La tesi ricostruisce alcuni momenti fondamentali della storia della contea principesca di gradisca, per approfondire i rapporti intercorsi tra 'centro' e 'periferia', tra gli Eggenberg/Asburgo e la nobiltà della contea. / The dissertation reconstructs some fundamental moments of the history of the princely county of Gradisca, in order to study relationships between 'centre' and 'periphery' in depth, between the Eggenberg/Habsburg and the nobility.

La tesi vuole evidenziare il carattere continuativo che l’influenza francese ha esercitato sulla moda curiale nel XVIII, fino allo scoppiare delle Rivoluzione. I primi tre capitoli, sono necessari per comprendere la nascita di questa fortuna. Lo scontro tra corona francese e corona spagnola si è caratterizzato nel XVII secolo anche come scontro di codici vestimentari. Il perdurare delle “divise” di corte maschile e femminile nel XVIII perfezionate durante la seconda metà del regno di Luigi XIV è funzionale al mantenimento del ruolo guida: riconoscendo la necessità di uniformarsi agli abiti prescritti dal cerimoniale francese, le corti si appropriano non solo di un codice vestimentario, ma di una particolare immagine della monarchia. Il monopolio francese sulla moda si basa su un’autorità che deriva innanzitutto da quella conseguita nel secolo precedente. Alla fine del Settecento il rifiuto per gli abiti strettamente di corte che coincide con la creazione di alternative che possano soddisfare l’esigenza dell’apparire curiale segue una matrice quasi strettamente femminile: capacità della corte francese è quelle di elaborare spunti provenienti da altre culture e modificarle in chiave nazionale. / The thesis wants to focus on the continuity of the French influence on the evolution of European fashion during the eighteenth century to the Revolution. The first three chapters are indispensable to understand the origin of this success. The fight between the French and the Spanish court during the sixteenth century was also a fight for the supremacy of their own fashion style. The persistence in the eighteenth century of the court dress code for man and women that was elaborated during the reign of Louis XIV was functional to the maintenance of the guide role of the French court in Europe. At the end of the century, the refusal of strictly court dresses for new kind of clothes is peculiar of the women living at the court, but the French court has the ability to invent new fashions using ideas coming from other countries.

The plays of James Boaden, an author all too often forgotten in the pages of theatre history, are usually dismissed by scholars as mercenary adaptations of popular Gothic novels for the stage. Boaden’s plays of the 1790s—Fontainville Forest (1794), The Secret Tribunal (1796), The Italian Monk (1797), Cambro-Britons (1798) and Aurelio and Miranda (1799)—were certainly popular successes in their own time, but this should not discount them from serious consideration as aesthetic and ideological objects. In fact, these plays are intelligently wrought, using popular Gothic conventions to further a conservative ideology that was not originally associated with this genre. This fact has gone unrecognized by scholars partly because these plays have not been previously analysed for their dramaturgical structure as adaptations: Boaden borrows conventions from the Gothic, to be sure, but he also borrows dramaturgical techniques from Shakespeare. In so doing, Boaden harnesses both popular appeal and theatrical legitimacy to write Tory propaganda at a time when the stage was a key tool in the ideological war against France and French sympathizers in Britain. Political threats, both domestic and foreign, were of ongoing concern in Britain in the years following the French Revolution. Immediately after 1789, the Gothic was ideologically charged in ways that promoted revolutionary thinking. Boaden’s adaptation of the Gothic form responds to the revolution and the Reign of Terror by replacing the genre’s iconoclasm with a strongly nationalist orientation, drawn, in part, from eighteenth-century Shakespeare reception, itself often strongly nationalist in tone. Boaden’s plays are reactionary in that they comment on the current political situation, using allegory to play on the audience’s emotions. In his first phase, Boaden depicts the demise of a villainous usurper, a scapegoat figure, but his second phase reintegrates the villain into domestic and social harmony. In so doing, Boaden serves as a case study in the shifting attitude towards Britain’s revolutionary sympathizers, the Jacobins, and illustrates the important use of the Gothic mode for conservative purposes. Boaden emerges, in this study, as a figure whose relevance to theatre history in this fraught period requires reassessment.

