Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa may have had abolitionist motivations when writing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, but the function of the text is much different and self-serving. Specifically, in looking closely at the wording of the text, with its language of we versus they, in group versus out group, ours versus theirs, Equiano clearly feels he at no time belongs fully to any specific group or place; rather, he only partially belongs anywhere, and thus, creates this work of autobiography and appropriation of fiction and oral tradition to negotiate and cultivate his own liminal, or even heterotopic, space. In other words, I suggest he may have used the writing of this text to define his sense of self, creating a space in which he was both in control and fully belonged.

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.

From the middle to the late eighteenth century, England prospered due to growing number of industries and revenues from foreign trade. Being economically available, people valued quality of lifestyle, including having amateur musical performances in social gatherings. Popular musical productions at the time, other than solo music, included also chamber music, such as accompanied keyboard sonatas. In these types of works, the performers could invite the guests to join in the performance, yet also demonstrating his or her own tastes and skills. František Kocžwara¡¦s (1750-1791) The Battle of Prague was one of the most favored piece of works by the English amateur musicians. Due to its moderate level of required performance skills and magnificent effect of the sounds, the amateur musicians were able to perform well in front of their guests, while bring the atmosphere of musical gathering to a high peak. This paper consists of three sections. The first section discusses the development of English music, its influences from local social factors, ands the rise of amateur musicians. The following section discusses the musical form which is mostly favored by amateur pianist in the late eighteenth century - accompanied keyboard sonatas - with depth into its historical background, social functions, and music arrangement. The final section discusses the life of Czech musician, František Kocžwara, and his accompanied keyboard sonatas published in 1788 The Battle of Prague. Through detailed description of the musical style and relationship between the main and the accompanying parts, a better understanding may be formed regarding the non main-trend composers and the elegant lifestyle of the English amateur musical life.

Research into the material culture of the household and the domestic interior has increased rapidly during recent years. It has primarily focused on the appearance and use of domestic space leaving household management and maintenance a neglected area of study. Furthermore the relationship between the ownership of goods, the domestic interior and the use of the home has not been studied in conjunction with the management and maintenance of the household. Additionally, research into the material culture of the household has predominantly focused on quantitative changes experienced during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth. It has long been established that the ownership of household goods increased in this period, but similar research has not taken place to explore the nature of these goods, nor to extend this work to the subsequent period. This thesis brings these aspects of research together for the first time to create a synthesis between the ownership of goods and the changing nature and use of the home and household maintenance and management. The argument proposed here suggests that the changing nature of the material culture of the household and developments to the use of the home had an impact upon the way that the household was managed and maintained. The complex inter-woven relationship between the material culture of the domestic interior and the ways in which it was maintained and managed reveals that both elements were a part of an emerging middle class culture of domesticity. Therefore, this thesis makes a significant contribution to a holistic understanding of the household by looking at the ownership of goods and the use of domestic space within the context of maintenance and management.

The present study examines a specific form of literary memorialization of Scottishness, stubborn and elusive as that term might be, under the concrete political, social, and economic conditions of the late eighteenth-century. It holds that literary history and criticism can make a significant contribution to understanding Scottish history, both in its own terms and in relation to British history writ large. It inserts into these histories a much wider range of late eighteenth-century Scottish poets than previous scholarship and deepens our understanding of the cultural and discursive manifestations of British state formation under the extreme stress of war and revolution. It also reveals the way the political crisis of the French Revolution converged with pre-existing concerns about the impact of union on the Scottish economy and society, as well as with shared Anglo-Scottish critiques of state power that feature so prominently in the political history of this period. Many of the poets studied here have never figured significantly in political, cultural, or literary histories of the period and, with a few notable exceptions, no analysis of their poetry, whether in political or literary terms, has yet occurred. Consequently, this study brings both historical and literary analysis to bear on a large and diverse group of Scottish poets with a range of political and aesthetic perspectives that reflect not only on the question of Scottish, English, and British "identities," but on the formation of British poetry more generally. / text

