In the late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century English domestic interior, games mediated and influenced the experience of age and masculinity. Games embodied, reflected, and shaped culture. Games united education, entertainment, and players’ imaginations inside the formative social environment of the home. The domestic interior was the catalyst that facilitated the agency of games. I explore the representation of age and masculinity in miniature images of boys, youth, and men in games and the agency of games as they interacted with players. I use three intersecting lenses: how people experience miniature objects; social interactions in domestic spaces; and the ability of an ordinary belonging to influence perceptions, ideas, and behaviour. In two case studies, I argue that games were serious cognitive technologies with agency that mediated and shaped players’ understanding of age and masculinity. In case one, I investigate the visuality, materiality, and experience of playing the didactic board game The New Game of Human Life (1790). The game consists of a battle between vice and virtue that males meet throughout the life stages. In case two, I analyze a series of five sets of paper dolls and their books published by Samuel and Joseph Fuller between 1810 and 1816. The male paper doll-book is an intermedial product that encourages players to imagine and act out adventures. In both cases, I argue games were active cognitive technologies that communicated with players. Games were visual and material culture that fashioned masculine identity. Games played in the domestic interior were communicative media designed to shape players’ ideas about masculine identity and their behaviour. / Graduate / 2022-08-10

My master’s thesis consists of a screenplay adaptation of the Eighteenth Century novel The Excursion by Francis Brooke, as well as an Introduction that details the writing process of the main text. In order to prepare this manuscript, I began with a study of both Francis Brooke and her novel as part of Dr. Judith Slagle’s Eighteenth Century British Novel course and developed my work to completion through independent research on and application of my findings on the screenwriting genre. The concluding product is a three-act screenplay which maintains the original period setting, speech, and costuming while adding such contemporary elements as 20th century music. Such a combination of time periods enables the stillness of the page to become the action of the screen even as it highlights the universal themes of Brooke’s original text.

Recently, literary critics have increasingly drawn on methods of quantitative analysis to understand the readers and literature of the eighteenth century. Ironically, however, the eighteenth century is home to debates concerning the nature and usefulness of number, counting, and therefore, on some level, quantitative analysis. Eighteenth-century questions of number form an important part of the intellectual history of this period; these questions of number, in turn, hold important implications for language and the period's literature. I argue that the far-reaching influence of eighteenth-century questions of number can be seen especially well in the nature poetry of James Thomson. To explore this influence, I first discuss the problems of number presented to eighteenth-century mathematicians and philosophers by George Berkeley's critique of the infinitesimal calculus popularized by Isaac Newton. I then further explain the problems of number for eighteenth-century thinkers by drawing on philosopher Alain Badiou's theorization of the collapse of number in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This background brings to light connections between eighteenth-century questions of number and similar questions philosophers, such as John Locke, asked of language. These connections set the stage to discuss number in Thomson's The Seasons. Because of Thomson's rather unique exposure to the Newtonian tradition through his Edinburgh education, he was introduced not only to Newton's more popular discoveries, but also the mathematical and philosophical debates that swirled around Newton's methods. Coming out of this environment, Thomson's The Seasons display a particular kind of interest in number at its limits—infinity and zero. This paper will explore Thomson's tropological expressions of infinity and zero in the poem and note how these tropes replicate the logic of the sublime. Ultimately number at its limits in Thomson suggests the problems of expression, and, reading against traditional interpretations of Thomson, the limits of the Enlightenment project.

A group of Protestant refugees from Salzburg founded the town of Ebenezer, Georgia, in 1734. The Pietists at the Francke Foundation in Halle sent two pastors, Johann Martin Boltzius and Israel Christian Gronau, to lead the religious immigrants in their new settlement. As other historians have shown, the Halle sponsors wanted Ebenezer to fulfill their own purposes: establish social and religious autonomy under British colonial rule, reproduce the economic structure and institutions of social and religious reform of the Francke Foundation, and establish a successful Pietist ministry in North America. This study examines journals and correspondence from Ebenezer's pastors, British colonial authorities, and the German religious sponsors to reveal how different aspects of the Pietist vision were compromised until Ebenezer resembled a typical German-American settlement rather than a model Pietist community. Georgia's economic conditions, political pressures, and Ebenezer's internal demographic changes forced the pastors to sacrifice their goals for an orphanage, a free labor economy, and a closely structured community of persecuted Protestants. They ensured Ebenezer's economic success and social autonomy, but they were unable to replicate their sponsors' most distinctly Pietist economic, social and religious enterprises.

