This dissertation is a study of how the culture of sensibility was expressed in the everyday practices and social relations of the Gjörwell family. Headed by publicist, publisher and royal librarian Carl Christoffer Gjörwell (1731-1811), the Gjörwell family served as the centre of a wide circle of friends in late 18th-century Stockholm. Gjörwell has been regarded as one of the first Swedish representatives of 18th-century sensibility as well as an archetype of the Swedish cult of friendship. Due to his effusive emotional expressiveness and passionate friendships with other men, Gjörwell has largely been derided as effeminate by researchers from the 19th century onwards. Using theoretical perspectives from the field of the history of emotions (more concretely the perspectives of William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein and Monique Scheer) this study centres on the emotional practices of the Gjörwell family, especially taking aspects of gender, class, sexuality and power into account. Gjörwell’s vast collection of family and friendship correspondence forms the empirical basis of this study. This study shows that the Gjörwell family and circle of friends in many ways could be regarded as an emotional community in which primarily emotions of happiness and joy are expressed. Furthermore, this study shows how the exercise of power could form part in the creation of an emotional community, as Gjörwell makes constant attempts to influence the way family members and friends manage their emotions, strongly dissuading them from the expression of melancholy. Although he has been viewed as effeminate by posterity, Gjörwell in fact regards himself as manly. This is due to his ability to remain joyful through adversities which testifies to his strong, and therefore manly, nervous organisation. This study thus further illustrates how a marked shift in masculine gender norms took place between the 18th and 19th centuries. This study also shows how expression of tender emotion could be a way of reinforcing personal status. This was due to the close association made between sensibility and virtue, in itself a central concept during this era. As Gjörwell is denied recognition in his professional life, the expression of tender emotion – and thus of virtue – becomes an important aspect of his personal life.

This dissertation examines the way the work of two nineteenth-century American authors, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, borrowed from, challenged, and even worked to support prevailing cultural attitudes, conventions, and ideas regarding death, mourning and memorializing as they produced their poems and tales, articulated their thoughts regarding the purpose and act of producing and reading literature, and designed their material book or magazine objects. Using both new historicist and book studies methodologies, it exposes how these writers drew upon literary, ritual, and material practices of this culture, and how, in turn, this culture provided an interpretive framework for understanding such work. In its initial three chapters, which focus largely on Edgar Allan Poe, this dissertation revisits Poe's aesthetic philosophies ("The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition"), much of his most notable Gothic work (such as "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven"), readers' responses to this work, and his own attempts or designs to mass-produce his personal script (in "A Chapter on Autography," "Anastatic Printing," and his cover for The Stylus) in order to revise our understanding of his relationship to this culture and its literary work, exposing a more sympathetic and less subversive relationship than is usually assumed. It illumines how Poe's aesthetic philosophies were aligned with those that undergird many of the contemporary mourning objects of the day, how his otherwise Gothic and macabre literature nevertheless served rather conventional and even recuperative ends by exposing the necessity of and inviting readers to participate in culturally sanctioned acts of mourning, and how he sought to confirm the harmony between his work and more conventional "consolation" or mourning literature by actively seeking to bring that work (and the "self" that produced it) visibly before his readership in a medium that this culture held was a reliable indicator of the nature and intent of both that work and its producer - namely his own personal script. In its latter three chapters, this dissertation illuminates Whitman's own extensive use of mourning and memorial conventions in his work, disclosing the way his 1855 Leaves of Grass relied, in both its literary and physical construction, upon the conventions of mourning and memorial literature, detailing the way his 1865 book of Civil War poetry Drum-Taps sought to unite a national body politic by creating a poetic and material text capable of allowing a grieving public readership to reconnect with and successfully mourn their dead, and how his 1876 Two Rivulets, overtly conceived of as a memorial volume, made use of the conventions associated with mourning and memorializing to bring readers to a more democratic understanding of "self" that Whitman believed would transform America into the democratic utopia it was destined to become. In revealing the way in which these authors' works reflect and reflect upon this culture, its ideologies, rituals, and practices, the dissertation also illumines an otherwise critically underexplored connection between these two writers. It details the influence of Poe's work on Whitman's poetic project, and borrows from Whitman's critical response to Poe in order to recast our understanding of Poe's literature in the manner detailed above. Thus, this dissertation offers new interpretations of some of the period's most canonical literature, alters our thinking about the relationship of these authors to each other and to nineteenth-century sentimental culture, and, finally, exposes a curious interdependence between Gothic and more transcendental literature that has implications not only for reading the work of Whitman and Poe, but for interpreting these literatures more generally.

