Joseph Haydn’s final oratorio, The Seasons (1801), has consistently been neglected in performance and scholarship, particularly when compared to its earlier, more successful counterpart, The Creation (1798). A number of factors contribute to this neglect, central among them the belief that The Seasons lacked the musical innovation of Haydn’s setting of the Judeo-Christian creation story, a thought that would gain further momentum as aesthetic and musical tastes changed throughout the nineteenth century. Yet Haydn’s final oratorio is a work of remarkable musical artistry and insight, especially when considered in the context of the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility and the rise of sentimental opera, conventions with which Haydn’s would have been intimately aware given his work in opera composition and production from 1762 to 1790. By examining the ways in which Hanne, one of the three central characters in The Seasons, is constructed as sentimental in van Swieten’s libretto and Haydn’s score, I demonstrate how the librettist and composer engage the trope of the sentimental heroine. Hanne features many of the expected qualities: she is chaste, virtuous, and possesses refined sensibility and sensitivity. Furthermore, her singing style is firmly rooted in sentimental traditions. Yet her music is also imbued with coloratura and musical markers of nobility. Through these musical choices and by textually defining Hanne through joy rather than suffering and pathos, Haydn and van Swieten depart from typical constructions to rethink the sentimental heroine. Therefore, in his final major musico-dramatic work, Haydn experiments with one of the central operatic tropes of the eighteenth century. In being aware of this feature, we might simultaneously arrive at a renewed appreciation for The Seasons and of Haydn’s abilities as a musical dramatist. / Graduate

This thesis critically examines the intersections between whiteness and terror/horror in texts produced during the long eighteenth century. I reframe the Gothic as a migratory Transatlantic, colonial mode that problematizes eighteenth-century distinctions between terror as a form of the intellectual sublime and horror as a bodily reaction that generates shock and aversion. Drawing upon contemporary Black Feminism(s), I analyze Enlightenment theories of mind and objective reason and consider whiteness as a spectral and material presence throughout long eighteenth-century writing, with which the Gothic mode grapples directly. Highlighting how the Gothic operates in Transatlantic spaces that rehearse the legacies of violence enacted against Black and racialized peoples, my project contends that classifications such as terror-Gothic (i.e., psychological horror) and horror-Gothic (i.e., bodily horror) are arbitrary and reductive; instead, the Gothic responds to colonialism by imagining that the experience of embodied knowledge is a conflation of both. Centered primarily as a study of literary methodology, this thesis presents readings of three works of literature that operate within and against the backdrop of Anglo-American Enlightenment myths of white supremacy: Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798), and Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834). This thesis puts questions to each text, regarding the reproduction, mobilization, and subversion of whiteness in their portrayal of terror/horror; the use of mobility to illustrate preoccupations with displacement, socio-political, and cultural conditions; the depiction of Black life, agency, and subjectivity despite oppression. By unraveling complexities of whiteness and terror/horror, noting the Gothic modality’s haunting/haunted relationship to colonial discourses of power, this study emphasizes the enduring relevance of these themes in understanding contemporary racial imaginaries. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This project examines the entangled relationship between whiteness and terror/horror in literature from the long eighteenth century. Drawing from contemporary Black Feminist theories to analyze Transatlantic works that make use of the Gothic mode, this study reframes historical concepts of terror and horror as separate affective categories, reimagining the foundational elements of Gothicism, to underscore the inseparable nature of psychological and physical manifestations of colonial oppression. Focusing on race and racialization, I illustrate how specific conceptions of whiteness generated, bolstered, and deployed terror/horror to shape the experiences of Black humans inhabiting Transatlantic locations in the period and beyond. I think with(in) Black Feminism(s) to delve into the impact of Enlightenment philosophy on Gothic narratives that grapple with slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. By retheorizing the Gothic as a migratory mode, I emphasize its capabilities to address the haunting legacies of whiteness and its violent manifestations across time and space.

La Bibliothèque universelle des romans (1775-1789, 224 vol.) est une collection littéraire périodique à vocation vulgarisatrice, apparue sous l’initiative du marquis de Paulmy dont la bibliothèque personnelle (actuelle Arsenal) fournit le matériau de départ, et que celui-ci dirigea des commencements à l’année 1779. L’étude du traitement réservé à la littérature médiévale dans cette importante collection soulève plus généralement la question de sa réception à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et de la place qu’occupent la BUR et ses rédacteurs dans l’histoire des études littéraires. Notre travail a consisté d’abord à identifier les collaborateurs du périodique, leur rôle respectif et leurs sources. Le passage d’un réservoir précis de textes à une bibliothèque romanesque imprimée passe dans la BUR par la pratique de l’extrait, technique dont nous nous sommes attachés à montrer qu’elle aboutissait, de recherches en essais, à la formation d’un véritable genre critique. De ce corpus d’extraits émerge en effet, sous la plume des rédacteurs de la BUR, l’élaboration d’une histoire littéraire dont il s’agit de présenter ici les résultats. / The Bibliothèque universelle des romans (1775-1789, 224 vol.) is a literary periodical collection with a non-scientific claim, initiated by the marquis de Paulmy whose personal library (now the Arsenal Library) provided the first material. Paulmy managed it from the beginning until 1779. The way this important collection deals with medieval literature raises the general question of its reception at the end of the 18th century, and the role occupied by the BUR and its authors in the history of literary studies. Our work primarily consists in identifying the contributors, their relative part in the laboratory of the Arsenal, and their source materials. The transition from a specific corpus of texts to a printed library of novels requires, in the BUR, the practice of extracting, an approach, as we try to show, that results –from research to testing– in the creation of a real critical genre. From this corpus of extracts emerges indeed, under the pen of the BUR’s authors, the formulation of a literary history that we intend to present in this work.

No description available.

No description available.