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.

In 1790s England, an expanding empire, a growing diaspora of English settlers in foreign territories, and spreading political unrest in Ireland and on the European continent all helped to contribute to a destabilization of British national identity. With the definition of “Englishperson” in flux, Ireland, France, and Italy—nations which are prominently featured in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—could be understood, similar to England’s colonies, as representing threats to the nation’s cultural integrity. Because the people of these European countries were stereotypically perceived as being economically impoverished victims of political and “popish” tyranny, it would have been easy to construct them in popular and literary discourse as being both socially similar to the “primitive” indigenous populations of colonized territories and as uneasy reminders of England’s own “premodern” past. Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is twofold. First, it attempts to account for the Gothic’s frequent—albeit subtle—use of imperialist rhetoric, which is largely encoded within the novels’ representations of sublimity, sensibility, and domesticity. Second, it claims that the novels under consideration are preoccupied with testing and reaffirming the salience of bourgeois English identity by placing English or Anglo-inflected characters in conflict with “monstrous” continental Others. In so doing, these novels use the fictions of empire to contain and claim agency over a revolutionary France, an uncertainlypositioned Ireland, and a classically-appealing but socially-problematic Italy.

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Over the long eighteenth century, Britain developed into the foremost naval power in world; with a fleet that could match the combined might of the next two largest European powers – as demonstrated in the Napoleonic Wars – Britain was understood, and understood itself, through the lens of maritime mastery. At the centre of this enduring framework was a potent symbol of Britain in the fused image of the sailor and the ship, as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and David Garrick’s ‘Heart of Oak’ fastened together the nation, the sailor, and the ship in a narrative of divinely ordained power and freedom, at once a justification of the empire and its mythology. This dissertation examines the ways that authors navigated these prevailing currents of naval exaltation, focusing closely on how those patriotic constructions were coopted to question the imperial cause. Indeed, I argue that, far from being a stable patriotic icon, the metaphorical unit of the sailor-ship was hotly contested in the eighteenth century. This study contributes to the growing scholarship of the ‘oceanic turn’, decolonizing the imperial assumptions of maritime discourse of and about this period. The challenges to the national narrative confronted the metaphor with its lived realities, a methodology that works both in stories of triumph and scenes of catastrophe, repudiating its assertions of mastery and liberty. This project reveals the decidedly ambivalent portrayal of British naval culture in works by well-known authors like Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, William Cowper, and Olaudah Equiano in addition to engaging with some lesser-known labouring poets like Henry Needler and William Falconer. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / At the height of the British Empire, it spanned across the globe, held together by the mightiest navy the world had ever seen. The empire justified its existence, to both its own citizens as well as foreigners, as the natural result of a history of skilled sailors and strong ships. However, in the century leading up to the dominance of the British Empire, both the navy and literature about the navy were much less confident about the success of the national project. In fact, a large number of texts – both poems and novels – used the very same sailors and ships to expose the weaknesses of British ambitions. This dissertation examines how these anti-imperial texts functioned and why they were so successful. For a nation that relied on these watery symbols, what did it mean for those elements to be proven false?