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The Culture of Sensibility permeates both Burney’s and Austen’s novels. Burney and Austen both use anomalous bodies and minds as a vehicle to explore the performative requirements of the Culture of Sensibility. The performance of disability, including bodily manifestations of nervous disorders, melancholy, and hypochondria, allows sensibility to become visible on the body. This dissertation examines the similarities between Burney’s and Austen’s portrayals of disability in order to understand how Austen’s texts engage and reflect Burney’s influence. Despite the frequency with which disability is necessary for the production of Sensibility, the connection between disability and Sensibility remains unexplored. This dissertation investigates the connection between various performances of disability with the Culture of Sensibility and exposes the narrative reliance on the anomalous body in both Burney’s and Austen’s novels. Through a combination of disability theory and performance theory, this dissertation examines the Culture of Sensibility’s reliance on the non-normative body for the performance of sentimental behaviour. Disability theory allows for the examination of the anomalous body beyond that of a strictly medical definition. Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price illustrates the difference between the medical and social construction of disability. Using only the medical model, Fanny’s debility represents her poor health; however, the social construction of disability connects Fanny’s debility to the fetishization of the anomalous body by the Culture of Sensibility. Disability features in Burney’s and Austen’s courtship narratives, as temporary physical and mental impairment provide opportunities for physical proofs of Sensibility, somatic communication of desire, and narrative resolution. Both Burney’s and Austen’s illness narratives of characters with permanent disabilities reveal concerns of the appropriation of the ii invalid’s favourable position within the Culture of Sensibility through an affected performance of disability. Male characters with temporary or permanent physical impairment suffer effeminization and exclusion from courtship narratives, whereas instances of female invalidism contribute to successful resolution of courtship narratives. I conclude that Burney’s and Austen’s reliance on the anomalous body to prove sensibility indicates that the late-eighteenth century sentimental novel normalizes the anomalous body.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-221).

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed May 3, 2010). Directed by Christian Moraru; submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 326-373).

The aim of the present thesis is to analyse how the narrative affects the various philosophical debates in Tristram Shandy and Jacques le fataliste. Contrary to what one expects from a philosophical novel, Sterne and Diderot do not impose upon the reader an authorial and authoritative discourse. Dominant discourses are constantly challenged and contradicted. The philosophical debates in both novels remain open and are left without a conclusion. The author's voice is but one amongst many others, and it is the narrative which maintains the dialogue between them by preventing one particular voice from invalidating the others. My argument hinges on Bakhtinian dialogism, which can be defined as the presence of interacting voices and views. In Tristram Shandy and Jacques le fataliste, dialogism occurs through the narrative structure allowing for the confrontation of the contradictory discourses in the philosophical debates, and enabling them to engage in dialogue, instead of establishing the authorial voice as the sole valid discourse in the text. Through those contradictions, the philosophical content takes on a different form, that of a refusal of systematic discourse. No dogmatic view is forced upon the reader. Sterne and Diderot do not offer a solution to the various philosophical questions debated in their novels. However, they do offer a philosophical method whereby the confrontation of contradictory ideas creates a dynamic for the pursuit of truth.

While literary scholars have written extensively about sensibility in the past two decades, most of the studies have treated either the history of sensibility itself or how it interacted with a particular aspect of English culture and literature, such as sexuality or politics. My project instead examines how a single author, Maria Edgeworth, used sensibility in her writing over the course of her career. I analyze the use of sensibility in three of her novels: Belinda (1801), her first full-length novel; The Absentee (1812), her influential Irish national tale, written at the height of her popularity in the middle years of her career; and Helen (1834), her last novel. This analysis illustrates the changing attitude of both Edgeworth and English society to sensibility and its representations in literature. In Belinda, Edgeworth uses sensibility to demonstrate the virtue and superiority of the characters who possess it, and also to rehabilitate the concept itself. She differentiates between mere affectation and true sensibility by creating both positive and negative examples of sensibility in Belinda – characters clearly possess true sensibility, and those who only pretend to it. In The Absentee, Edgeworth adheres much more closely to the conventions of sentimental fiction than she had in her previous society novels. In my discussion of The Absentee, I demonstrate how Edgeworth uses the conventions of sentiment both to make Irish culture accessible to her English audience and to justify the Irish estate system which put Anglo-Irish landowners in a position of authority over native Irish tenants. My final section focuses on Edgeworth's last novel, Helen, which marks a return to the genre of the society novel with which she began her career. While Edgeworth still uses sensibility as a sign of virtue in Helen, she is also much more interested than previously in the interplay between education and inborn qualities of personality – the very qualities whose existence she was so skeptical of in her education manual, Practical Education, published two years before she began her career as a fiction writer.

