This dissertation argues that friendship operates in mid-eighteenth-century English fiction as a privileged category of virtue, knowledge, and aesthetic value. By representing social tensions raised by extra-familial friendships and appealing to readers as friends, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Sarah Scott, and Laurence Sterne, develop ideal friendship into a reflexive trope for cultivating authorial identity, framing literary response, imagining a public sphere, and theorizing social reforms. Amiable Fictions offers a new way of thinking about the ethical frameworks that shape experimental narrative techniques at a moment when the English novel is just emerging into cultural prominence. In this study, I analyze the ways that these four novelists represent friendships as allegorical meditations on interpersonal ethics so as to imagine literary exchange as a virtual form of friendship. I explore how the idealized communicative intimacy of friendship becomes a basis for imagining more perfect spiritual and economic unions. On the level of plot, these fictions unpack the philosophical values of real friendship by staging its antagonism with persistent forms of patriarchy, aristocracy, and economic individualism. Drawing from the values of friendship that arise in the plot, these authors shape narrative exchanges as a tie of friendship. In cultivating an amiable ethos, they avoid appearing as slavish flatterers in a commercialized literary marketplace, or as overly didactic figures of institutional authority. Amiable Fictions builds on studies of the novel genre by accounting for the way a rhetoric of friendship motivates experiments in narrative form. I offer insights into developments in epistolary style, free indirect discourse, unreliable narration, anonymous authorship, and autobiographical form. I suggest that the concept of friendship orients these writers in their exploration of techniques, propelling them as they articulate a range of possibilities available for future authors of narrative fiction. This dissertation also engages current scholarly understandings of sociability, sensibility, domesticity, and public and private life in the mid-eighteenth century. These novelists deploy friendship as a moral category that challenges codes of sociability, refines understandings of sympathy, and often antagonizes the emerging cultural authority of the domestic sphere. Reframing questions of gender and sexuality and their influence on literary forms, the project highlights how male characters imitate friendship between women (and vice versa), how social reform impulses raise the need for heterosexual friendship, and how non-familial friendship conflicts with domestic norms as an alternative mediator of public and private character.

This paper examines the role of enslaved craftsmen in Charleston cabinetmaking shops during the late-eighteenth century and how wealthy Charlestonians’ desire fashionable goods fueled the demand for this labor force. The first chapter examines the rise of the wealthy Charlestonians and the origins of their taste for fashionable goods. The second chapter explores the increased use of enslaved craftsmen in Charleston cabinetmaking shops during the last half of the eighteenth century and how they affected the production of fashionable cabinet goods.

A collection of poetry exploring eighteenth-century material culture connected to empire and enslavement on display in museums.

For much of America's history, a certain fascination has existed in American culture with the lifestyle of the woodsman who made the hardwood wilderness his home. over time this fascination has given birth to a collection of romantic traits firmly identified with such a frontiersman. The requirements for survival in a deep wilderness forced the pre-American Revolution era woodsman turned long hunter, to be "Indian," to demonstrate a high level of marksmanship, and ultimately to draw most of his needs from the bounty of the forest. Such requirements tended to promote the popular conceptions surrounding the eastern frontiersman. Looking beyond those legendary traits, though, such a lifestyle was often an uphill path made only steeper by a rather monotonous diet, days spent in endless and mundane labor, and the threat of perpetual warfare born of political forces beyond his control.

