論文提要內容： 本篇論文旨在探討安•瑞克麗芙之《烏多夫堡秘辛》中十八世紀女性如何藉改造自身特質，逆轉身處不平等的劣勢。同時並引用瑪麗•烏爾史東考夫特的自由女性主義來分析小說文本。在小說中，瑞氏藉由女主角的冒險故事來剖析十八世紀的女性如何在父權社會中抗拒屈從，堅持自我存在的價值和追尋個人幸福。 本論文共分為五章。第一章概述瑞氏生平背景、作品特性、本小說之寫作背景、古今評論對本小說之評價，以及分析本文所應用的理論。第二章與第三章側重瑞氏對十八世紀之「感性」（sensibility）的分析。註1瑞氏在小說中以許多篇幅描寫「感性」對當時女性的深遠影響，並探討其正、反兩面的價值。有鑑於此，第二章討論瑞氏對「感性」強化女性膚淺、非理性等負面特質的批判。第三章探討瑞氏如何運用「感性」中知性、理性、利他三種正面價值來改變女性軟弱無能的特質。第四章乃瑞氏在小說中對於女權和女性獨立自主觀點之分析。最後一章為結論兼及小說寫作和瑞氏作品的貢獻。 / Abstract In The Mysteries of Udolpho Ann Radcliffe describes the story of a young, middle-class woman. She illustrates how the innocent, sensitive protagonist fights against oppression, defends her value and finds her own happiness in the male dominated world. By describing the protagonist’s opposition to subordination, Radcliffe points out the necessity of changing women’s manners. The writer of this thesis explores Radcliffe’s concern with the social inferiority of women in The Mysteries of Udolpho. The writer also applies Mary Wollstonecraft’s liberal feminist thought in her discussion of Radcliffe. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is a general introduction. It includes Ann Radcliffe and her works, the critical response, the theory employed in the textual analysis, namely Wollstonecraft’s liberal feminist thought and an overview of the eighteenth-century sensibility. The second chapter focuses on Radcliffe’s attack of the false sensibility and how it distorts the nature of women. The third chapter centers on the virtuous sensibility and how it functions as the power to reverse women’s social inferiority. In the fourth chapter, the stress will be laid upon issues of marriage, property and the meaning of independent women. The concluding chapter discusses the contribution of Radcliffe as novelist.

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In an age of Revolution, when the rights of the individual were being fought for, Anna Letitia Barbauld was at the centre of the ideological debate. This thesis focuses on her political writing; it argues that she was more radical than previously thought. It provides new evidence of Barbauld’s close connection to an international network of reformers. Motivated by her Dissenting faith, her poems suggest that she made topical interventions which linked humanitarian concerns to wider abuses of power. This thesis traces Barbauld’s intellectual connections to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious and political thought. It examines her dialogues with the leading thinkers of her era, in particular Joseph Priestley. Setting her political writing in the context of the 1790s pamphlet wars, I argue that it is surprising that her 1792 pamphlet, Civic Sermons, escaped prosecution; its criticism of the government has similarities to the ideas of writers who were tried. My analysis of Barbauld’s political and socio-economic ideas suggests that, unlike many of her contemporaries, she trusted ordinary people, believing that they had a right to be involved in government. She argued that intellectuals should provide them with information but not tell them what to think. These democratic ideas were reflected in her literary approach; she employed different genres to reach different audiences. She critiqued and used the discourses of enthusiasm and sensibility to appeal to the emotions of her readers. I argue that, by adapting the traditionally male genre of political pamphlets, her work was part of a tradition of progressive female political thought dating back to the seventeenth century. Her innovative defence of civil liberties contributed to the development of liberalism.

Feeling Subjects investigates sensibility in relation to the production of subjectivity in the later eighteenth century. It creates a model of sensibility as a discursive space bringing together literary, philosophical, and medical understandings of feeling. It argues that sensibility’s discursive space produces experiential subjects in an ongoing, dynamic project of negotiating between the internalization of public experiences and the projection of private feelings and thoughts. It invokes the three-dimensional image of the Möbius strip to envision inner/private and external/public expressions of feeling as inseparable, yet distinct elements that help to produce the feeling subject. This model of sensibility represents a new theory of subjectivity in the later eighteenth-century where the literary subject and the social community that surrounds him or her are both co-constitutive and co-destructive and where the traditional binaries are challenged in a model that sees every character as simultaneously a public and private subject. The aim of the project is to show that the legacies of rational men and emotional women which have occupied scholars of the eighteenth century for much of the last fifty years suggest a much more cohesive understanding of gender and its connection to subjectivity than is revealed in much of the fiction of sensibility in the period. Feeling Subjects offers a theory of sensibility that is not inherently gendered, and that focuses on how individuals experience themselves in relation to the world around them while simultaneously generating that world. The project is divided into two halves which enact the Möbius model of private and public feeling. The first half focuses on the personally and socially productive potential of sensibility in The Adventures of David Simple, The History of Ophelia, The Vicar of Wakefield, and The Fool of Quality. The second half examines the increasingly negative expression of sensibility in A Simple Story, Secresy, The Natural Daughter, and Zofloya. Throughout Feeling Subjects, sensibility is not just a word denoting the expression of feeling, but a discursive space through which to experience the tensions and interrelations between public and private thought and feeling in theories of socialization in the later eighteenth-century novel. / English