This dissertation investigates Markgräfin Wilhelmine von Bayreuth’s (1709 – 1758) architectural patronage and the fashioning of her “body politic,” “body natural,” and the range of personas that inhabited the spaces between the public and private spheres. She used architecture and interior design to perform multiple roles, where the ornamentation of each built space enacted different facets of her royal identity. Central European social customs determined the arrangement and décor of palace architecture. The function, audience, and accessibility of a room were also connected to one’s rank and gender. Because of this, the representation of Wilhelmine’s “bodies” in art and architecture should have reinforced current social customs, which dictated that her visual identity play a subordinated role to that of her husband, Markgraf Friedrich. However, when considering the subtle claims made throughout Wilhelmine’s decorative program as a whole, it is clear that she used architectural splendor and theatricality to subvert these conventions and represented herself as her husband’s equal. The theatrical nature of ornament—as a social agent used to transfer meaning—allowed Wilhelmine to redefine the gender limitations of Magnificence gave her greater agency to perform roles that were often at odds with her limited social and political powers as a woman consort. Previous scholarship on Wilhelmine von Bayreuth has failed to recognize architectural space as an arena for contesting the limitations of social decorum or the differences between the Markgräfin’s public, natural, and semi-private bodies. This project contributes to the field of eighteenth-century studies by contextualizing Wilhelmine von Bayreuth’s commissions within a larger system of European Enlightenment architecture, design, and self-fashioing. Few authors have considered the architectural patronage of non-sovereign consorts in German courts, like Wilhelmine’s, or the prescribed boundaries that gender played in their commissions. This dissertation illustrates the significant contributions that minor courts and non-sovereign noblewomen made to the development of Rococo ornament and architecture. A layered methodological approach—which combines extensive archival research with literature on self-fashioning, orientalism, spatial theory, and gender performance—gives a greater understanding of Wilhelmine’s agency in crafting her range of public, private, and liminal identities. / Art History

The first half of the 18th century saw the advent of Qing imperial authority over Central Tibet and much of Inner Asia. Histories of this formative period have often reiterated narratives of empire building that emanate from the imperial center in Beijing. The few treatments of Qing empire building that engage Tibetan language sources have typically centered around the ties of patronage between the Qing court and Gelukpa monastic hierarchs such as the Dalai Lama and their associated monastic institutions. This dissertation traces elite responses to the political transformations that swept across Central Tibet during the 18th century by examining the literary narratives of the Qing encounter and Tibetan lay rule produced by Tibetan laymen that clustered around the lodestar of the court of the king Polhané Sonam Topgye (r. 1728–1747). How did these courtly elites negotiate the violent and transformative history of state and empire building in 18th century Tibet and Inner Asia? What imaginaries did they draw upon to understand the formation of new political affiliations and communities against the backdrop of Qing imperial expansion? And what was the legacy of the Polha kingdom as lay rule ended in 1750? This dissertation recovers an early modern reading of this lay literary tradition as a distinct form of elite self-fashioning and historiographical practice that emanated from poet-statesmen at the Polha court during the formative decades of Qing rule in Lhasa. In doing so, I foreground the role of a network Tibetan lay elites in the early Central Tibetan encounter with Qing imperial power, and the potency of the Tibetan literary tradition to capture the major political, social, and cultural shifts that Qing imperial rule brought about. Attending to these Tibetan noblemen as both key political actors in and poet-historians of this imperial encounter, I demonstrate how their poetic literary productions sought to reconcile notions of kingship, ethical governance and the history of imperial rule in Tibet and Inner Asia by drawing on an entangled Buddhist political and literary imagination. At its core, this study contributes to the understanding of indirect rule in a multi-ethnic imperium, how Buddhist knowledge making practices responded to imperial conditions, and the connected histories of political formations in early modern Asia. Delinking from the colonial episteme - with its inherent conceptions of the historical and the literature as separate domains, this study reads 18th elite Tibetan sources for both their historical and literary value in tow with Tibetan, Qing, and European archival sources of the period, to offer a window into how Tibetan courtly elites were influenced by, responded to, and imagined the formative encounter between the 18th century Central Tibet and the Qing empire. To this end, this dissertation is comprised of five thematic chapters centering Tibetan lay elites, their encounter with Qing imperial power, their participation in Buddhist elite literary culture, and the broader ethical, material, and political concerns they inscribed through their cultural productions spanning the 18th and early 19th century.