PhD / Bodhasāra, previously untranslated into English, is a Sanskrit treasure. Written by Narahari in eighteenth century India, it consists of charming Sanskrit verse of the highest order. Full of metaphors and word puns, it is a clever piece of literature that stimulates the intellect and imagination. By carefully following the traditional protocols, Bodhasāra remains acceptable to orthodox Advaita Vedāntins. However, although superficially it appears to be merely another presentation of the Advaita Vedānta tradition, in-depth reading reveals a refreshingly new style. The Hindu tradition is poetically presented as invaluable to awaken discernment between the real and unreal, but the import of Bodhasāra is that, ultimately, liberation requires a maturity that is not bound by anything, including the tradition itself; it comes through an awakening discernment. Narahari is celebrating jīvanmukti, not as liberation from the world, but as liberation while living. Bodhasāra is stylishly poetic, but not poetry for poetry’s sake, nor bhakti (religious devotion); rather it exemplifies the potency of rasa (aesthetic flavour) and dhvani (aesthetic suggestion). Narahari understands the correspondence between words and truth and uses his poetic style to facilitate union of the individual and universal. Few eighteenth century Sanskrit works have even been read, let alone translated into English, so this translation of Bodhasāra is a valuable example of Indian thought immediately before Colonialism. It shows what modernity, defined here as a moving away from entrenched traditional beliefs to an empowerment of the individual living in the present moment, in an Indian context could have been like if Colonialism had not intervened. The implications of Bodhasāra to scholars of Indian history, Advaita Vedānta and Yoga need to be considered. Bodhasāra extends the project ‘Sanskrit knowledge systems on the eve of colonialism’ being a work on mokṣa written in the late eighteenth century. It revitalises academic research into Advaita Vedānta, presents a fresh view of Yoga, and fits well the notion of an Indian modernity or renaissance during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Comparative Religion, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-61).

This dissertation explores the surprising intersections among women's scandalous fiction and other popular genres in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. I use the term "women's scandalous fiction" to refer to the illicit tales of seduction authored by Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood. Women's scandalous fiction has consistently been viewed, both by contemporary readers and writers and modern critics, as a distinct genre: contemporary writers explicitly distance their works from its illicit and immoral content and modern critics continue to focus on the transgressive aspects of the works to the exclusion of other considerations. Challenging earlier critics whose analyses rely on the superficial qualities of these texts, in this dissertation I emphasize the ideological consistency that aligns women's scandalous fiction with other popular prose genres of this period. This comparative work reveals a consistent ideal of moderation and restraint-across eighteenth-century genres-that evidences a larger cultural belief in the value of regulating sexual desire. Chapter one establishes the mutability of genre categories in the early eighteenth century in contrast to the narrow specificity of genre definitions constructed as a result of the modern critical "origins of the novel" debate. This chapter shows that, while modern genre distinctions are theoretically useful, it is important to recognize that contemporary readers of the early novel had different and significantly broader ways of categorizing genre. I also discuss eighteenth-century attitudes about gender and genre, and I highlight the importance these attitudes have for understanding the ideological connections among texts in the period. In chapter two I compare women's moral fiction with immoral fiction and argue that, though these genres differ in the nature and degree of their sexualized discourse, both genres convey an implicit critique of failed patriarchal influence. Using self-proclaimed moral fictions-Penelope Aubin's The Strange Adventures of Count de Vinevil and Jane Barker's Love's Intrigues-and stigmatized immoral, scandalous fiction-Behn's The History of the Nun and Haywood's The City Jilt-I argue that many of these texts idealize female self-restraint and hold father figures responsible for women's capacity to perform this model of female identity. Chapter three compares Haywood's Fantomina: or, Love in Maze and Manley's New Atalantis with two English translations of French pornographic texts, The School of Venus and Venus in the Cloister, and explores the ways in which differing patterns of sexual discourse construct surprising ideals of femininity; specifically, analysis of narratives of seduction shows that both genres defer power at moments of sexual encounters to the man, allowing the ideal of feminine passivity to prevail. Chapter four moves to popular periodical papers by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele that construct an ideology of the aesthetic subject that parallels libertine ideology; I argue that the similar constructions of libertine and aesthetic pleasure in Addison and Steele's The Spectator, Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination" essays, Haywood's Love in Excess, and Behn's Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister are underpinned by the same hegemonic systems of patriarchal authority that govern the ideological constructions of gender discussed throughout this dissertation. Ultimately, the analysis in these chapters shows that we should continue to question the degree to which Haywood, Manley, and Behn are "scandalous writers" whose works challenge dominant eighteenth-century discourses about gender. By instead recognizing the ideological intersections among these texts and "moral" texts of the period, we can see the ways in which these writers engaged with dominant discourses about gender in complex ways.

