This study revises a dominant narrative of the eighteenth-century, in which a secular modernity emerges in opposition to religious belief. It argues that a major challenge for writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and for English subjects generally, was to grasp the object world--including the modern technological object--in terms of its spiritual potential. I identify disputes around the liturgy and common prayer as a source of a folk psychology concerning mental habits conditioned by everyday interactions with devotional and cultural objects. Swift and Defoe therefore confront even paradigmatically modern forms (from trade items to scientific techniques) as a spiritual ecology, a network of new possibilities for practical piety and familiar forms of mental-spiritual illness. Texts like A Tale of a tub (1704) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) renew Reformation ideals for the laity by evaluating technologies for governing a nation of souls. Swift and Defoe's Protestantism thus appears as an active guide to understanding emotions and new experience rather than a static body of doctrine. Current historiography neglects the early modern sense that sectarian objects and rituals not only discipline religious subjects, but also provoke ambivalence and anxiety: Swift's Tale diagnoses Catholic knavery and Puritan hypocrisy as neurotic attempts to extract pleasure from immiserating styles of material praxis. Crusoe, addressed to more radical believers in spaces of trade, sees competent spiritual, scientific and commercial practice on the same plane, as techniques for overcoming fetishistic desires. Swift's orthodoxy of enforced moderation and Defoe's oddly worldly piety represent likeminded formulae for psychic reform, and not--as often alleged--conflicts between sincere belief and political or commercial interests. Gulliver's travels (1726) and A Journal of the plague year (1722) also link mind and governance through different visions of Protestant polity. Swift sees alienation from the national church--figured by a Crusoe or Gulliver--as refusal of common sense and problem solving. Defoe points to religious schism, exemplified by dissenters' exclusion from state church statistics, as a moral and medical failure: the city risks creating selfish citizens who also may overlook data needed to combat the plague. / text

Defoe and Fielding were intensely concerned with the social conditions of the time. The upsurge in crime constituted a threat to the ordinary citizen as well as a danger to civilized values. As Fielding in particular showed, exploitation of the ordinary citizen took place under the guise of respectability. It was the task of the writer to remove this guise and examine the real motives behind the actions of a particular individual and judge that person according to strict moral standards. The criminal was not simply a member of the lower classes; he could be a member of the aristocracy or of the government. The times were corrupt; Defoe and Fielding had to come to terms with this corruption by examining the motives behind it and the possible remedies for it. The difference between the various levels in society becomes blurred in their writings in order to make the point that robbery on the highway and robbery by the apparently respectable memeers of society are one and the same thing; both have to be exposed in order to preserve civilized standards. Both writers were searching for the truth, and took care to examine the individual circumstances surrounding a person's lapse into crime so that the fairest judgement possible could be made. This seeking after truth guides them in their fight against crime and corruption

The Long Eighteenth Century was a period in which change was constant and proceeding the Restoration Era; this sense of change continued throughout the era. Charles II created an era in which women were allowed on the theatre stage, and his mistresses accompanied him to court; Charles II set the stage for the proto-feminist ideas of the eighteenth century that would manifest themselves in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. These novels showcase the enlightenment of women and some of their male contemporaries and the beginning struggles of female agency. The eighteenth century was a time in which the separate sphere mentality grew ever stronger within the patriarchal society, and yet, women began to question their subservient place in this society—although this struggle would continue to intensify throughout the nineteenth century and eventually come to fruition in the late nineteenth century.

Проблематика построения стабильного и процветающего государства является одним из основных направлений в общественно-политической и экономической мысли Англии конца XVII в. и первой трети XVIII в. Процесс становления национальных государств сопровождается внутренней рефлексией интеллектуалов, выраженной в построении общественно-политических теорий. Автор работы приходит к выводу, что взгляд Д. Дефо на место монарха в «политическом теле» не расходится с превалирующими среди вигов идеями о «равновесии сил в государственном устройстве» местом и ролью короля и парламента. Функция короля заключается в охране английской свободы и «древней английской конституции». Ограниченная, или парламентская монархия признается Даниэлем Дефо лучшей формой правления применительно к Англии. Основанная на системе противовесов власть венчается королем, который есть отражение идеалов общества. Не претендующий на тираническую власть, он является гарантом «общего блага». «Общее благо» понимается Д. Дефо как система процветания английской нации, где общество разделено на две неравные страты – низший класс и остальные (коммерсанты, интеллектуалы, благородные (титулованное и нетитулованное дворянство) и монарх). Выполнение функций, возложенных на каждую часть «политического тела», ведет нацию к всеобщему благоденствию. / The problem of building a stable and prosperous state is one of the main directions in the socio-political and economic thought of England at the end of the XVII century and the first third of the XVIII century. The process of formation of national states is accompanied by the internal reflection of intellectuals, expressed in the construction of socio-political theories. The author of the work comes to the conclusion that D. Defoe's view of the place of the monarch in the "political body" does not diverge from the ideas prevailing among the Whigs about the "balance of power in the state structure" of the place and role of the king and parliament. The function of the King is to protect English freedom and the "ancient English constitution". The limited or parliamentary monarchy is recognized by Daniel Defoe as the best form of government in relation to England. The power based on the system of counterweights is crowned by the king, who is a reflection of the ideals of society. Not claiming tyrannical power, he is the guarantor of the "common good". The "common good" is understood by D. Defoe as a system of prosperity of the English nation, where society is divided into two unequal strata – the lower class and the rest (merchants, intellectuals, noble (titled and untitled nobility) and the monarch). The fulfillment of the functions assigned to each part of the "political body" leads the nation to universal prosperity.

