The agglomeration of both contextual and particular factors contributed to this general negligence, but the most important factors were anonymity and the transformation of the text by the addition of a tenth lesson on Edmund Burke's Reflections, which altered the way Lessons was read by contemporaries in light of the revolution controversy. The thesis suggests that the explicit ad-hominen attack on Burke in the tenth lesson overshadowed what amounted to an implicit attack on Burke-in-transition towards Reflections contained in the original nine lessons. Using a significant body of previously unknown material to identify Williams' intended audience and the effects of anonymity, genre, and advertising on reader-response to Lessons, the thesis adds to existing knowledge about Williams' intentions and to the way his texts were read and understood by contemporaries. More particularly it underscores the importance of his publishers and charts their impact upon his text. The influence that Lessons' publishers had on the impact of the text, both intentional and unintentional had received no scholarly attention, and they are themselves, as publishers, understudied. However, as this thesis shows, their direct textual interpolations increased the satirical vigour of Lessons, whilst a sophisticated marketing campaign attempted to influence reader reception as well as sales. Indirectly, anonymity caused readers to superimpose the political sympathies of the publishers onto Lessons, which further pre-ordained the terms on which they were read.