Poland's political fate and the plight of her exiles during the nineteenth century evoked a mixed response from various sectors of the British population. Five separate aspects of pro-Polish sympathy have been analyzed. The Literary Association's efforts to raise money for the relief of refugees resident in Great Britain were severly hampered and finally crippled by public opinion hostile to charity for foreigners in the midst of domestic distress. Agitation designed to place pressure on the Government to intervene by force in order to re-establish the independence of Poland was never sufficiently strong between 1832 and 1867 to deflect the Government from pursuing a course dictated by national interests. This has been illustrated by a study of public opinion and official policy towards the restoration of Poland during the Crimean War. The attitude of several of the more important religious denominations to the Polish question was not uniform. Roman Catholics feared the destruction of Papal possessions in the event of Polish revolutionary fervour reaching Italy; Anglo-Jewry tended to be absorbed in the problem of its own disabilities while it was difficult for the Poles as a predominantly Catholic nation to avoid giving offence to the Established Church and dissenting sects. Anglo-Polish masonic contacts produced a new form of passive Polonophilism quite distinct from the conventional pattern of demonstrative sympathy for Poland but equally futile from the political point of view. Polish experience of foreign oppression was far more relevant for Irish nationalists than for the English. A backward agrarian economy and the Roman Catholic religion also drew the two nations together. Ireland, however, could offer nothing more substantial to the Poles than moral support and in return was able to profit from sophisticated Polish theories of insurrection.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Comparative Literature." Includes bibliographical references (p.205-215).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1913. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

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.

This study examined the development of sharing and its associations with moral emotions in an ethnically diverse sample of 244 4-, 8-, and 12-year-old children. Sharing was measured through participants’ allocation of resources in the dictator game. Participants completed self-report measures of sympathy and anticipated their negatively and positively valenced moral emotions (i.e., guilt and pride) following actions that either violated or upheld moral norms. Results demonstrated an age-related increase in sharing between ages 4 and 8. For children with low levels of sympathy, sharing was predicted by negatively valenced moral emotions following the failure to perform prosocial duties. Sympathy also emerged as a significant predictor of sharing behaviour in early childhood. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to children’s developing norms of fairness and the emergence of two compensatory emotional pathways to altruistic sharing, one via sympathy and one via negatively valenced moral emotions.

The primary goal of this study was to assess the development of maltreated school-age children's ability to understand the thoughts, feelings, and points of view of others. Level of egocentrism and social perspective-taking coordination were assessed in a group of 49 maltreated and 49 demographically matched nonmaltreated children. Twenty-six elementary and 23 high school students in each group are individually interviewed and their responses to hypothetical interpersonal situations coded for egocentricity and level of perspective-taking ability. The findings revealed that the maltreated students were more egocentric and delayed in their perspective-taking development at both the elementary and high school level. Maltreated elementary school children with higher levels of egocentrism were more likely than their less egocentric peers to report higher perceived social competence and self-worth. Theoretical implications, within the context of an organic-developmental approach, and implications for future research and clinical interventions are discussed.

This study examined the development of sharing and its associations with moral emotions in an ethnically diverse sample of 244 4-, 8-, and 12-year-old children. Sharing was measured through participants’ allocation of resources in the dictator game. Participants completed self-report measures of sympathy and anticipated their negatively and positively valenced moral emotions (i.e., guilt and pride) following actions that either violated or upheld moral norms. Results demonstrated an age-related increase in sharing between ages 4 and 8. For children with low levels of sympathy, sharing was predicted by negatively valenced moral emotions following the failure to perform prosocial duties. Sympathy also emerged as a significant predictor of sharing behaviour in early childhood. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to children’s developing norms of fairness and the emergence of two compensatory emotional pathways to altruistic sharing, one via sympathy and one via negatively valenced moral emotions.

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.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2010. / Title from PDF t.p. Release of full electronic text on OhioLINK has been delayed until July 1, 2013. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1913. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.