This dissertation seeks to explore the wide reaching effects of the ‘Consumer Revolution of the Augustan Period’ (1680-1750) by examining the Hudson’s Bay Company from the perspective of the London metropole. During this period, newly imported and manufactured goods began flooding English markets. For the first time, members of the middling and lower sorts were able to afford those items which had previously been deemed ‘luxuries.’ One of these luxuries was the beaver felt hat, which had previously been restricted to the wealthy aristocracy and gentry because of its great cost. However, because of the HBC’s exports of beaver fur from Rupert’s Land making beaver widely available and therefore, less expensive, those outside of the privileged upper sorts were finally able to enjoy this commodity. Thus, the focus here will be on the furs leaving North America, specifically Hudson’s Bay, between 1670 and 1730, and consider the subsequent consumption of those furs by the British and European markets. This thesis examines English fashion, social, economic, and political history to understand the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Consumer Revolution, and their effects on one another.

“Skeletal Testimony: Bony Biopolitics in the Early Atlantic” argues that colonial descriptions of Indigenous remains throughout the Atlantic World compose two archives: textual representations and physical remains. Because these remains explicitly demonstrate a relationship between embodied life and writing, they enable analysis of how settler writers depicted them and how Indigenous communities care for them. Emphasizing these moments through what I term “skeletal testimony,” I ask the question: what care resulted in the appearance of these remains, and how does this recognition change how we read these texts? Examining reports, histories, natural histories, speeches, poems, and engravings from New England through Suriname, I establish how colonial authors used formalized conventions of natural history empiricism and firsthand narration to represent Indigenous remains as collectible bones, often citing and reproducing one another’s work throughout the eighteenth-century Anglophone colonies. These descriptions figure remains as arising naturally and spontaneously from the landscape, enabling colonists to claim land and histories as they erase living Indigenous persons from these spaces. However, without pointed and prolonged physical care, many of these remains would have disappeared. By identifying the tension between this physical preservation and textual descriptions, I contend that these remains always attest to communities and carework, constituting a structural grounding to colonial texts, even as they attempt to obscure such relations. This emphasis in turn facilitates “narrative repatriation,” in which these narratives can be formally and thematically returned from colonial texts to ongoing histories of Indigenous life, a process most clearly demonstrated by formal reworkings and textual citations by Indigenous writers like William Apess. Because this reclaiming does not require political or historical recognition by colonial persons (a contrast to physical repatriation), narrative repatriation thus serves as a creative process of returning and belonging. Ultimately, “Skeletal Testimony” reckons with erasures—real and supposed—of colonial archives, providing a model for navigating settler colonial texts across the Atlantic World. I recalibrate how we do “early American literary studies” by insisting that we must always think about texts and bodies together, mobilizing this relationship to contribute to interdisciplinary conversations about how to respect Indigenous relations between the living and the dead.

This thesis examines the French maritime seizures during the eighteenth-century US Quasi War with France (also called the half war, or the United States’ undeclared war with France), encompassing events on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in France, the United States, and the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. The analysis focuses on the captured ships, telling the stories of seamen who feared for their lives and merchants who lost their ships. This point of view allows the thesis to explore an area of the Quasi War that are less documented in other histories: how civilian participants experienced violence and the indifference of governments that valued property over people. The Law of Nations had a certain amount of ambiguity when it came to captured crews. However, the questionable legality of French seizures and the system of decrees created to sustain them fostered an environment designed create situations where those in the maritime trade lacked credibility when they documented their dangerous situations. By examining seizures that chiefly took place before the more commonly considered date of the conflict (1798). This thesis will attempt to show how extending the timeline of the war allows for a narrative centering the experience of the seizures, and focusing on more than just the political class. Drawing on newspaper articles, legislative records, court records and other judicial records, as well as letters, and family papers, the thesis argues that while no single seizure was a defining event for the country, many were defining events for the individuals involved, and as a whole they constituted the foundation to the conflict. Concentrating on the seizures will not only reveal new perspectives on the Quasi War, but also providing context to other scholarship on the war, where the seizures are less fully explored. Humanizing the Quasi War is important, both because these seizures are an infrequently explored area of scholarship, and because understanding what the conflict meant to everyday Americans makes it easier to understand why it had meaning on a larger scale.

Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift, has captured readers' imaginations for almost three hundred years, spawning countless adaptations over several different mediums. As different means of communicating and transforming art have been invented, these adaptations have grown to fill the new mediums and make use of the various possibilities each form has created. Film in particular has created an enormous opportunity to re-imagine Gulliver's Travels, since it can directly show the audience the fictional foreign locations in which Gulliver finds himself. In this study, I examine seven screen adaptations of Swift's novel to determine what our current culture views as the core of the work, or what we see as the important pieces to pass on to current and future audiences. The seven chosen adaptations were selected based on how well they have survived over the last century; adaptations which are no longer available for commercial purchase and/or viewing were excluded from the study. I have also only included works which maintain a resemblance to the original story in structure, even if merely loosely, and have excluded works which bear only a thematic tie; I based my choices on the works which make an overt claim to be interpretations of the original text. This study examines only the works which seek to directly represent the original novel. By looking at Swift's work through the lens of adaptation, this study will show how Swift's work is currently perceived, and examines what that may mean for the future of Swift's legacy. As cultural views and connotations of language have changed, the directors of the adaptations have used different means to achieve sometimes similar, sometimes different messages. Gulliver's Travels was originally a satiric work that addressed social problems of eighteenth-century England. Popular views on society have changed, however, as have the politicians holding office. Certain events in Gulliver's Travels, such as the reading of Gulliver's offences in Lilliput, no longer have nearly the same relevance. Therefore, it is important to examine how the directors address these changes to determine what will retain relevance over time.

The impact of Enlightenment rhetoric on Revolutionary conceptions of gender has been a topic of historiographical debate. This thesis examines how Scottish Enlightenment stadial views of progress influenced early American female education discourse. Within this framework, upper middle-class white women transitioned from “slaves” to reasonable companions through the performance of feminine domesticity. Women who conformed to the prescriptions of Scottish moralists represented Anglo-American ideals of civility and refinement which served as a justification for the enslavement and dispossession of African and Indigenous peoples. Examining opinion pieces, advertisements for schools, academy addresses, and runaway slave advertisements reveals how early Americans participated in the simultaneous construction of race and gender. Beginning in the colonial era, editorialists deployed rhetoric from James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766) to argue that upper-class white women were capable of reason and thus deserving of educational opportunities. Pre-revolutionary rationales persisted into the post-revolutionary era. This suggests that increased educational opportunities were not contingent on the Revolution. In the 1780s, editorialists deployed lines of reasoning from John Greogory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), to broaden the construct of reasonable companionship. They argued that upper middle-class white women influenced men’s manners and made society more virtuous. This conception gave women an informal public role as moral arbiters. In the 1790s, women’s rights rhetoric challenged but did not refute the ideological construct of reasonable companionship. Taking a critical race approach to studying Revolutionary women’s access to educational opportunities reveals how dominant discourses upheld the racial hierarchy. / Graduate / 2023-08-24

This thesis approaches eighteenth-century utopian thinking from a new methodological angle, namely by utilising the Reception Reader, an open-access text reuse detection tool, to study a sub-corpus of 39 utopian works available in ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), the largest collection of digitised eighteenth-century texts printed in the British and Irish Isles. As the first study of text reuse in utopian thinking, this thesis shows that text reuse detection is a viable method for gaining new insights into eighteenth-century utopian thinking. Engaging with existing theories of text reuse in historical materials, this thesis proposes a theoretical framework that is particularly suited for the study of text reuse in eighteenth-century books, with an emphasis on the interrelationship between text reuse and contemporary print culture. This thesis argues that an investigation of text reuse patterns at three interconnected levels—reflecting print culture, genre popularity, and individual authors’ persuasive strategies—results in a better understanding of the presence and purpose of text reuse in eighteenth-century utopian works. This thesis posits that text reuse was often a deliberate choice on the part of the author to signal belonging to a shared intellectual tradition, and, most importantly, to support the overall critical aim of the utopian work. Individual instances of text reuse in utopian works are signs of deliberate or unintentional engagement with the culture that surrounded these works. A more nuanced interpretation of how utopian thinking interacted with contemporary print culture is crucial for recognising why utopian thinking continued to be prevalent throughout the eighteenth century.

