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The simulation of sickness intrigued British writers from the very beginning of the eighteenth century, attracting attention within a wide range of social spheres. Drawing upon texts from the fields of literature, medicine, theology, welfare policy, the military, and the law courts, this interdisciplinary thesis combines close textual analysis with an examination of social and cultural contexts in order to explain why the issue of feigned illness became such a prevalent and enduring source of debate in eighteenth-century Britain. Both the allure and the threat of simulated sickness lay in the ability of ill health to confer power upon the sufferer. On the one hand ill health might operate as a signifier of social or spiritual importance, yet sickness also functioned as a source of practical power, enabling emotional manipulation, exemption from social duties, and access to resources. The perceived benefits of ill health made the identification of simulated illness a matter of importance, yet the subject would not have attracted such attention were it not for prevailing doubts as to the legibility of the body. As this thesis indicates, the varied attitudes towards and representations of simulated sickness provide fascinating insights into the preoccupations of writers of different spheres and periods. Nevertheless, broader trends in attitudes towards bodily legibility and feigned illness are visible. Early eighteenth-century writers were generally wary of trusting external appearances, while the middle decades of the century were marked by an expression of faith in the natural legibility of the body, as demonstrated by the fashion for the literature of sensibility, acting through feeling, and the medico-literary rhetoric of nerves. Renewed scepticism towards the close of the century resulted in growing debates about the duty of medical practitioners to detect feigned illness, and the methods by which this might be accomplished. While the treatment of the subject evolved, its continued relevance highlights a sustained cultural preoccupation with the legibility of the body and its potential to mislead or even deceive, a subject that continued to fascinate writers to the very end of the eighteenth century.

This thesis examines the experiences and impacts of the deployment of Highland soldiers to North America in the mid to late-eighteenth century. Between 1756 and 1783, Britain sent ten Highland battalions to the North American theatre, where they fought for the duration of both the Seven Years‟ War and the War of American Independence. The pressures of recruiting, utilizing, and demobilizing these men created powerful new forces in the Scottish Highlands, occurring, and in some cases prefiguring, the region‟s severe socio-economic problems. The impact of military contributions to the imperial state also had significant implications for Gaelic self-perception and the politics of loyalty and interest. This thesis asserts the importance of imperial contacts in shaping the development of the Scottish Highlands within the British state. Rejecting the narrative of a centrifugal empire based on military subjugation, this thesis argues that Gaels, of all social groups, constructed their own experiences of empire, having tremendous agency in how that relationship was formed. The British Empire was not constructed only through the extension or strengthening of state apparatus in various geographical spaces. It was formed by the decision of local actors to willingly embrace the perceived advantages of empire. Ultimately, the disproportionately large Highland commitment to military service was a largely negative force in the Highlands. This thesis establishes, however, the importance of political and ideological imperatives which drove these decisions, imperatives that were predicated on inter-peripheral contacts with British America. It establishes the extent to which Highland soldiers willingly ensured the development of British imperialism in the late eighteenth century.

The thesis argues that never-married gentlewomen dissociated themselves from negative and ubiquitous stereotypes of the old maid by focussing on their gentility rather than their marital status. By demonstrably fulfilling the familial and social roles which belonged to their sex and rank, and by representing themselves in terms of approved genteel feminine virtues and conduct, they located themselves in networks of social reciprocity which extended from household and family into the wider social sphere. In doing so they confounded popular caricatures of mature unmarried women as selfish parasites whose failure to marry and procreate drained the resources of their natal families and undermined the nation’s strength. The thesis focuses on a number of case studies drawn from the extensive collections of family papers in the National Records of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. Several of these never-married women were kin by birth or marriage, and their correspondence illustrates the reach of their relationship networks, their status, and influence. Their personal and, in some cases, published writing shows how they used ideals of gentility and associated language to support the familial and social positions they claimed. The thesis chapters examine the relationships they forged, and the resulting influence they were able to exercise, by considering them variously as members of households headed by male kin, as heads of their own households, and as familial patrons. While never-married women are increasingly the subjects of research, the lives of never-married gentlewomen remain under-examined. Yet gentlewomen, habituated to writing as an essential social skill, have left a wide range of sources by which their management of social status and singlehood can be assessed. This thesis shows some of the perspectives opened up by study of these sources.

