« Je ne vois pas pourquoi on blâmerait une fille comme Nanette, de profiter, pour mettre le plus haut prix à sa personne et à son art, de la folie et du désordre extrême de vos riches libertins ? » - s’interroge la Leontion de Wieland. Ce « désordre extrême » n’est qu’une des caractéristiques de l’existence insouciante exprimant le triomphe du libertinage des mœurs à l’époque où l’attirance des sociétés européennes pour la conduite libertine, réelle ou imaginaire, trouve son reflet dans les littératures anglaise, française et allemande. La présente thèse démontre ainsi la diversité du libertinage littéraire en Europe dans la seconde moitié du dix-huitième siècle. Les romans épistolaires Clarisse Harlove de Richardson en Angleterre, Les Liaisons dangereuses de Laclos en France et Menander und Glycerion de Wieland en Allemagne nous ont paru les meilleurs exemples afin d’esquisser cette diversité et d’en comparer les aspects. Le regard que les trois auteurs portent sur les lois de l’ordre social, la religion et les mœurs traduit une vision originale du monde. Et bien que cette vision ne dépasse pas le cadre de la fiction romanesque, l’étude de leurs œuvres met en relief un certain nombre de données propres au climat sociopolitique de l’époque tout comme des éléments autobiographiques ayant contribué à l’élaboration du modèle qui est le leur du libertin masculin ou féminin. Notre objectif est d’étudier la richesse littéraire de ce modèle de libertins et de leur conduite, d’ailleurs propre aux deux sexes, sa complexité et sa singularité en procédant par rapprochements et contrastes, similitudes et différences. / “I don’t see why a girl like Nanette should be blamed for profiting from the madness and extreme disorderly conduct of your libertines, in order to set the highest price to her person and her art,” Wieland’s Leontion says to herself. This “extreme disorderly conduct” is only one of the characteristics of that kind of carefree existence which is an expression of the triumph of libertine mores at a time when the fascination of European societies for libertinism, whether real or imaginary, is reflected in English, French and German Literature. The following thesis thus demonstrates the diversity of libertine literature in Europe in the second half of the XVIIIth century. In order to analyse this diversity and compare its different aspects, I have chosen three epistolary novels that I consider to be paradigms in the matter: Clarissa Harlowe by Richardson in England, Les Liaisons dangereuses by Laclos in France and Menander und Glycerion by Wieland in Germany. The implicit or explicit judgement that these three authors pass on the laws of social order, on religion, and on the mores of the period is emblematic of an original vision of the world. Although this vision is expressed within the limits of works of fiction, the study of these works highlights a number of elements that are specific to the social and political atmosphere of the time, as well as certain autobiographical elements which have contributed to the social paradigm of feminine and masculine libertinism to which they subscribe. The purpose of this thesis is to study these literary works as rich sources of information on the libertines and their conduct as an accepted social model for men and women alike, and to discuss the complexity and singular nature of this phenomenon by a differential treatment of the various themes through which it can be identified.

The historiography of leisure has focused on class conflict, commercialization, and the arts. In the latter two areas historians have attempted to make statements about consumers, but as historians of consumption have demonstrated, examining the consumer from the perspective of producers is insufficient. This thesis demonstrates what the developing methodologies used to examine practice and consumption reveal about leisure and recreation. Exploration of forty-five diaries kept in London between 1757 and 1820 makes it possible to consider different aspects of choice with reference to recreation. This dissertation analyses how simple determinants of choice such as time, location, and cost shaped behaviour before moving on to the more complex and fuzzy concepts of social position, the role of domesticity, and taste. Choice is central to understanding what amusement was in Georgian society, therefore it is necessary to consider both people’s scope for choice, and the forces shaping those choices. Following an introductory section, chapters two to four examine choice by looking at simple factors. London was by far England’s largest city, but the distribution of establishments and patterns of mobility affected different segments of society in complex ways. In addition, leisure routines and the ability to spend money on recreation differed between socioeconomic groups who had different amounts of time and money to use. Affinities within social groups appear, but diaries also illuminate the importance of individual variations. Chapter four signals a shift in the analysis by looking at determinants of choice like feeling obliged, wanting to please friends or family, or the impact of social networks on reactions to activities. Chapters five to eight examine interpersonal relationships and the function of recreation in eighteenth-century society and raise questions about how we combine agency and structure in our models of society. This account challenges claims that group identities were the only identities available to Georgians and that individual variations were downplayed before the nineteenth century. Rather, individuals existed in networks that had to be negotiated and maintained.