For years critics have noticed how Jane Austen uses a cold, a sore throat, a sprained ankle, or some other minor affliction (Watson 336) to further the plots of her novels. Although the recurring motif of illness appears to be nothing more than the recording of everyday trivialities, the frequent appearance of illness during the courtship narratives is intriguing. The bodily production of modesty requires the conscious display of delicacy; however, delicacy requires disability in order to be visible to society. Similarly, sensibility also requires the display of delicacy and, by extension, disability. Applying Judith Butlers performance theory to disability, it is possible to analyze the performance of delicacy used in both the production of modesty and sensibility, and thereby understand the degree to which delicacy is a learned performance rather than an innate feminine trait. Austens heroines display varying degrees of affectation of both modesty and sensibility through their performances of delicacy. These performances serve to highlight each heroines degree of modesty and sensibility, as well as to pique the interest ideally, although not always successfully of potential lovers. The performance of disability through delicacy is an essential feature of the temporary invalidism experienced by the heroines during the courtship narratives of Austens novels.

One of the fundamental insights of Kants ethical theory is that moral requirements cannot follow from our understanding of motivational capacities. Ethics must precede psychology. But Kant also believes we can learn new things about what we are capable of from ethics, in particular what it would be like to act out of respect for the moral law. This is the task of Kants moral psychology. It must explain how practical reason can, in place of desire, serve as an incentive for action. I argue that Kants psychology of the moral incentive plays a crucial, but often ignored, role in his project of moral justification. While our view of human motivational capacities cannot dictate our understanding of moral requirements, we must still show how those requirements become effective in human conduct. That is, we must show how they enter into the structure of human motivation. The challenge for Kants moral psychology is to explain this. The trouble is that the relationship between practical reason and human sensibility is so puzzling that we may begin to doubt their connection. So we face a problem the problem of motivational skepticism. My dissertation is organized into two parts. First, I argue that Kants project of moral justification in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) fails because it does not specify the psychological conditions required for moral action (PART I). Part of the problem is that Kant thought he could only explain these conditions in causal terms. In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) Kant abandons this assumption and develops a new analysis of the influence practical reason has on feeling. Secondly, I show that this analysis is meant to address a skeptical worry left unresolved in the Groundwork, namely, the worry that our will may be unfit for morality (PART II). By showing how we are capable of moral sensibility, then, I argue that the second Critique develops a powerful response to skepticism about moral motivation. / PhD

For years critics have noticed how Jane Austen uses a cold, a sore throat, a sprained ankle, or some other minor affliction (Watson 336) to further the plots of her novels. Although the recurring motif of illness appears to be nothing more than the recording of everyday trivialities, the frequent appearance of illness during the courtship narratives is intriguing. The bodily production of modesty requires the conscious display of delicacy; however, delicacy requires disability in order to be visible to society. Similarly, sensibility also requires the display of delicacy and, by extension, disability. Applying Judith Butlers performance theory to disability, it is possible to analyze the performance of delicacy used in both the production of modesty and sensibility, and thereby understand the degree to which delicacy is a learned performance rather than an innate feminine trait. Austens heroines display varying degrees of affectation of both modesty and sensibility through their performances of delicacy. These performances serve to highlight each heroines degree of modesty and sensibility, as well as to pique the interest ideally, although not always successfully of potential lovers. The performance of disability through delicacy is an essential feature of the temporary invalidism experienced by the heroines during the courtship narratives of Austens novels.

Morgan reads the treatment of gesture in Clarissa (Richardson, 1747 - 48), Amelia (Fielding,1 751), and Cecilia (Burney, 1782) to study the capacity the sentimental novel attributes to physical forms of eloquence to generate sociability and moderate selfishness in London. He argues that the eighteenth-century English novel of sentiment adopts a physiology derived from Descartes's theory of the body-machine to construct sentimental protagonists whose gestures bear witness against Bernard Mandeville's assertions that people are not naturally sociable, and that self-interest, rather than sympathy, determines absolutely every aspect of human behaviour. However, when studied in the context of sentimental fiction set in the cruel and unsociable metropolis of London, the action of this eloquent body proved relatively ineffectual in changing its spectators for the better. In the English novelistic tradition that stems from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747 - 48), selfishness lies at the roots of civilization, and inculcates modern urban people with instinctively theatrical mores: metropolitan theatricality, marked out in the gestures of the polite body, works to vitiate the sociability that might naturally animate everyday human intercourse. Clarissa responds to the dilemma of the intrinsic theatricality and self-interestedness of modern civil society with a heroine whose gestures (that is, whose physical states) demonstrate an eloquence that partially counteracts some of the effects self-love has upon the metropolis. But while sympathy and natural eloquence do little to diminish London's submission to selfishness, they remain, in Clarissa, unequivocally good. In contrast with Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751) and Frances Burney's Cecilia (1782) criticize both phenomena. In these novels, both by written by socially conservative authors, natural eloquence and sympathy do not generate sociability in London at all and do not even ensure personal virtue unless they are tempered by the discipline of some kind of theatricality. For Fielding and for Burney, unregulated sympathy becomes a problem to which the best remedy is a modicum of stage-craft. But, strangely enough, all three novels indirectly licence the principles of the self-interest they ostensibly attack. Ultimately, these novels of sentiment self-consciously position sympathy and natural eloquence as supplemental discourses that might protest against the dominant practices of Mandevillian self-interest that produce the social order of the metropolis. The net result is that the novel of sentiment implicitly tolerates the dominance of self-interest in the areas of public activity that lie mostly outside the subject-matter with which sentimental fiction principally concerns itself.

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