Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is not traditionally known for valuing the company of women. While contemporary critics tend to be more forgiving and defer to the prevailing values of the eighteenth century, they generally do not dwell on the positive influence that Swift had on female writers of his day. This thesis will work towards remedying that omission by analyzing the writing of three prominent female contemporaries of Swift: Delariviere Manley, Mary Barber and Laetitia Pilkington. While varying in writing ability, each of the three women in this thesis had a personal relationship with Swift, was invited to join his "inner circle" for a time and received his advice on a variety of issues. Despite substantial analysis to the contrary, this thesis will emphasize the positive impact that Swift had on women writers of his day. While surely influenced by the mores of his time that relegated female writing to the "lower rungs" of literature, Swift nevertheless sought women out, reviewed their work and offered his suggestions and insights. Ever the keen social observer, Swift often expressed his doubts about the capabilities of the female mind through the veil of satire or by employing alternate literary voices. However, the Dean's ridicule does not mean that he was merely an insensitive misogynist. Despite the opinion of some critics, Swift was concerned with the development of the female mind, and dedicated human behavior troubled him deeply, he was nevertheless able and willing to support and befriend individual acquaintances (particularly females), lending them both personal and literary advice. Therefore, rather than bow to the prevailing societal pressures that kept women writers at arm's length, Swift welcomed female companionship, and helped them to become effective literary voices. The template that he advocated, however, was from the "male" perspective, as he encouraged his female protges to emulate "traditional" masculine behaviors in both their personal and literary endeavors. Therefore, this thesis focuses on three prominent female writers who benefited from the Dean's friendship and advice: Delariviere Manley (best known for her influential New Atalantis), Mary Barber (focusing primarily on her Poems on Several Occasions), and Laetitia Pilkington (notably through her groundbreaking The Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington). While each writer wrote in a distinctive manner and possessed different public personas, Manley was perhaps the most talented of the three; in fact, many critics regard her as Swift's peer rather than simply a follower. Indeed, they were both concerned with many of the same issues, including dissatisfaction with those in power, a desire to satirically comment on the issues of the day and general disdain for the deficiencies of mankind. A primary influence for this thesis is the seminal work of Margaret Anne Doody. Her scholarship sheds light on Swift's positive influence on his female companions, as evidenced in numerous essays, including her essential "Swift among the Women" (1998). In this work, Doody offers evidence to support the Dean's concern for his female followers). This analysis will support her work and clarify the vital role that Swift played in the development of eighteenth century female writers.

An important part of the recent growth in scholarship on meter focuses on reconstructing 18th-century listening practices. Danuta Mirka (2009) studies contemporary accounts of meter in theory treatises to build a model of 18th-century metric listening, while Stefan Love (2016) takes a corpus studies approach, arguing that surveying repertoire provides a more accurate view of meter than 18th-century theorists. But despite the known debt that much 18th-century art music owes to dance and dance music, Mirka and Love only briefly mention dance. In touching so lightly on dance, these and other authors overlook the more fundamental connection between meter and movement. In this paper I examine late 18th-century French contredanses and their music to propose a model of contemporary metric hearing that unites literal and musical motion. There are three features of the contredanse and dancing in general that support their relevance to 18th-century metric experience. First is the contredanse’s role in society—recent writers on 18th-century music often present the minuet as the premier dance of the century, but though it remained the most aristocratic dance, by the middle of the century it had been surpassed in popularity by the contredanse. Second, contredanses involved multiple dancers moving simultaneously, and music helped them coordinate their movements. As a result, hypermetrical schemas matching hypermeasures with dance moves could develop. Finally, the experience of moving in time with musical meter likely had a positive effect on dancers’ ability to find meter in music in general.