Throughout the age of sail, with the exception of finance, there was no aspect of naval warfare that exhibited as much difficulty and anguish as manning the fleet. Finding the necessary skilled seamen to man warships was the alpha and omega of problems for the Royal Navy, as in wartime it was the first to appear with mobilisation and the last to be overcome. Manning the Royal Navy was an increasing problem throughout the eighteenth century as the Navy and British sea trade continuously expanded. This resulted in a desperate struggle for the scarce resource of skilled manpower, made most evident during the initial mobilisation from peacetime to wartime footing. There is no doubt that the Royal Navy depended on able seamen as if they were the very lifeblood of the ships on which they served. In manning its fleets the Royal Navy had to also consider the merchant marine, which depended upon skilled mariners and supplied the British Isles with food, stores, and the economic income generated by sea trade. The task of manning the fleets proved extremely difficult and was only accomplished under great stress as both the Royal Navy and the merchant marine struggled to obtain the services of vitally important skilled mariners. Therefore the fruits of the Royal Navy’s avid search for seamen during the French Revolutionary Wars must be viewed in light of its success in dominating the oceans of the world. This research proves that the Admiralty of the British Royal Navy was as concerned and as cautious in manning warships as they were in fighting them. It also shows that much of what history has said about naval manning has been based on conjecture rather than fact. This research utilizes statistics to reanalyze naval manning and provide a basis for future research.

Conclusion. The objective of this work was to concentrate on eighteenth century female authors. Simultaneously popular and severely criticised during their time, the playwrights, short fiction writers and novelists succeeded in the establishing of the tradition of women's writing and established the foundations for the following generations. Nevertheless, they have usually been omitted from the canon. Only in the recent decades, with the increasing interest in the literary margins and gaps, have they been 'resurrected' and, to some extent, done justice to. This paper in particular focuses on the talented playwright Hannah Cowley, the prolific and versatile, mostly prose-writer and journalist Eliza Haywood and the renowned critic and a novelist Elisabeth Inchbald and their works. All the three women authors can be said to be innovative and original. They overcame the obstacles of social prejudice and left a rich textual legacy to their adherents. In particular, the paper attempted to analyse the masquerade scenes in Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem, Haywood's Masqueraders, or the Fateful Curiosity and Inchbald's Simple Story to attest to the importance of the masquerade and to register its varied textual reflections. The masquerade as a social practice and a cultural event was highly fashionable in the...

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace / Thesis advisor: Alan Richardson / This project argues that the British financial revolution ushered in a new way of conceptualizing time based in mathematic innovations of the seventeenth-century. As it was employed in financial instruments and government policies, mathematics' spatialized representation of time conflicted with older, more intuitive experience of time associated with consciousness and duration. Borrowing from the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I examine how he interaction between these two temporalities reshaped conceptions of value, the public, and the body in the first half of the eighteenth century. The first two chapters of my study explore texts ranging from pamphlets that advocated for the establishment of banks to the periodical essays of The Spectator and The Tatler that advocated for political economic conceptions of time and value at the turn of the century. These texts reveal the subtle tensions and strange paradoxes created by the clash of disparate temporalities and open the door to new readings of fictional narratives like those of Daniel Defoe and Aphra Behn. My second two chapters focus on selected works by these two authors to explore how longer first-person narrative forms modeled both the possibilities and dangers of emerging political economic structures. My study concludes with two chapters that follow the development of the oriental tale in Britain. Making use of a seventeenth-century tradition that explores the tensions between representation and meaning in oriental fables, Arabian Nights' Entertainments follows on the heels of John Paul Marana's Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy and reshapes the genre to reflect the new concerns of a global marketplace in which deferral has become essential to the production of value. I conclude these chapters with readings of Johnson's Rasselas, Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet, and Frances Sheridan's Nourjahad, three tales that foreshadow late-eighteenth-century efforts to manage the public and its temporal paradoxes through an attention to the body. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