This thesis is predicated upon a rejection of the existing characterisation of attitudes towards the dead in the eighteenth century. In current thinking this period witnessed the first signs of a reduction in the extent to which people had contact with the dead. However, this assumption is supported by very little research. In focusing on proximity and exposure to the dead body at an ‘everyday’ level this thesis tempers the century’s association with distance and change by revealing a high level of proximity and very significant continuities with both the preceding and proceeding periods. Utilising sources from London, Bristol and York it follows the dead body from the point of death through to its eventual resting place, concentrating in particular on the impact of the newly-emerged undertaking trade and burial practice in the century and a half prior to the widespread establishment of extramural cemeteries and eventual outlawing of burial in towns. The following key questions are addressed: how were spaces shared between the living and the dead; where exactly were the dead present; who had contact with them; and in what ways. The result is a picture which demonstrates that during the long eighteenth century the living shared their private and public urban spaces with the dead to a significant extent. The attitudes governing treatment of the dead body revealed in the process are shown to be at once timeless and period-specific. Foremost among these is the concept of ‘decency’. It is shown that this idea, whilst far from unique to the eighteenth century, had a particular contemporary significance shaped by social and economic factors and their effects on the class structure and urban environment. At the same time, visible in all aspects of treatment of the dead is a pragmatism born of limitations on time and, in particular, space which did not always sit easily with notions of decency, particularly once the dead were underground.

Shoplifting proliferated in eighteenth-century England with retail expansion, acquiring a new prominence as it was made a capital crime. This study comprehensively examines this phenomenon, seating it within the historiographies of crime, marketing and consumption. The majority of offenders were occasional thieves, drawn from some of the most economically vulnerable sectors of plebeian communities, their profile confirming the significance of age and gender. While specialist shops were shoplifters' primary target, particularly those selling textiles and clothing, a spatial analysis suggests that thieves preferred smaller, local shops to their more prestigious counterparts. Shoplifters matched their tactics to the size and status of shop, using performance as a tool to achieve their ends. Yet the study questions assumptions around the influence of fashion and consumer desire on shop theft, discussing how the type and quantity of goods stolen points to more complex economic motives, both financial and social. The potential impact of the crime on women's role as shopkeepers and the tendency to sexualise female offenders are also scrutinised. While retailers were initially instrumental in driving legislative change and worked constructively with magistrates to control the crime's incidence, their constant reluctance to prosecute conveys a false impression of the crime's true extent. The study calculates prevalence, and projects the financial impact of shoplifting on its victims at a time of highly competitive retailing. 'Risk-based' in their thinking, retailers developed practical means of protecting their stores, while new marketing techniques proved variously a boon and handicap. Yet shopkeepers' reactions were not uniform, some apparently preferring such situational prevention, while others turned more readily to the law. This ambivalence was also exhibited in their engagement with the capital law reform that ultimately saw the repeal of the Shoplifting Act. Employing a variety of sources from court transcripts to literature, the study finally explores how changing social perspectives on crime during the period coloured public attitudes to shoplifting, foreshadowing reconfigured nineteenth-century perceptions of the crime.

<p>This study focuses on a series of foundational stylistic and formal innovations in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, and argues that they can be cumulatively attributed to the distinct challenges authors faced in representing human action and the will. The study focuses in particular on cases of “acting against better judgment” or “failing to do what one knows one ought to do” – concepts originally theorized as “akrasia” and “weakness of the will” in ancient Greek and Scholastic thought. During the Enlightenment, philosophy increasingly conceives of human minds and bodies like systems and machines, and consequently fails to address such cases except as intractable or incoherent. Yet eighteenth-century and Romantic narratives and poetry consistently engage the paradoxes and ambiguities of action and volition in representations of akrasia. As a result, literature develops representational strategies that distinguish the epistemic capacities of literature as privileged over those of philosophy.</p><p>The study begins by centering on narratives of distempered selves from the 1760s. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey narrate cases of knowingly and weakly acting against better judgment, and in so doing, reveal the limitations of the “philosophy of the passions” that famously informed sentimental literature at the time. These texts find that the interpretive difficulties of action demand a non-systematic and hermeneutic approach to interpreting a self through the genre of narrative. Rousseau’s narrative in particular informs William Godwin’s realist novels of distempered subjects. Departing from his mechanistic philosophy of mind and action, Godwin develops the technique of free indirect discourse in his third novel Fleetwood (1805) as a means of evoking the ironies and self-deceptions in how we talk about willing. </p><p>Romantic poetry employs the literary trope of weakness of will primarily through the problem of regretted inaction – a problem which I argue motivates the major poetic innovations of William Wordsworth and John Keats. While Samuel Taylor Coleridge sought to characterize his weakness of will in philosophical writing, Wordsworth turns to poetry with The Prelude (1805), revealing poetry itself to be a self-deceiving and disappointing form of procrastination. More explicitly than Wordsworth, John Keats identifies indolence as the prime symbol and basis of what he calls “negative capability.” In his letters and poems such as “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817) and “Ode on Indolence” (1819), Keats reveals how the irreducibly contradictory qualities of human agency speak to the particular privilege of “disinterested aesthetics” – a genre fitted for the modern era for its ability to disclose contradictions without seeking to resolve or explain them in terms of component parts.</p> / Dissertation