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Virgil's Georgics portray peace and war as disparate states derived from the same fundamental materials. Adopting a didactic tone, the poet uses the language of farming to confront questions about the making of lasting peace in the wake of the Roman civil wars. Rife with subjunctive constructions, the Georgics place no hope in the easily realized peace of a golden age; instead, they teach us that peace must be sowed, tended, reaped, and replanted, year after year. Despite this profound engagement with the consequences of civil war, however, the Georgics have not often been studied in relation to English writers working after the civil wars of the 1640s. I propose that we can better understand poems by Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Anne Finch, and John Philips--all of whom grappled with the ramifications of war--by reading their work in relation to the georgic peace of Virgil's poem. In distinct ways, these poets question the dominant myth of a renewed golden age; instead, they model peace as a stable yet contingent condition constructed from chaotic materials, and therefore in need of perpetual maintenance. This project contributes to existing debates on genre, classical translation, the relationships between early modern poetry and politics, and most importantly, poetic representations of political and social peace. Recent work has argued for the georgic as a flexible mode rather than a formal genre, yet scholars remain primarily interested in its relation to questions of British national identity, agricultural reform movements, and the production of knowledge in the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century. I argue, however, for the relevance of the georgic to earlier poems written in response to the consequences of the English civil wars. The dissertation includes chapters devoted separately to Marvell, Finch, and Dryden, and concludes with a chapter on how their dynamic conceptions of georgic peace both inform and conflict with aspects of the popular eighteenth-century genre of imitative georgic poetry initiated by Philips and brought to its height by James Thomson. / 2017-05-01T00:00:00Z

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace / This dissertation explores what a new materialist line of thinking can offer the study of eighteenth-century Irish and British literature. It sees specific objects that were considered indicative of eighteenth-century Irish identity—coins, mantles, flax, and spinning wheels—as actively indexing and shaping the formal development of Irish character in fiction, from Jonathan Swift to Sydney Owenson. Through these objects, I trace and analyze the material origin stories of two eighteenth-century discursive phenomena: the developments of Irish national character and Irish literary character. First, in the wake of colonial domination, the unique features and uses of objects like coins bearing the Hibernian typeface, mantles, and flax helped formulate a new imperial definition of Irish national character as subdued, raced, and, crucially, feminine. Meanwhile, material processes such as impressing coins or spinning flax for linen shaped ways of conceiving an interiorized deep subjectivity in Irish fiction during the rise of the individual in late eighteenth-century ideology. Revising recent models of character depth and interiority that take English novel forms as their starting point (Deidre Lynch’s in particular), I show how Ireland’s particular material and colonial contexts demonstrate the need to refit the dominant, Anglocentric understanding of deep character and novel development. These four material objects structure Irish character’s gradual interiorization, but, unlike the English model, they highlight a politically resistant, inaccessible depth in Irish character that is shadowed by gendered, colonial violence. I show how, although ostensibly inert, insignificant, or domestic, these objects invoke Ireland’s violent history through their material realities—such as the way a coin was minted, when a mantle was worn, or how flax was prepared for spinning—which then impacts the very form of Irish characters in literary texts. My readings of these objects and their literary manifestations challenge the idea of the inviolable narrative and defend the aesthetics and complexity of Irish characters in the long eighteenth century. In the case of particular texts, I also consider how these objects’ agency challenges the ideology of Britain’s imperial paternalism. I suggest that feminized Irish objects can be feminist in their resistant materiality, shaping forms of Irish deep character that subvert the colonial gaze. Using Ireland as a case study, this dissertation demonstrates how theories of character and subjectivity must be grounded in specific political, material contexts while arguing that a deeper engagement with Irish materiality leads to a better understanding of Irish character’s gendering for feminist and postcolonial analysis. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

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St. Augustine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a prosperous, multi-ethnic community that boasted trade connections throughout the Atlantic world. Shipping records demonstrate that St. Augustine had access to a wide variety of goods, giving residents choices in what they purchased, and allowing them to utilize their material possessions to display and reinforce their status. Likewise, their choice of residential design and location allowed them to make statements in regards to their place in the social order. St. Augustine was a unique city in the Spanish Empire; the realities of frontier living meant that inter-ethnic connection were common and often necessary for survival and social advancement. Inhabitants enjoyed a high degree of social mobility based on wealth rather than ethnicity or place of origin. Through entrepreneurship and hard work, many St. Augustinians took advantage of the city*s newfound prosperity and fluid social structure to better their economic and societal position. In sum, St. Augustine in the Second Spanish Period (1783-1821) was not a city in decay as the traditional historiography holds; rather, it was a vibrant community characterized by a frontier cosmopolitanism where genteel aspirations and local realities mixed to define the social order.