In the Mind's Eye: Associationism and Style in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel argues that the British novel, in its syntactic, grammatical, and rhetorical strategies, incorporated associationist premises about reading comprehension. Associationism, as a term, encapsulates a series of theories during the period that attempted to explain the ways in which external stimuli were "represented" in the mind and linked with other ideas. Inquiries into the association of ideas spanned numerous fields but shared a core belief: everything an individual touched, saw, smelled, or read, was translated into a secondary representation in the mind. Since all objects--whether a phrase, a misty moor, or a character's face--were thought to be experienced through mental "miniatures," the association of ideas was the mechanism of the reading experience and of phenomenal experience. Associationist theories delineated how words evoked images, and the ways in which these images became linked to form holistic ideas in the course of a sentence, a paragraph, and throughout a work of fiction. In this project, I show how four canonical nineteenth-century authors--Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot--created prose styles intended to evoke, enhance, or even resist the spontaneous associative mechanisms considered essential to the comprehension of language. In order to trace the contours of an associative stylistics during the period, I pair each author with associationist theories contemporary with their fiction. In Chapter One, I demonstrate how Jane Austen's techniques in Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility incorporated the tenets of the dominant model of associationism in Austen's day: those of David Hartley. Austen's mode of representation is highly metonymic, capitalizing on of principles of language comprehension proposed in Hartley's work. The great degree of stylistic control so often attributed to Austen's prose is inextricably rooted with the Hartleyan paradigm: a strategy of representation to depict a social world and its objects according to an associationist epistemology. In Chapter Two, I read Sir Walter Scott's Waverley with the theories of his teacher Dugald Stewart. Walter Scott studied with Dugald Stewart at the University of Edinburgh and in Stewart's Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Stewart develops literary-aesthetic guidelines based on the mental models posited in his work. Stewart recommends that a writer delineate in the form of an "outline," a "minimum" required for the reader to comprehend a represented object. Stewart's theories about language cognition and literary technique, I argue, provide guidelines for Scott's development of his own style of literary outline. In Chapter Three, I unfold how Charles Dickens's style in David Copperfield draws on the associative principles in Lindley Murray's English Grammar. In Murray's Grammar, the sentence is a unit of cognition: a precise capsule in which our thoughts are both formed and transmitted. Grammar is an external representation of links between thoughts: the association of ideas in its most tangible form. In Chapter Four, I show that George Eliot integrates a number of discourses about the human mind into her style, with the goal of developing a technique to manage the spontaneous actions of mental associations. The work of James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Alexander Bain influenced Eliot's view of associationist psychology, and Eliot, in turn, develops her own associative theories of language in her essays and journals. Eliot's associative model of reading incorporates principles of chemistry. Elaboration, a term important to both literary and scientific discourse, provided Eliot with a syntactic style closely aligned with the structure of associative links. More importantly, elaboration afforded Eliot a strategy of cognitive delay; a stylistics intended to subvert the spontaneous action of the mind. By providing "raw materials" for the reader in the form of concrete nouns, and elaborating with a series of extended prepositional phrases, Eliot demands that the reader slow down the automatic action of association and redraw the mental picture.

This thesis examines the idea of China in British literature during a clearly defined period. Between 1757 and 1785, when Britain still had little direct contact and cultural exchange with the Chinese, China evoked various attitudes, images and beliefs in the British imagination. At times uncertain and evasive, popular understandings of China were sufficiently malleable for writers of the period to knead into domestic political satire and social discourse, giving fresh expression to popular criticisms, philosophical aspirations, and religious tensions. The period presents several prominent English, Irish, and Scottish writers who use the idea of China precisely in this manner in writings as generically diverse as drama, translation, travel writing, pseudo-Oriental letters, novels, and fairy tales. Some invoke China’s supposed defects to accentuate Britain’s material, scientific, and moral progress, or to feed contemporary debate about decadence in British society and government. Others exploit the notion of a more civilized and virtuous China to satirize what they regard as a supercilious cultural milieu attendant on their own emerging polite and commercial society, or to interrogate their nation’s moral criteria of the highest good, public-spiritedness, or evolving global enterprise. All give the idea of China new currency in the dialectical interplay between literary appeals to antiquity and the pursuit of modernity, enlisting it in philosophical and theological debates of Enlightenment. This thesis will argue that its subject writers, including Arthur Murphy, Thomas Percy, Oliver Goldsmith, John Bell, and Horace Walpole, use the idea of China to help define a British identity as culturally and politically distinct from Europe, especially France, and to contemplate Britain’s place within global history and a broadening world view at mid-century.

