Le dix-huitième siècle est une période propice à l’essor du débat sur la prostitution à Londres.Parce que la politique répressive des autorités se révèle défaillante dans son combat en la matière, un grand débat se fait jour dès le milieu du siècle, dans l’espoir de trouver des recours plus adaptés à l’ampleur du phénomène. Cette thèse est consacrée à l’analyse chronologique de ce débat qui adopte, au fil de son évolution, une dynamique complexe. Créé à Londres en 1758, le Magdalen Hospital devient la première maison de charité pour prostituées repenties en Angleterre. Il est la concrétisation d’une vigoureuse croisade humanitaire menée par des réformateurs philanthropes, afin de porter secours aux nombreuses filles publiques de la ville. Soutenue par le discours sentimental, une politique de »victimisation » à l’égard de la prostituée est mise en place, avec des répercussions majeures sur son image : celle-ci a subi le « crime » de séduction, et c’est par nécessité économique,non par choix, qu’elle se prostitue. À partir des années 1780, on constate néanmoins un tournant sensible dans le débat. Le discours philanthropique semble s’essouffler et présage le retour d’une pensée plus radicale : celle qui rappelle le crime de la prostitution. Dans un contexte social agité, ce commerce est devenu un « mal national » auquel il faut s’attaquer avec plus de fermeté. Par-dessus tout, ce sont deux discours habituellement opposés, celui delà charité et celui de la répression, qui, au tournant du siècle, collaborent peu à peu afin de combattre le « fléau ». / The eighteenth century witnessed an intensifying debate on prostitution in London. Asrepressive state policies became a less effective counter to the burgeoning sex trade, agrowing debate starting in the middle of the century sought a more coherent response. Thisthesis offers a chronological analysis of the debate, which took on a complex dynamic overthe course of its development. Founded in London in 1758, the Magdalen Hospital becamethe first charity house in England for repentant prostitutes. It represented the concretization ofa vigorous humanitarian crusade spurred on by philanthropist reformers hoping to help thecity’s many « streetwalkers ». A new policy, rooted in sentimentalist discourse, whichmaintained the « victimization » of the prostitute, had major repercussions on her image: theprostitute was seen to have been subjected to the crime of « seduction », and it was financialnecessity, not choice, which had led her to prostitution. The 1780s, however, brought about anoticeable shift in the debate. As the philanthropic discourse ran out of steam, it presaged thereturn of a more radical line of thought, which evoked the « crime » of prostitution. At a timeof social turbulence, prostitution increasingly became seen as a « national evil », which neededto be attacked with greater firmness. Above all, it was these two normally opposed lines ofthought – that of charity and that of repression – which, at the turn of the century, tentativelyworked together to put an end to the « scourge » of prostitution.

Francesco Geminiani was highly regarded as a violinist, composer, and theorist during the late Baroque era. During his lifetime he was considered equalin status to the foremost composers of the day; however, relatively little information is available regarding his life and works today. This lack of information is largely a result of controversy among his peers regarding the merit of his work, specifically in reference to melodic style, structural consistency and harmonic practices. Critical views of such authors as Sir John Hawkins and Charles Burney have been reflected in later historical writings, considerably suppressing further interest in the composer. The first objective of this thesis is the examination of Geminianis 1752 treatise, Guida Armonica, its content, and implications for potential harmonic and structural functions. The second objective is to identify specific characteristics of Geminianis music that distinguish him from other composers of the period. Comparative analyses of selected movements by Geminiani and his teacher, Arcangelo Corelli, identify traits unique to Geminiani. The third objective of this project is to explore possible relationships between the work of Geminiani and the content presented in Guida Armonica. It is the intent of this study to provide expanded information about Guida Armonica and Geminiani’s compositional style, identify possible parallels between the music and treatise, and explore how the distinguishing stylistic details of his work may correlate with the criticisms he faced.