The last two decades of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of numerous French travel compilations and descriptive texts studying the customs and ways of life of the peasants, an ethnographical interest that developed even further during the First French Republic. In this study, I identify and study a specific genre that I call republican ethnography. The republican ethnography was part of the Enlightenment’s search for a science of society and to the quest of finding the roots of the Republic. Studying travel literature and administrative reports from two French regions, Bretagne and Auvergne, this study examines the character and the meaning of the republican ethnographical projects. The republican travellers and administrators in Bretagne and Auvergne drew on a complex array of knowledge traditions, using categories from climate theory and medical thinking as well as the vocabulary of the travel literature. The study shows that the republican ethnography worked as way of establishing difference, where the French peasant was described as rude and “savage”, as well as similarity, since the travellers and administrators set out to find the unifying principles on which the Republic could be based.

Au XVIIIe siècle, le pape est devenu un « père humilié » auquel les puissances viennent « forcer la main en lui baisant les pieds ». Après Unigenitus, dans un contexte d’essor des gallicanismes, scruter la négociation elle-même en cour de Rome, étudier la multiplicité des interlocuteurs, le cours des relations internationales, permet de comprendre l’évolution de la papauté elle-même tout en approfondissant la connaissance du dispositif diplomatique français à Rome. Cette démarche offre également la possibilité de lire cette évolution dans le regard des puissances européennes et d’observer comment Rome entérine ou refuse les nouveaux équilibres politiques et ecclésiastiques. Rome, theatrum mundi, devient de plus en plus une scène et de moins en moins un lieu d’action. Au fur et à mesure de l’effacement de la voix de la papauté dans les relations internationales, la représentation tient le plus grand rôle dans la cité pontificale et les diplomates jouent des personnages de tout premier plan, puisque, encore au XVIIIe siècle, « le plan de Rome est la carte du monde ». De fait, nulle part ailleurs qu’à Rome, la double tâche de l’ambassadeur, négocier et représenter, n’a davantage l’occasion de se déployer ni ne possède autant de signification. / Eighteen century Popes have become « pères humiliés » whom European crowns are putting under their will while showing apparent great respect and devotion. From Unigenitus on, under the growing influence of « Gallicanismes », studying the negociation itself in the Pontifical court of Rome, with a multiplicity of partners involved, is a good step towards a better comprehension of both the Papacy decline and the french diplomatical pattern in Rome. This orientation also offers an opportunity to appreciate this evolution under the perception of european crowns, with Rome agreeing or disagreeing with new political and ecclesiastical compromises without any possibility of modifying them. A growing Theater Scene, Rome is, less and less, a true place of decision. With the influence of the Pope on international relationships becoming thiner and thiner, the art of representation tends to become the main duty for Ambassadors, as, nowhere much as in the pontifical court of Rome, the two main duties of an Ambassador, negociating and representating their own King, may find a more significant and broader place.

L’ironie dialogique, favorisée par plusieurs genres littéraires à l’époque des Lumières, est-elle un simple produit de l’esprit du temps ou l’adjuvant tactique nécessaire au progrès des idées ? Sous l’enjouement et le bel-esprit conversationnel des ironistes, comment ne pas discerner le masque rhétorique et ludique d’un examen critique qui, de l’esthétique à la morale et aux mœurs, n’épargne aucun domaine de l’autoréflexivité ? La thèse se place dans cette perspective en observant qu’au-delà de la topique narrative et fictionnelle, au-delà de la satire sociale et psychologique, les cibles cachées des ironistes sont souvent des paravents intellectuels forgés au siècle précédent : la défense raffinée du statu quo par la morale de l’honnêteté et la civilité de la politesse ; l’abstraction du commerce des sexes au moyen du langage de l’amour galant et des bienséances internes et externes; la quête du sublime tragique censé gratifier le sacrifice héroïque du bonheur au devoir d’état ; la comédie comique des vices individuels occultant le débat sur les vices institutionnels, etc. / The rhetorics of Irony in Enlightenment’s written dialogues are no mere by-products of the then prevalent social mode of conversational interplay. Their careful perusal indicates that Irony and Humour were instrumental in the vast reshuffling of moral values, religious and political obedience, aesthetic codes, social behaviours that are a legacy of the period. This dissertation focuses on the four main literary areas where dialogical Irony plays an active role in textual topics: parody, comedy, philosophical dialogue and libertine novels. The hypothesis here offered is that ironic subversion is mostly aimed at mental and behavioural compliances made consensual during the Classical period, i.e.: politeness and “honesty” as paramount signs of social fitness; exaltation of the dramatic sublime as benchmark for excellence in Tragedy; allegory and propriety in the written rendition of love-making; linkage of social hardships to individual violation of Christian rules and not to collective/institutional failures; etc.