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.

“The Third Person in the Room: Servants and the Construction of Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel” explores the eighteenth-century Gothic novelists’ use of the stock servant character device to illustrate the tenuous nature of identity construction in a novelistic world torn between an admiration for its feudalistic past and a desire to embrace rising notions of individualism. I examine representations of real and literary servants to argue that the servant figure offers a convenient avenue for the discussion of class, social expectation, and economics, for as both family members and participants in the economy of the outside world, servants bridge the gap eighteenth-century authors find between their reclusive, feudalistic past and their social, individualistic present. Further, servants’ ties to the household associate them with the feminine perspective and provide authors, particularly authors of the Female Gothic, with a means of presenting the female voice in cases where it had otherwise been silenced by male oppression. In this work, I focus specifically on usurpation in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto¸ Robert Jephson’s The Count of Norbonne, and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, maternal history in Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, and Sophia Lee’s The Recess, sexual surrogacy in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and aristocratic criminalization in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House. I examine these works in the context of eighteenth-century realistic literature, social criticism and historical frameworks as well as through the lens of current theoretical examinations of the eighteenth-century Gothic.

Eliza Haywood was one of the most popular and prolific writers of the early eighteenth century, and in the 1720s, her output alone accounted for a significant percentage of all writing being published in English by women. Until the late twentieth century, her large and influential body of work was largely ignored by critics and excluded from the current eighteenth-century cannon. Haywoods body of work is immense, and much remains to be done to fully illuminate her involvement in early modern literature. My study focuses on Haywoods very early career, 1719 1726. My goal is to examine how Haywood achieved her early success in an industry that was relatively inhospitable to women, and what reaction her texts garnered from the marketplace, and the reading public.<p>Part One: The Marketplace, focuses on the construction of Haywoods early career in the context of early eighteenth-century print culture. I investigate the cultural reception and influence of Haywood as author within her social milieu. Haywoods writing emerged from a period when women were beginning to write in large numbers; Haywood was one of the first, the most popular, and the most prolific women writers of the eighteenth century. She achieved a high profile presence in the marketplace and became an example that womens writing could be a lucrative product.<p>Part Two: The Works explores the subject material of Haywoods popular early novels; I argue these works not only function as entertaining amatory fiction, but also contain meritorious social criticism and even possess a didactic tone previously exclusively associated with her later work. While her writing often contests the status quo, it also sometimes replicates it. She simultaneously affirms yet challenges mainstream culture.<p>Overall, this dissertation aims to explore and demystify the complexities, tensions, and contradictions involved in Haywoods writing, and Haywood as a cultural figure. We can only achieve a full understanding of the cultural influence of her texts and career by considering the content of her work alongside the marketability she achieved. Additionally, by exploring Haywoods work during her early career, I hope to contribute to a broader, more accurate understanding of Haywoods body of work as a whole.

My thesis is a historical and cultural study of how the womb was visualized in Britain circa 1660-1775 as well as during the twenty-first century. Prior to the late seventeenth century, the womb was frequently explained as an occult phenomenon, which is to say, as an enigmatic object with inexplicable powers. Because of the social significance and personal investment involved with reproduction, the womb was continually the subject of speculation and conjecture. Additionally, the womb was considered as crucially influencing female well-being, psychology, and sexuality. Following the prerogative of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century empiricism and human science, the womb was increasingly the subject of inquiry, especially as it had been long perceived an occluded phenomenon that had been rarely examined or described visually. The progression of the visualization of the womb during the late seventeenth and eighteenth century incorporated and instituted certain features in the visual illustrations that continue to act as precedents for medical scientific uterine imaging today.<p> Having traced the dissolution and influence of earlier occultist beliefs about the womb, I found that a regular set of metaphors were used in explaining the womb during the eighteenth century. These metaphors provided conceptual themes for the anatomical illustrations of the womb that were contemporaneously produced. One such metaphorical understanding was the brain-womb, wherein the brain and the womb were commonly analogized through both literary tropes and medical pathologies. An overarching concept that directed how the womb was understood was the perception that the womb was an autonomous entity within the female body. This precept allowed that the womb could perform various, often malignant, activities that vitally altered the female constitution. The visual images created for anatomical and medical treatises responded to these metaphors and conceptualizations, responses which markedly altered how the womb, reproduction, and the female body were understood. My final consideration relates these metaphorical and conceptual features of eighteenth-century visualizations of the womb to modern-day uterine imaging. Although optical technology has vastly changed between these two eras, many features and conceptualizations have carried forward, crucially informing how we now perceive the uterus.

This thesis examines the role of philosophic instrument-makers within the eighteenth-century philosophic instrument trade in Britain. The instrument-maker functioned in both the realms of the philosophic elite and the burgeoning eighteenth-century public marketplace. Faced with the task of balancing the contradictory scholarly expectations of natural philosophers and the monetary pressures of the public market, these craftsmen employed sophisticated marketing strategies to reconcile these opposing realms. This project examines the careers of several London instrument-makers and their attempts to gain and maintain solid standing among philosophic circles, while using that standing to their commercial advantage in the instrument trade. By examining the way instrument-makers marketed their products one can glean insight into the role philosophic credibility played in shaping the successful instrument makers career and how the materials of experimental philosophy were promoted to a public increasingly interested in consuming natural philosophy.<p> This enquiry addresses several types of marketing techniques employed by instrument-makers in their efforts to sell their wares. However, patenting strategies receive particularly close attention as they reveal the tension found between the scholarly expectations among the philosophic elite and the commercial priority of the public marketplace.

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.

<p>"Scriblerian Ethics" proposes that the aesthetic and ethical standpoint of the writings of the Scriblerians (Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Oxford, Parnell) can be better understood through an attunement to their orientation towards the Longinian sublime and to the metamorphic poetics of Ovid. The project holds the negative and critical features of the group's writing in abeyance, as it attempts to account for the positive, phenomenological concepts and features of Scriblerian satiric and non-satiric writing. The intensities and affiliations of Scriblerian writing that emerge from this study gesture aesthetically and ethically beyond historical subjectivity to an opening to alterity and difference. This opening or hope for the achievement ethical dimension of writing is divulged as the intimate motivation of the literary or aesthetic components that accompany the negative, referential, and critical features of Scriblerian writing.</p><p>Examining closely the major writings of Pope and Swift in conjunction with the collaborative writings of the Scriblerus club, the project describes the concern with temporality that emerges from Longinian and Ovidan influence; the Scriblerian reflexivity that culminates in a highly virtual aesthetics; and the ethical elaboration of an orientation toward hospitality that emerges from this temporal and virtual aesthetic orientation. A "Scriblerian ethics" is an affinity for a hospitality not yet achieved in political, economic, and cultural life. Finally, the project analyzes throughout its readings of Scriblerian writing the violence that nevertheless accompanies Scriblerian aesthetics, examining the figures of modernity, criticism, and sexual violence (rape) that permeate Scriblerian texts as barriers or resistances to the achievement of an ethical orientation to alterity.</p> / Dissertation

Thèse - Paris. / At head of title: Université de Paris, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines. Bibliography: p. [445]-476.