This dissertation discusses the Edo-period Japanese translation, adaptation, and theoretical analysis of Chinese popular fiction and drama between 1680 and 1815. I focus on the ways in which Japanese encounters with fiction and drama written in the unfamiliar “vernacular” engendered reinterpretations of Japan’s cultural relationship to China. Whereas this relationship had previously centered largely on the Confucian classics and their ongoing interpretation in Japan, I argue that the introduction of vernacular texts enabled new modes of visualizing China’s position as a locus of textual and cultural authority. I connect the increasingly formalized study of vernacular texts to a discourse on temporality and linguistic change, and demonstrate the degree to which engagement with late imperial Chinese fiction and drama led to the reformulation of definitions of culture, literature, and language. By dramatically widening the range of materials and texts that could be used to construct a vision of China, the introduction of vernacular fiction and drama encouraged Edo-period philologists and fiction connoisseurs to reconceptualize both the criteria for judging textual competence, and the position of their own writing with respect to China. Rather than focusing on eighteenth-century efforts to efface traces of China’s cultural imprint on Japan, I seek to complicate accounts of the development of Japanese literature by exploring the oeuvres of philosophers, philologists, and fiction writers who attempted to theorize areas of convergence between Chinese and Japanese literary production. The study is divided into four chapters. Chapter One introduces the major themes of the dissertation as a whole and analyzes the rhetoric surrounding both the introduction of Chinese vernacular texts and subsequent attempts at reifying their study as an independent academic discipline. Chapter Two develops these themes further through an analysis of three eighteenth-century explorations of aesthetics, genre, and literary translation. In Chapters Three and Four, I examine a group of anomalous “reverse translations” of Japanese fiction and drama into the language and structure of vernacular Chinese fiction—using these largely overlooked texts to map out networks of literary contact and discuss the hermeneutics underlying eighteenth-century Japanese engagement with vernacular Chinese fiction and drama. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation studies the construction of the marital bond and its dissolution with respect to the normative stipulations of the shari'a, social and moral constructions, and the cultural formations during late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Istanbul. Through the examination of court cases, estate inventories, and contemporary chronicles, I demonstrate the strategies and practices that perpetrated possible patterns in the matrimonial union. Although Islamic law allowed for and encouraged the spouses to reconcile marriage-related negotiations outside of court, the amount of registered marital disputes indicates the central role of the court for spouses in establishing conciliatory grounds. This study explores in particular the consensual and purposeful use of the shari'a courts by women. The examination of the sicils from three different courts in intra muros Istanbul has shown that women were adamant about formalizing the consequence of marriage, divorce and property related discordances hoping to secure their future interests. The dissertation essentially introduces the largely overlooked issue of the specialization of courts in this period and presents specifically the Dāvud Pasha court’s concentration on marriage and family-related disputes. By focusing on local practices and particularities through a case-by-case methodology, the study delivers a portrayal of Ottoman urban marriage structure within the context of the socio-legal and economic dynamics of the period. Given that the formal registry of marriage contracts and divorce settlements was not legally enforced until the early twentieth century, the extensive practice of registration in court could be interpreted as the preliminary steps to the formalization and codification of the marital union. I offer a likely reading of women’s experiences with respect to marriage and property ownership suggesting that the predominant marriage pattern observed in the segment of the population that used the court was companionate. By analyzing quantitative data and archival material, I demonstrate women’s visibility in the public sphere through their significantly increased use of courts, proactive utilization of social networks, and strategic activities vis-a-vis marriage and divorce to depict a portrayal of the late eighteenth-century Istanbul family.

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.

For years, scholars have focused on the serious narrative of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and have been unable to reconcile the episodes of ironic humor within the larger serious narrative. By reading Rasselas as an imitation of Ecclesiastes rather than an Oriental tale, critics can begin to identify the humor in Rasselas through the embellishment of the story of Ecclesiastes. The failures of the character Koheleth in Ecclesiastes become the genesis for the failures of Rasselas and his companions; however, the failures of Rasselas and more elaborate and comedic. How Johnson embellishes these failures to create humorous irony in Rasselas becomes clearer for the reader through this new categorization of genre, which can hopefully unite the two opposing views of criticism surrounding this book.

Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, has been noted as an unconventional eighteenth-century novel and it has long been considered unadaptable and unfilmable. In the last decade, however, two popular adaptations of Tristram Shandy have appeared in new media forms: Martin Rowson’s 1996 graphic novel and Michael Winterbottom’s 2005 film. Since Sterne’s text denies the kind of transfer typical of literary adaptations, Rowson and Winterbottom adapt the conceptual elements. Through adaptation and media theory, this thesis defines the Shandean elements of Sterne’s novel and locates the qualities of the text retained in adaptation. Rowson and Winterbottom adapt the conceptual properties of Tristram Shandy, ‘the spirit of the text,’ into two distinct mediums. In an exploration of the conventions of each medium, this thesis argues that the adaptations of Tristram Shandy are true to its spirit, and both successfully adapt the unadaptable novel.