On the tenth of January 1786, Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi recorded her entrance into the city of Naples, Italy in her travel journal Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey Through France, Italy, and Germany. She emphasized the importance of her experience in Naples by stating that: "among all the new ideas I have acquired since England lessened to my sight upon the sea, those gained at Naples will be the last to quit me." This British woman's stay in Naples was but a brief period within her three year long Grand Tour, yet it represented a great deal more than a simple respite. It became both a metaphor for her own break from the English society with her second marriage to an Italian musician and a forum through which she could express her complex opinions about class, ethnicity and gender. Essentially, this study reconstructs how Naples became a symbolic site in the journal and what it and its inhabitants represented to Hester Piozzi, both geographically and personally. Moreover, it simultaneously analyzes the common northern-European impressions that informed her opinions of Naples and the personal experiences that shaped her interactions with Neapolitans. Complex and sometimes conflicting beliefs and motivations formed Hester Piozzi's opinions of the place and its people. The object of my thesis is to understand how these various strands shaped her cultural interactions in the Italian south. In Piozzi's mind, Naples stood for many things. In part, long-standing northern European conceptions of Italian society formed the basis for her perceptions. More interestingly they also built upon her intensely personal observations as a woman who had split from her own social niche, the British upper-class. The city's exotic qualities provided her with the ability to fully embrace her liberation, yet in that context she also found common parallels that connected the lives of Neapolitan women to her own. Ironically, in the place that she believed to be most opposite to her home, she found a striking metaphor to help her evaluate and understand her own fractured life in England.

The overarching goal of this study is to suggest that Alexander Pope did not abandon his project for a "system of ethics in the Horatian way," but rather that in his final days he did find a way to unite the parts at hand into a viable whole. Constructing such an argument, however, requires a similar building up from the parts, and so the core focus becomes a study on the way the image of an arch can serve as a metaphor for Pope's reconciliation scheme in his Moral Essays as he "steers betwixt" seeming opposites. To justify this approach, I note the works of critics who have studied Pope's use of the sister arts, the works of architectural theorists and historians, as well the works of critics who focus on various reconciliatory strategies. Perhaps more importantly, I look back to Pope's correspondence and Joseph Spence's record to establish not only Pope's interest in architecture, but also his actual architectural endeavors. From this foundation, I relate Pope's intentions for his opus magnum and indicate the connections that can be drawn between the four epistles of Essay on Man and the four epistles that Pope selected to comprise the "death-bed" edition of his ethic work, namely To a Lady, To Cobham, To Bathurst, and To Burlington. Finally, I examine Pope's method of reconciling the extremes he presents by exemplum in the Moral Essays by comparing the personal and societal pressures that form the basis of Pope's satire to the vertical and lateral thrusts that enable an arch to stand, even as they threaten its destruction should the forces become unbalanced. From such an architectural perspective, one can trace Pope's conception of man in his middle state as he makes the transition from the abstract plan established in Essay on Man, through the pendentive formed by the arches of the Moral Essays, and ultimately to the ideal state of existence that is represented by the dome. The final result can be conceived of as no less than a monument to Pope's life and art.

The works of Mary Wollstonecraft have been largely utilized in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries within the domain of feminist studies. They were influential throughout the 'feminist movement' of the 1960s and 1970s and Wollstonecraft is routinely given the title of 'mother' of feminism. One result of her works being classified as important feminist texts is the elision of the religious element in her works. Moreover, recent scholarship has drawn attention to the central importance of religion in eighteenth century British discourse. This thesis will primarily argue that Wollstonecraft was heavily influenced by religion, and that her writings were conceived in response to a profoundly theologico-political culture. This influence of religion has generally been overlooked by researchers and this thesis will aim to redress this absence. Four of Wollstonecraft's works - all produced within a 'similar' political climate and within a concise time period - are utilized to show that religion was a foundational element within Wollstonecraft's thought and arguments. This thesis shows that Wollstonecraft was not so much a 'feminist' thinker, but a unique intellectual determined to show that the inferior position of women went against 'God's will', teachings and the equality He had ascribed to both men and women during Creation.

This thesis studies the progressive nature of women’s writing and the various factors that helped and hindered the successful publication of women’s written works in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The thesis interrogates culturally encoded definitions of the term “success” in relation to the status of these women writers. In a time when success meant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “attainment of wealth or position”, women could never achieve a level of success equal to the male elite. The dichotomous worldview, in which women were excluded from almost all active participation in the public sphere, led to a literary protest by women. However, the male-privileged binary system is seen critically to affect women’s literary success. Hence, a redefinition of success will specifically refer to the literary experience of these women writers and a long-lasting recognition of this experience in the twentieth century. An examination of literary techniques used in key works from Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen suggests that there was a critical double standard with which women writers were constantly faced. The literary techniques, used by the earlier writers, fail in overcoming this critical double standard because of their emphasis on revolution. However, the last two women writers become literary successes (according to my reinterpretation of the term) because of their particular emphasis on amelioration rather than revolution. The conclusion of the thesis suggests that despite the “unsuccessful” literary attempts by the first three women authors, there is an overall positive progression in women’s journey toward literary success. Described as the ‘generational effect’, this becomes the fundamental point of the study, because together these women represent a combined movement which challenges a system of patriarchal tradition, encouraging women to continue to push the gender relations’ boundaries in order to be seen as individual, successful writers.

