At first glance Thomas Jefferson's presidential actions concerning the Haitian Revolution seem to denote racially motivated decisions predicated upon fear. However, through a deeper analysis of primary documents, Jefferson's position appears more economically and politically ambitious. By 1791, the French colony of Saint Domingue held the title of the richest colony in the Caribbean and the world's leading producer of sugar. In addition, Saint Domingue consumed about sixteen percent of all of America's exports. Jefferson's personal opinions concerning revolution and trade on the island of Saint Domingue contradict the statements of his administration. Partisan politics manifested a stern voice within the Republican Party that cried out for an end to all trade with the island. Thomas Jefferson's republican and revolutionary ideals of freedom, as well as the ideals of many Americans, became transformed by the social transgression of the Caribbean blacks against white hegemony. Their actions, along with press accounts, become "grotesque" in comparison to pure republican and revolutionary ideals. Jefferson, though publicly in tune with the wishes of his party, used his chief advisors to carry out a foreign policy that appeased the South and allowed for continued trade with Saint Domingue. Contemporary historians often categorize Jefferson's foreign policy concerning Haiti as a completely racist agenda. For example, historians frequently cite Jefferson as having said he would, "reduce Toussaint to starvation," but in reality this excerpt comes from a report sent by Louis Pinchon, the French chargé d'affaires, to his superiors. While labeling this report false seems excessive, ignoring the possibility of exaggeration by Pinchon and placation by Jefferson becomes a dangerous oversight. Through a fresh analysis of primary documents, especially those used out of context, an understanding emerges that portrays Jefferson not as a racial equalitarian or as "a man intellectually undone by his negrophobia," but as a political figure who acknowledges the republican values inherent in revolution and, at the same time, the necessity of economic prosperity to sustain the United States.

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.

This study examines three 18th-century novels and their connection to the romances of the 17th century, the middle ages, as well as the Greek romances that flourished during the Roman Empire. I argue that the novel and the romance differ, not because the novel possesses some intrinsic formal, structural, or thematic essence wholly and disjunctively different from the romance, but rather because the two forms have been arbitrarily differentiated over a long contentious history for ideological and not categorical reasons. Thus, I define the novel not as a form or a genre, but as a mode and medium—a way and means of expressing story rather than as a structural, shaping category of story. Romance, on the other hand, is a type of story particularly interested in how to deal with difference. It asks: How do I deal with difference without annihilating or exiling it or myself in the process? When the romance gets subsumed into the novel as the dominant mode of prose fiction, it re-inscribes this ethical aspect of the romance’s structure through the use of resembling conventions and tropes. In analyzing how resemblances are treated in three 18th-century novels—Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Sophia Lee’s The Recess, and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess—my dissertation focuses on the novel’s re-use of the romance to explore anxieties about difference and sameness, about moral issues related to personhood, and about the tension between the individual and the collective. These texts ask: How do we cope with and incorporate the difference of the other when privilege in rank and perception is assumed by the subjective self? This question informs familiar and social relations of all kinds. It illuminates the 18th century’s scientific assumption that reality can be dissected via objective observation. It influences views of aesthetics, of gender and sexual politics, of creativity and the conflation of originality with novelty and of repetition with derivativeness.

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.

Women Poets and Place in Eighteenth-Century Poetry considers how four women poets of the long eighteenth century--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Leapor, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Mary Robinson--construct various places in their poetry, whether the London social milieu or provincial England. I argue that the act of place making, or investing a location with meaning, through poetry is also a way of writing a place for themselves in the literary public sphere and in literary history. Despite the fact that more women wrote poetry than in any other genre in the period, women poets remain a relatively understudied area in eighteenth-century scholarship. My research is informed by place theory as defined by the fields of Human Geography and Ecocriticism; I consider how the poem reproduces material space and the nonhuman environment, as well as how place effectively shapes the individual. These four poets represent the gamut of career choices in this era, participating in manuscript and print culture, writing for hire and for leisure, publishing by subscription and through metropolitan booksellers. Each of these textual spaces serves as an illustration of how the poet's place, both geographically and socially speaking, influences the medium of circulation for the poetic text and the authorial persona she constructs in the process. By charting how each of these four poets approaches place--whether as the subject of their poetry or the poetic space itself--I argue that they offer us a way to destabilize and diversify the literary landscape of eighteenth-century poetry.

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.