Previous research on paper history has tended to be conducted from an economic perspective and/or as part of the field of book history within a broadly literary framework. This has resulted in understandings of paper history being book-centric and focused on production. We now have a great deal of knowledge about the physical process of hand paper-making, a good knowledge of the actors involved and where in the country paper was manufactured, but there is still very little scholarly discussion of the people, processes and practices associated with paper outside of the mill. Taking inspiration from eighteenth-century ‗it-narratives‘, this thesis takes a holistic approach to the paper trade – loosely based around the framework of social life theory as expounded by Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff. It encompasses a case study of the rag-collection and paper-wholesale operations of a single Edinburgh firm, a wider examination of paper-retailing in Edinburgh, a look at the ownership of desks in Edinburgh alongside a consideration of advice and instruction relating to desk-use, and closes with an examination of the papers owned by a notable Edinburgh family. The first three chapters consider the scope of the Edinburgh paper trade. Moving through distinct stages in the life of paper, these chapters begin with an account of the Edinburgh rag-trade. Business records relating to the Balerno Company‘s rag-buying operations reveal an active and organised network with connections to a variety of trades. Continuing the focus on the Balerno Company, the second chapter considers the company as paper-wholesalers. It demonstrates that the driving force behind their operations was not the supply of paper for the booktrade but rather the provision of wrapping papers for the purposes of commerce. Using advertisements in local newspapers the third chapter looks at the reach of paper-selling beyond the booktrades. The final two chapters move gradually from the commercial to the personal. Chapter four considers the presentation of desk-use in penmanship manuals and the evidence of desk-ownership in confirmation inventories. Both of which are suggestive of a growing mercantile interest in desk furniture. Finally, this thesis closes by looking at the paper archives of the Innes family of Stow in order to examine the extent to which the findings of previous chapters is reflected in the collection, retention and use of papers across two generations of this family. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the value of adopting an inclusive approach to the study of paper history, as doing so opens up a multifaceted world of paper. Paper history has tended to be understood as the history of writing and printing paper sold by booksellers and stationers. The social life approach allows connections to be made between materials, artefacts and trades; to gain a fuller understanding of the role paper played in people‘s lives.

“Novel Conversations” examines how and why eighteenth-century novelists came to represent people interacting in ways that registered as lively and real. Speech had long been crucial in literary genres as varied as drama, philosophical dialogue, romance and narrative poetry; but techniques for representing speech would proliferate in the eighteenth century as writers gave conversation a new centrality in the novel, seeking to capture the manner of speech over and above its basic matter. “Novel Conversations” explores this literary-historical development with chapters on four writers who were especially interested in the technical challenge of recording vocal effects: Samuel Richardson, James Boswell, Frances Burney and Jane Austen. They developed a set of tools for rendering in prose the auditory and social nuances of conversation, including tone and emphasis, pacing and pausing, gesture and movement. I argue that their experiments resulted in a new “transcriptional realism” in the novel. This term describes the range of techniques used to craft dialogue that faithfully approximates the features of real speech, while remaining meaningful and effectual as an element of prose narrative. In developing methods to this end, eighteenth-century writers borrowed techniques from other genres, combined them, and invented new ones. One rich source was life writing, the broad category of documentary prose genres that both absorbed and influenced the novel form in its early stages. Writers also sought complementary techniques in drama, whose stage directions, tonal notations and cues about who is speaking to whom at what point in time could be readily adapted for prose narrative. The task at hand was to calibrate two often opposing styles: the empirically driven, transcriptional mode of life writing and the more overtly stylized mode of drama. Writers did so by developing two resources within the novel form: the narrator, who occupies a flexible platform from which to elaborate conversational dynamics with description; and print itself, with all of its graphic and spatial possibilities for shaping speech on the page, including accidentals, line breaks, and typography. What are in one sense formalist readings are complemented by a careful attention to the materiality of the manuscript page and the printed page. In approaching my primary authors’ texts from a technical perspective, I do justice to their experimental efforts to use writing as a technology for capturing voice: a recording device avant la lettre. This approach in turn gives me critical purchase to analyze the effect that this technology serves: detailed representations of characters operating in a lively, familiar social world.

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.