<p>Much of the critical discourse on J.M. Coetzee’s <em>Foe</em> does not fully investigate its relationship with Daniel Defoe’s texts, despite <em>Foe</em>’s intimate relation with them. This thesis offers a postcolonial reading of Coetzee’s Susan Barton, Cruso and Friday against Daniel Defoe’s original characters Roxana, Robinson Crusoe and Friday. Chapter one discusses Roxana-as-feminist, female colonizer, representative of her sex and Amazon and compares her to Barton. It reveals the tendency of critical discourse to attempt to ‘know’ Barton as they ‘know’ Roxana, by categorizing her, and reveals how Coetzee’s character frustrates attempts to define her. The second chapter addresses eighteenth-century knowledge of race and how it differs from present day, which offers an alternate reading of <em>Robinson Crusoe</em> and complicates its use as a colonial handbook. I also discuss masculinity in Defoe’s <em>Robinson Crusoe</em> as an individual characteristic Coetzee alters into something that can be appropriated. His characters are not masculine but can wield phallic symbols such as the pen and the knife to reveal power as systemic rather than individualistic. The final chapter offers an in depth postcolonial reading of Friday and interrogates critical discourse’s tendency to read him as representative of ‘the colonized,’ or as a colonial trope.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

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.

Proposing the concept of mimetic uncertainty, this project aims to provide a critical inquiry into the correspondence of unreliable narration and realism. Building on Springett (2013) and Olsen (2003), a distinction between narratorial unreliability and uncertainty is proposed to denote whether a narrator explicitly signals an awareness of their fallible narration. I thereafter indicate how narratorial uncertainty, on the one hand, can serve to evoke a “reality effect” (Barthes 1989) on a receptive aesthetic level; and on the other hand, can provide a form of historicity (Jameson 1985) and discursive realism (Auerbach 2003) on an expressive historical axis. Through this tripartite framework, realism is contextualised within the discourse of unreliable narration, as well as the specific debate which surrounds uncertainty and fallibility. The textual analysis focuses on three separate works—Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague year (1722), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), and finally, Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013)—with the twofold aim of (1) providing a model for approaching uncertain narration and (2) applying a historically contingent realist reading. I argue that in all three novels, emphasis on how readers may respond to uncertain narration provides insight into socio-historical and discursive points of friction surrounding their authors. The overarching ambition of this study is to provide a more substantial and historicized understanding of the stylistic devices of contemporary authorship, while more broadly signifying the unexpected critical acuity of mimetic approaches as well as the challenges and demands which metamodernist literature approaches.

This master's thesis is primarily concerned with the philosophical conditions of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England that encouraged the emergence of periodical literature and perpetuated the birth of the novel. While most connections between periodical literature and the novel are made on how the former created the readership that ensured the latter's success, I focus on how the epistemology unique to the advent of empirical science together with the growing prominence of casuistic thought created a space in which periodical literature could emerge and the early novel could flourish. I investigate the underlying assertion of a particular philosophical amalgam that I call casuistic-empiricism. Such philosophies encouraged the Renaissance trend that devalued letter-of-the-law thinking, which led ultimately to a significant epistemological transformation in seventeenth-century England. Recognizing the immensity of this epistemological shift, I focus on the early seventeenth-century practice of casuistry as an outgrowth fueled by seventeenth-century natural philosophy. By investigating the poetry and prose of John Donne, I emphasize the pervasive threads of casuistic thought that found parallels in empirical epistemology. I proceed in a linear fashion by following the evolution and growing pervasiveness of casuistic culture into its period of culmination marked by the birth of the Athenian Gazette. Readers' prominent attraction to the periodical is shown to run on a parallel with the incipient empiricism. Indeed, the two prominent lines of thought (empiricism and casuistry) form a dynamic binary where each feeds off of and is fed by the other, culminating in a unique epistemology that aided the emergence of the early novel. Extending this discussion of periodical literature's casuistical qualities into Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, I investigate how Defoe's ties to casuistry are reflected in and perpetuated by Crusoe, illustrating how the novel becomes a medium for resolving cases of conscience. The novel as a genre is shown to be more than just a close relative of the periodical, both genres being spurred into prominence by some of the more salient features attendant to casuistic-empirical philosophy. The novel becomes finally a type of culminating product of a unique casuistic-empirical practice that accounts for the full range of experiences involved in reaching justified conclusions.

Literary realism, that is, texts that seek to represent the actual in literature while achieving a sense of verisimilitude, have historically been analyzed and defined by a number of critics. These critics have, with differing approaches, attempted to make comprehensible what it is that constitutes the realist text. In their process of doing so, many have dismantled this specific category of text and isolated its distinguishing components. This study has sought to challenge and elaborate on three of the most influential, scholarly voices that have articulated such ideas about the realist text: Ian Watt, Eric Auerbach and Roland Barthes. The purpose has been to add to this field of knowledge by increasing our understanding of what it is that constitutes literary realism. This has been done by analyzing three realist works that have been previously examined by these critics, and then, by studying two further realist works, more recent in time. These works are, in the order that they have been approached and analyzed: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (Published in 1722), Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart (Published in 1877), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (Published in 1925), Melina Marchetta’s Jellicoe Road (Published in 2006) and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Published in 2022). As a result, the study has found that technology is a recurring textual element that functions as a coherence-making narrative device in these realist texts, and as a consequence, has laid bare a blind spot in these above-mentioned critics’ definitions of literary realism. Thus, the study suggests that technology should be understood as a distinguishing element in the literary text. The selection of works has, in turn, allowed for the study to both compare and contrast these texts, and to trace the effect that the technological development in the reality preceding the literary text can be said to have on these texts themselves. Here, the study has found that new technologies in the reality preceding the text often occur as new coherence-making textual devices in these literary works, and thus, that the technological development in the actual affects the realist text itself.