In the discussions about contemporary celebrities, the femme fatale, the bad boy, the child star, and the wannabe have become accepted and even celebrated figures. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, actors and actresses who challenged acceptable strategies for celebrity behavior were often punished by exile, debt, disgrace, and humiliation. Some performers even faced a veritable textual and historical oblivion. Illegitimate Celebrity considers the careers of Dorothy Jordan, William Henry West Betty, Edmund Kean, and Margaret Agnes Bunn, and offers a historical genealogy of "illegitimate" performers who dared to break with social convention and struggled to define and redefine themselves according to strict social codes that dictated their behavior both onstage and off. By examining celebrity productions, portraits, caricatures, and performances as elements to producing celebrity, I demonstrate how the audiences used these public figures to create complex narratives regarding class, femininity, masculinity, marriage, nationalism, among others. Ultimately, the study of illegitimate celebrity reveals the role of celebrity in shaping these discursive structures and provides an important history for modern narratives regarding the role of celebrity in society. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / English / PhD; / Dissertation;

This study provides a new account of the evolution of the eighteenth-century British novel by reading it as a response to contemporary interest in, and self-consciousness about, print communication. During the eighteenth century, print went from being a marginal technology to being one with an increasingly wide circulation and a diverse range of applications. The pervasive adoption of print generated anxiety about its positive and negative effects, prompting a series of responses from writers. Examining the work of five British novelists from across the long eighteenth century, this dissertation investigates the influence of eighteenth-century philosophical thinking about human understanding and social interaction on the assumptions that these novelists made about the way their work would be received. In particular, this thesis explores the ways in which these novelists respond to contemporary philosophical ideas about the cognitive functions of the imagination by experimenting with the form of their work in order to generate new kinds of reception. But this study also shows that, while these five novelists drew on the tenets of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, their work exposed a number of the limitations of that philosophy by putting it into practice. Each chapter in this study focuses on a different aspect of the intersection of mediation and imagination. Chapter One considers the ways in which Locke's understanding of probability informed Richardson's attempts to promote specific affective reading practices with his epistolary fictions and editorial commentary. Chapter Two reads Sterne's manipulations of the material page in Tristram Shandy as an attempt to expose the limitations of print communication and to suggest new ways of reading that could overcome those limitations. Chapter Three examines the writing of Smith, Kames, Mackenzie, Reeve and Godwin in order to illustrate both the promise and the danger that these authors attribute to imaginative sympathy and to the reading practices that promote sympathetic reactions. Chapter Four explores Scott's experiments with a form of fiction that could collapse the distance between writing and orality in order to force readers to reevaluate the complex relationship of sound and writing in the establishment of communities in an age of print.

This project report analyzes the emergence of categories of sexual deviancy as they appear in selected medical treatises from the eighteenth century. Terms such as homosexual or lesbian were not yet available in medical or public discourse but the early modern writers did use a variety of other references to establish the existence of such categories. For instance, one might label deviants as hermaphrodites, eunuchs, sodomites, or monsters to describe what were perceived as unnatural forms of sexual expression which ostensibly posed a threat to the social order largely because they were not procreative, but also because of the fear that they might produce children of the same ilk. Moreover, the sudden explosion in scientific and medical knowledge during the Enlightenment created a need for the organization and classification of such knowledge, as well as a fascination with anomalies and how they might be cured. My argument is that four of these deviant categoriesthe chronic masturbator, tribades or hermaphrodites, mollies (or effeminate male homosexuals), and eunuchswere considered unnatural because they fell outside normative prescriptions of acceptable sexual conduct that was based primarily on pro-natal and pro-nutpial ideologies. I rely on experts in eighteenth-century scholarship, such as Rictor Norton, Randolph Trumbach, Thomas Laqueur, Robert Darby, Thomas A. King, and George Rousseau, to inform my discussion of writings from this period. Although contemporary scholars in this field have made significant contributions to our knowledge of early modern understandings of sexual deviancy, relatively few of them seem to have investigated how medical treatises on generation provided a scientific basis for the marginalization of specific types of people. By identifying these types under the larger category of generation, I argue that these medical texts and popular sexologies function as vehicles of social control by emphasizing that the only legitimate form of sexual expression was within the context of marriage and that its sole purpose was for reproduction.

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