A corpus of terms for human beings collected from 18th century novels is studied from a broad sociolinguistic perspective. A summary of recent linguistic theories and a survey of 18th century culture and society are provided as background. The basic assumption is that the meaning of words is dependent on human beings and their society and that shifts in meaning are linked to changes in attitudes, culture and social structure. Terms used for men and women therefore mirror the concepts of 'male' and 'female' in a society. Gender differences found in various semantic fields are presented and discussed. Prototypes for certain terms are suggested by means of frame analysis. Sense developments are traced and related to societal changes. Differences in male and female usage are discussed. The findings are analyzed in terms of the following contrasts within the concepts of 'male' and 'female': spirit/matter; power/dependency; active/passive; varied/limited. / digitalisering@umu

The Restoration and early eighteenth-century theaters of London formed an important mixed-gender rhetorical venue, which was acutely focused on the age-old “querrelle des femmes” (or woman question). The immediate popularity of the newly opened Restoration theaters, the new practice of casting actresses rather than actors in female roles, and the libertine social climate of London from 1660 to the early 1700s created a unique rhetorical situation in which women openly participated as speakers and audience members. Through a methodology combining feminist historiography, performance theory, Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, and Habermas’ notion of the public sphere, this dissertation reclaims the Restoration theatre as one of the earliest public, secular, mixed-gender rhetorical venues in the English-speaking world. London theater of the Restoration and the early eighteenth century presents a feminist kairos for rereading and revisioning the actress from object to subject, from passive receiver to deliverer of performative rhetoric. Overall, the attention given to issues of femaleness in the plays of this period exceeds that of preceding and subsequent periods. The novelty of the actresses, as well as disillusionment with the male-dominated government and system of patriarchy, were major contributing factors that led to the female focus on stage. This phenomenon of female rhetoric also reflects the charisma, elocutionary skill, and visual rhetoric of the best female performers of the period, including: Nell Gwyn, Mary Saunderson Betterton, Elizabeth Barry, Anne Bracegirdle, Susannah Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, and Lavinia Fenton, all of whom are discussed from a rhetorical perspective in this dissertation.

The structure of this thesis relies on the physical locations of Mme. de Pompadour. Although the chapters are roughly chronological, beginning with her arrival at Versailles in 1745 and ending with her death in 1764, this work makes no attempt to comprehensively chronicle the entirety of her involvement in the decorative arts. Rather, it focuses on several specific aspects of her patronage, with the goal of illuminating her social position and public image, and how she worked to control the two. Chapter One deals with the first rooms Mme. de Pompadour inhabited, from 1745-1750. These upper apartments characterize her early attempts to convey meaning through décor and to shape social interactions within a constructed environment. Chapter Two follows Mme. de Pompadour’s move downstairs, to the lower apartments in 1750. This move parallels an important evolution in her role at court and seeks to explore how her newly political functions were expressed through these interior spaces. Chapter Three is more expansive, examining three architectural projects undertaken by Mme. de Pompadour and Louis XV on her behalf, over the course of her nineteen years at court. These independent homes represented an opportunity for Mme. de Pompadour to actively work to change public perception of herself and her role, an opportunity that she did not waste.

In recent years, Gothic literary studies have increasingly acknowledged the role played by Shakespeare in authorial acts of appropriation. Such acknowledgement is most prominently stated in Gothic Shakespeares (eds. Drakakis and Townshend, 2008) and Shakespearean Gothic (eds. Desmet and Williams, 2009), both of which base their analyses of the Shakespeare-Gothic intersection on the premise that Shakespearean quotations, characters and events are valuable objects in their own right which mediate on behalf of the 'present' concerns of the agents of textual appropriation. In light of this scholarship, this thesis argues the case for the presence of 'Gothic Shakespeare' in Gothic writing during the latter half of the eighteenth century and, in doing so, it acknowledges the conceptual gap whereby literary borrowings were often denounced as acts of plagiarism. Despite this conceptual problem, it is possible to trace distinct 'Gothic' Shakespeares that dismantle the concept of Shakespeare as a singular ineffable genius by virtue of a textual practice that challenges the concept of the 'genius' Shakespeare as the figurehead of genuine emotion and textual authenticity. This thesis begins by acknowledging the eighteenth-century provenance of Shakespeare's 'Genius', thereby distinguishing between the malevolent barbarian Gothic of Shakespeare's own time and the eighteenth-century Gothic Shakespeares discussed under the term 'appropriation'. It proceeds to examine the Shakespeares of canonical Gothic writers (Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis) as well as their lesser-known contemporaries (T.J. Horsley Curties and W.H. Ireland). For instance, Walpole conscripts Hamlet in order to mediate his experience of living in England after the death of his father, the first Prime Minister Robert Walpole. The thesis then argues for the centrality of Shakespeare in the Gothic romance's undercutting of the emergent discourses of emotion (or 'passion'), as represented by the fictions of Radcliffe and Lewis, before moving on to consider Curties's attempted recuperation - in Ethelwina; or, the House of Fitz-Auburne (1799) - of authentic passion, which is mediated through the authenticity apparatus of Edmond Malone's 1790 editions of Shakespeare's plays. It concludes with W.H. Ireland's dismantling of Malone's ceoncept of the 'authentic' Shakespeare through the contemporary transgressions of literary forgery and the evocation of an illicit Shakespeare in his first Gothic romance, The Abbess, also published in 1799.