This thesis researches the construction of gender ideals for the new Middle Class and women’s involvement in the same by analysing fashion magazines published in Germany and Sweden between 1786 to 1827 and 1818 to 1844, respectively. The analysis consists of two parts: first, the share of women’s involvement in the public sphere as defined by Habermas as well as the justification of the inclusion of female-written texts and second, the nature of gender ideals in relation to the separate spheres’ framework. They show that the highest percentage of female contributions to fashion magazines was 5.3 % for the Swedish magazine from 1840 to 1844, while the lowest percentage of female contributions was 2.1 % for the German magazine from 1820 to 1827. Furthermore, the inclusion of texts written by women was often justified through their domestic virtue or the statement that they never wanted their texts to be published. The publication was thus against their will, which firmly anchors the female authors in the private sphere. In the second part, this study shows that women authors in the fashion magazines mainly advocated for the separation of the public and private but, in comparison to gender ideals shared by male authors, did not advocate for the submission of women. Regarding the stereotypes of emotionality and rationality, I find that women were mostly portrayed as emotional by men but would contest these negative portrayals of their sex. At the same time, men were portrayed as emotional and rational by both female and male authors, which is surprising considering the prominent male ideal of rationality.

Following the Proclamation Act of 1763 growing numbers of colonists arrived in upper East Tennessee to settle and build wherever they could make arrangements with local groups of Cherokee. While these first families were occupied with survival, the British colonies continued to thrive. Concurrent with growing prosperity was the increasing determination of colonists to exercise control over their property and economic interests. Frontier exigencies affected family strategies for dividing labor and creating economic endeavors. A commonly held view asserts that where women were scarce and needed, rigid sex-role distinctions could not prevail. This thesis will present research of the earliest Washington County Court records and other primary evidence from the late eighteenth-century through the early Republic period to examine the place of women in the upper East Tennessee frontier and argue that despite frontier conditions the underlying attitudes about women did not change.

The Long Eighteenth Century was a period in which change was constant and proceeding the Restoration Era; this sense of change continued throughout the era. Charles II created an era in which women were allowed on the theatre stage, and his mistresses accompanied him to court; Charles II set the stage for the proto-feminist ideas of the eighteenth century that would manifest themselves in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. These novels showcase the enlightenment of women and some of their male contemporaries and the beginning struggles of female agency. The eighteenth century was a time in which the separate sphere mentality grew ever stronger within the patriarchal society, and yet, women began to question their subservient place in this society—although this struggle would continue to intensify throughout the nineteenth century and eventually come to fruition in the late nineteenth century.

The eighteenth century is famous for producing literary satire, primarily in verse (and later prose) form. However, during this period, a new dramatic form also arose of which satire was the controlling element. And like the writers of prose and verse satires, playwrights of dramatic satire claimed that their primary aim was the correction of moral faults and failings. Of course, they did not always succeed in this aim. History has shown a few, however, to have had a significant impact on the ideas and lives of their audiences. This thesis is an attempt to demonstrate how these satiric dramas achieved their reformative aims by tracing the theatrical experience of an eighteenth-century audience through Victor Turner's stages of liminality. Turner explains the different ways in which specific genres of theatre (1) create a performance space that is apart from, but still draws symbolically on, the outside world, (2) invite the participation of their audiences in that space, and (3) urge audiences to act in different ways as they leave the theatre space. By examining plays in these ways, we can see how the plays affected the ideas and outlooks of audience members. Because satiric drama invited a high level of participation from audience members, because it invited them into a very "liminal" space, it frequently served to sway audience members' tastes, and in some cases even helped to revolutionize social and literary institutions.