The invasion of the Western Hemisphere by empire-building Europeans brought European forms of rhetoric to the Americas. American Indians who were exposed to European-style education gradually adopted some of the cultural ways of the invaders, including rhetorical forms and operations that led, via literacy in European languages, to autobiographical writing, historical consciousness, and literary self-representation. This dissertation uses rhetorical criticism to analyze autobiographical discourse of six eighteenth-century American Indian writers: Samuel Ashpo, Hezekiah Calvin, David Fowler, Joseph Johnson, Samson Occom, and Tobias Shattock. Their texts are rhetorically interrelated through several circumstances: all of these men were educated in a missionary school; most of them probably learned to read and write in English at the school; they left the school and worked as teachers and Christian missionaries to Indians, sharing similar obstacles and successes in their work; and they are Others on whom their teacher, Eleazar Wheelock, inscribed European culture. The six Indian writers appropriate language and tropes of the encroaching Euro-American culture in order to define themselves in relation to that culture and make their voices heard. They participated in European colonial culture by responding iv to, and co-creating, rhetorical situations. While the Indians' written discourse and the situations that called forth their writing have been examined and discussed through a historical lens, critiques of early American Indian autobiography that make extensive use of rhetorical analysis are rare. Thus this dissertation offers a long-overdue treatment of rhetoric in early American Indian autobiography and opens the way to rhetorical readings of autobiography by considering the early formation of the genre in a cross-cultural context.

This thesis seeks to define how Francis Barrett’s The Magus, Or Celestial Intelligencer is indicative of a transitional period (1800–1830) of English Magic. The intention and transmission of Barrett’s The Magus is linked to the revival of occultism and its use as a textbook for occult philosophy. This thesis provides a historical background preceding this revival. The aim of the thesis is to establish Barrett’s text as a hybrid interpretation of Renaissance magic for a modern audience. It is primarily by this hybridization that a series of feedback loops would begin to create the foundation for modern occultism. This study utilizes a careful study of primary sources, including a systematic examination of The Magus within its intellectual and social contexts.

In this thesis, I examine the radical political views and activism of Thomas Beddoes, a late eighteenth century chemist and physician. A multifaceted man, Beddoes corresponded with many of Britains leading industrial and intellectual lights, especially members of the Lunar Society, had a brief career as an Oxford lecturer, devised air delivery apparatus with James Watt, and wrote extensively to distribute useful medical knowledge to the public and argue for medical reform, all the while attracting the ire of the government and scientific community for his outspoken, radical, republican politics. <br><br> I track Beddoes career as a Friend of Liberty, set within the context of the British reform movement, from 1792, when he began involving himself publicly in agitation, to 1797, when the death-knell of the British reform movement sounded and the French Revolution seemed to have utterly failed. In doing so, I seek to determine to what extent Beddoes was a radical, a revolutionary, and a fifth-column threat to the British, whether or not his ideology was in any regard the product of his science, and what the nature of his radicalism and the lineage of his ideas can tell us about the intellectual culture of his era. <br><br> I conclude that Beddoes fiery rhetoric belies an otherwise moderate and pacific approach to political change, based in British Enlightenment ideas rather than emerging science. The republic, rather than a goal to be achieved through violent overthrow, was simply the only logical organization for a society of innately equal citizens, a fact he believed obvious to the enlightened mind. He defended the French Revolution while he could still cast it as a moderate endeavor led by rational men, but, like so many of its early British supporters, grew disillusioned as France descended into mob violence and the tyranny of Robespierre. Following the Priestley Riots of 1791, he harboured deep fears of a sans-culotte-like British mob, which threatened not only the Church and King, but the interests and liberty of those men like Joseph Priestley and James Watt who were generating valuable knowledge and industry around him. <br><br> My analysis supports Roy Porters theory of a unique British Enlightenment, a social fermentation which emphasized Lockean personal liberty, improvement, and private property (which evolved into the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith and David Hume), and which was, critically, defensive of liberties already gained. Beddoes constellation of political, religious, scientific, and economic influences reflect the characteristic Englishness of the enlightenment culture around him, distinct particularly from France, and helps illustrate the links between scientific and political ideas in the late Enlightenment.