Ascetic Citizens: Religious Austerity and Political Crisis in Anglo-American Literature, 1681-1799, attends to a number of scenes of voluntary self-restraint in literary, political, and religious writings of the long eighteenth century, scenes that stage, what Alexis de Tocqueville calls, “daily small acts of self-denial” in the service of the nation. Existing studies of asceticism in Anglo-American culture during the period are extremely slim. Ascetic Citizens fills an important gap in the scholarship by re-framing religious practices of seclusion and self-denial as a broadly-defined set of civic practices that permeate the political, religious, and gender discourses of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. This thesis focuses on the transatlantic relevance of the ascetic citizen—a figure whose rhetorical utility derives from its capacity, as a marker of political and religious moderation, to deploy individual practices of religious austerity as a means of suturing extreme political binaries during times of political crisis. My conception of asceticism’s role in Anglo-American society is informed by an understanding of ascetic citizenship as a cluster of concepts and cultural practices linking the ascetic’s focus on bodily control to republican theories of political subjectivity. The notion that political membership presupposes a renunciation of personal liberties on the part of the individual citizen represents one of the key assumptions of ascetic citizenship. The future guarantee of individual political rights is ensured by present renunciations of self-interest. As such, the ascetic citizen functions according to the same economy by which the religious ascetic’s right to future eternal reward is ensured by present acts of pious self-abnegation. That is to say, republican political liberty is enabled by what we might call an ascetic prerequisite in which the voluntary self-sacrifice of civic rights guarantees the state’s protection of such rights from the infringements of one’s neighbour. While the abstemious nature of ascetic practice implies efficiency grounded in economic frugality, bodily self-restraint, and physical isolation, the ascetic citizen functions as the sanctioned perversion of a normative devotional practice that circumvents the division between profane self-interest and sacred disinterestedness. The relevance of ascetic citizenship to political culture is its political fluidity, its potential to exceed the ideological functions of the dominant culture while revealing the tension that exists between endorsement of, and dissent from, the civic norm. Counter-intuitively, the ascetic citizen’s practice is marked by a celebration of moderation, of the via media. Forging a space at the threshold between endorsement/dissent, the ascetic citizen maps the dialectic movement of cultural extremism, forging a rhetorically useful site of ascetic deferral characterized by the subject’s ascetic withdrawal from making critical decisions. Ascetic Citizens provides a detailed investigation of how eighteenth-century Anglo-American authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Hannah Webster Foster, and Charles Brockden Brown conceive of individual subjectivity as it exists in the pause or retired moment between competing political orders.

Ascetic Citizens: Religious Austerity and Political Crisis in Anglo-American Literature, 1681-1799, attends to a number of scenes of voluntary self-restraint in literary, political, and religious writings of the long eighteenth century, scenes that stage, what Alexis de Tocqueville calls, “daily small acts of self-denial” in the service of the nation. Existing studies of asceticism in Anglo-American culture during the period are extremely slim. Ascetic Citizens fills an important gap in the scholarship by re-framing religious practices of seclusion and self-denial as a broadly-defined set of civic practices that permeate the political, religious, and gender discourses of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. This thesis focuses on the transatlantic relevance of the ascetic citizen—a figure whose rhetorical utility derives from its capacity, as a marker of political and religious moderation, to deploy individual practices of religious austerity as a means of suturing extreme political binaries during times of political crisis. My conception of asceticism’s role in Anglo-American society is informed by an understanding of ascetic citizenship as a cluster of concepts and cultural practices linking the ascetic’s focus on bodily control to republican theories of political subjectivity. The notion that political membership presupposes a renunciation of personal liberties on the part of the individual citizen represents one of the key assumptions of ascetic citizenship. The future guarantee of individual political rights is ensured by present renunciations of self-interest. As such, the ascetic citizen functions according to the same economy by which the religious ascetic’s right to future eternal reward is ensured by present acts of pious self-abnegation. That is to say, republican political liberty is enabled by what we might call an ascetic prerequisite in which the voluntary self-sacrifice of civic rights guarantees the state’s protection of such rights from the infringements of one’s neighbour. While the abstemious nature of ascetic practice implies efficiency grounded in economic frugality, bodily self-restraint, and physical isolation, the ascetic citizen functions as the sanctioned perversion of a normative devotional practice that circumvents the division between profane self-interest and sacred disinterestedness. The relevance of ascetic citizenship to political culture is its political fluidity, its potential to exceed the ideological functions of the dominant culture while revealing the tension that exists between endorsement of, and dissent from, the civic norm. Counter-intuitively, the ascetic citizen’s practice is marked by a celebration of moderation, of the via media. Forging a space at the threshold between endorsement/dissent, the ascetic citizen maps the dialectic movement of cultural extremism, forging a rhetorically useful site of ascetic deferral characterized by the subject’s ascetic withdrawal from making critical decisions. Ascetic Citizens provides a detailed investigation of how eighteenth-century Anglo-American authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Hannah Webster Foster, and Charles Brockden Brown conceive of individual subjectivity as it exists in the pause or retired moment between competing political orders.