Elsa Fougt (1744–1826), a woman entrepreneur, was one of the leading figures in the late eighteenth-century Swedish book trade. Her main enterprise was the printing house Kongl. Tryckeriet (the Royal Printing House), which was responsible for printing and publishing the official documents of the Swedish realm. Besides her office as Royal Printer, she also ran a publishing house, two bookshops and a type foundry, as well as being the editor of the Swedish newspaper Stockholms Weckoblad. The dissertation analyzes Fougt's different enterprises and her position in the book trade between 1780 and 1810, from the perspectives of sociology of literature and gender history. It consists of five independent articles, preceded by an introductory chapter which summarizes the articles and discusses their main findings. The first two articles explore the office of the Royal Printer during the whole eighteenth century, while the third article concerns Elsa Fougt’s position as Royal Printer. The fourth article is a study of Fougt's publishing house, and the fifth and final article focuses on her international bookshop, where, among other things, she sold clandestine books imported from the STN in Switzerland. Fougt's successful career was made possible by a number of favourable circumstances, the most important being her family background and network. Her father Peter Momma held the office of Royal Printer, and Elsa Fougt and her husband Henric inherited his position when he died. When Henric passed away in 1782, Elsa – as a widow – was legally allowed to take up the office of Royal Printer independently. The fact that Elsa Fougt was a woman does not seem to have particularly affected her role as Royal Printer. In comparison with her predecessors, her position as Royal Printer appears to have been rather strong. She was a shrewd businesswoman who successfully negotiated with the authorities for higher financial compensation. Her office was obviously of greater importance than her gender. Being both a publisher, a printer, and a bookseller, Fougt handled most of the functions of the book trade, although she distinguished between these different functions. Furthermore, rather than just being an intermediary of books, she also took part in the creation of them, for example by initiating texts and editing manuscripts. In the book trade of her time, Fougt can be seen as both a traditionalist – holding the inherited office of Royal Printer – and an innovator, representing a more modern literary system with increased specialization.

This study examines the ritual of tarring and feathering within specific American cultural contexts and literary works of the nineteenth-century to show how the discourse surrounding the actual and figurative practice functioned as part of a larger process of discursive and visual racialization. The study illustrates how the practice and discourse of blackening white bodies enforced embodiment, stigmatized imagined interiority, and divorced the victims from inalienable rights. To be tarred and feathered was to be marked as anti-social, duplicitous and even anarchic. The study examines the works of major American authors including John Trumbull, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, analyzing how their works evidence a larger national conflation of character, race, and morality. Sometimes drawing on racial imagery implicitly, and sometimes engaging in the issues of race and slavery explicitly, their works feature tarring and feathering to portray their anxieties about social coercion and victimization in the context of the “experiment” of democracy. Trumbull’s mock-epic genre satirizes the plight of the Tory and diminishes the forms of the revolution; Cooper’s novel works as a rhetorical vehicle to prevent a perceived downfall of the republic; the short fiction of Poe exaggerates the horror of uneven and racialized power relations; and Hawthorne’s body of work ironizes the original parody of tar and feathers to expose the violent nature of democratic foundation. Relying on an interdisciplinary approach, this first, in-depth study of tarring and feathering in America reveals that the ritual is a fertile ground for understanding the multivalent social constructs of the time. Examining tarring and feathering incidents can tell scholars about the status of racial feeling, moral values (including sexual and gender norms), and economic fissures of the context in which they occur. Abjecting the body of the victim, the act rewrites the individual’s relationship to the body politic, and the performance of the ritual reveals the continuously emergent, publically sanctioned forms of belonging to the community and the nation. Moreover, examining the representation of tarring and feathering can tell scholars about an author’s relationship to the ideology of an American way.

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