This dissertation is about the formations of the king as knowledge of the political in early eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley, in present day northeast India. Here, I identify three areas as the sites of the political: courtly-monastic politics, pleasure, and law. Each chapter of the dissertation presents a contemporary iteration of the king that contributed to the understanding of the political in early eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley. In doing so, I propose an understanding of kingship founded in the person of the king. Drawing on expressive literature, epigraphs, and visual sources written in the first few decades of the eighteenth century in the court of the Tungkhungia kings of Brahmaputra Valley and the Vaiṣṇava monasteries in the region, I argue that the person (and the body) of the king was the site of the political in the courtly-monastic spaces. This understanding of a personalised kingship in the courtly-monastic spaces was in dialogue with transregional political imaginations of kingship, both imperial Mughal and subimperial Rajput of early modern South Asia. In the dissertation, I bring together sources in Assamese, Persian, Sanskrit, and Tai-Ahom towards revealing the ways in which a distinct local articulation of the king in areas of politics, pleasure, and law was located within translocal and transregional networks of learning stretching across the regions lying to the western and southern borders of the territories of the Tungkhungia kings. Through a conceptualisation of early eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley as a “contact zone” between Mughal-Rajput, Tai-Ahom, and Burmese cultural forms that clashed and grappled in the wake of Brahman arrival in the court of the Tungkhungia kings I historicise the multiple iterations of the king towards understanding the intellectual conditions that emerged as foundations of a new political imagination. Moving away from cultural histories of kingship in early modern South Asia where studies of cultural productions have remained the lens for analysis of kingship; in this dissertation I look at the formations of the king within specific areas of intellectual inquiry towards writing a history of the multiple iterations of the king, across institutions, in early eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley. The dissertation, thus, intervenes in the study of kingship in early modern South Asia and the World, demonstrating the centrality of the person of the king, in contemporary understandings of the political, rather than the “body politic” that is immutable and imperishable. The dissertation, thus, with its focus on early eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley, brings to light theories of the political emerging from the margins of imperial histories of early modern South Asia and the World.

<P> This dissertation explores literary representations of North American Indigenous people in eighteenth-century British texts. Throughout the century, "Indians" appeared frequently in British print culture, in newspapers, periodicals, and travel narratives, but the primary focus in this work is on imaginative writing such as novels, plays, poetry, and essays. Many of these texts are surprisingly overlooked, and scholarship regularly diminishes the significance of Indians in literature during the period. I argue that these texts explore modernity through Indigenous subjectivity, and ultimately contribute to the shaping of modem British identity. </p> <p> While the figure of the Indian is often thought of as a primitive "noble savage," Indians were also used to negotiate modem discourses which Britons were beginning to encounter throughout the eighteenth century. The important developments in British culture during the time, such as the forming of a unified British identity, the rise of capitalism and consumerism, and empire, impacted the lives and identities of Britons, and the Indian was used as a kind of "other self' to negotiate their effects. This dynamic began with texts surrounding the 1710 visit by four Iroquois "Indian kings" to London a few years following the Acts of Union, and increased mid-century as conflict in the colonies escalated. First Nations people began to play an important strategic role and were more frequently encountered by British soldiers and travellers, which led to a rise in textual representation in the metropolis. Both as critics of European culture and discursive sites upon which to project emerging cultural forces, Indians functioned as imagined modem subjects; by the end of the century, the figure of the Indian became appropriated by the Romantics and other writers, and the hybrid Briton who internalized Indigenous fortitude and cultural tenacity became the corrective to the decadence and corruption of European culture. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)