Les romans édifiants des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles – des fictions narratives en prose qui affichent clairement leur volonté de transmettre des valeurs chrétiennes et d’influencer le comportement de leurs lecteurs dans le sens de ces valeurs – développent une poétique spécifique, basée sur la recherche et le dévoilement de la vérité chrétienne à travers la fiction mondaine. Ils posent ainsi de front une question qui a hanté les écrivains et les théoriciens de l’Âge classique, à savoir la conciliation du plaisir romanesque et de la moralité. La topique du roman édifiant (personnages, lieux et temps), sa matérialité (titres, divisions internes, ensembles d’œuvres) et sa voix (narrative et rhétorique) concourent à l’élaboration d’effets de sens qui servent la visée persuasive et religieuse des ouvrages tout en créant des récits et des imaginaires propres à satisfaire le goût du lectorat pour le roman. Cette étude vise à réintégrer dans l’histoire du roman un corpus d’œuvres négligées par la critique en faisant apparaître leur contribution à l’élaboration du roman : du roman d’Ancien Régime d’abord, mais aussi du roman à thèse moderne et, par extension, de toute la fiction idéologique. / Edifying novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - narrative prose fictions that clearly put forth their will to convey Christian values and influence the behavior of their readers in the sense of these values - develop a specific poetics, based on the research and the unveiling of Christian truth through mundane fiction. They therefore emphasize a problem that has haunted writers and theorists of the Classical Age, namely the reconciliation of novelistic pleasure and morality. The narrative topics of the edifying novel (characters, places and times), its materiality (titles, internal divisions, groups of works) and voice (narrative and rhetorical) contribute to the development of significations that serve the persuasive and religious aim of the works while creating stories and imaginary worlds capable of satisfying the taste of the audience for the novel. This study aims to reintegrate in the history of the novel a body of works neglected by literary critics by showing their contribution to the development of the novel: the novel of the Old Regime, but also the modern novel of thesis and by extension, the entire ideological fiction.

Traveling Women and Consuming Place in Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters and Journals considers how various women-authored travel narratives of the long eighteenth century employ food in the construction of place and identity. Chronologically charting the letters and journals of Delarivier Manley, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Janet Schaw, and Frances Burney, I argue that the “critical food moments” described in their letters and journals demonstrate material, cultural, and social implications about consumption. My interdisciplinary project is located at the intersection of three seemingly divergent topics: food studies, human geography, and women-authored travel narratives. Approaching “place” as a way of being-in-the-world, my project traces the connection between verbal constructions of place and issues of identity, national and gender, across the eighteenth century. Looking at what I term “critical food moments” during travel allows us particular insight into how food simultaneously serves a literal (intended for consumption) and a figurative (used as a literary topic and device) function, and how tropes of food—such as digestion—function as lexicons which offer women writers opportunities to better understand and criticize the nation and their own identities within the nation. I argue that food-centered moments allow us to better understand the lived experiences of women traveling in the eighteenth century, to analyze how material and sensory conditions influenced and shaped women’s understandings of themselves and their positions (places) in the world. Taken together, these four women authors represent a wide-range of perspectives from various social and economic backgrounds, and yet, what they have in common is crucial: a connection with the food, communities, and places they travel.

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.

This thesis examines the ministry of John Fletcher (1729-85), vicar of Madeley, Shropshire (vic. 1760-85) as a case study on the Church of England and Methodism in the eighteenth century. Studies of Fletcher have tended to focus either on his contribution to Methodist theology or on his designation as Wesley's successor as the leader of the Methodists. The parish of Madeley has been, for the most part, peripheral to Fletcher studies. The present thesis, however, has aimed to examine Fletcher in his parochial context; to study both what the parish tells us about Fletcher, but also what Fletcher tells us about the parish, and more specifically, about the church in the eighteenth century in a local context. The main argument of this thesis is that Fletcher's ministry at Madeley was representative of a variation of a pro-Anglican Methodism--localized, centred upon the parish church, and rooted in the Doctrines and Liturgy of the Church of England. Three recent publications have provided a triad for understanding Fletcher: (1) in his industrial context; (2) in his theological context; and (3), in his relationship with leaders in the Evangelical Revival. This thesis has sought to examine a fourth component: Fletcher's work as an ordained clergyman of the Church of England, that is, in his ecclesial and ministerial context. The main body of the thesis focuses on two primary aspects of Fletcher's parish ministry: his stated duties and his diligence in carrying out other responsibilities and meeting other needs which arose, including addressing the various tensions which developed during his incumbency. Fletcher's background and his call to parochial ministry as well as the religious history of Madeley are outlined first (Chapter 1). There are three chapters which examine his performance of stated duties: worship services and preaching (Chapter 2); pastoral care andeducation (Chapter 5); and confrontation of erroneous doctrine (Chapter 6). Fletcher's ministry also included a scheme of church extension, represented primarily by his development of religious societies on which other aspects of his parochial duty built (Chapter 3). His evangelicalism and commitment to his parish simultaneously raised tensions between Fletcher and his parishioners (provoked by his 'enthusiasm' or zeal), and between Fletcher and John Wesley, whose variations of Methodism had similar aims, but different models of practice. A chapter is devoted specifically to these issues (Chapter 4).Fletcher's chapel meetings formed an auxiliary arm of the church, operating as outposts throughout his parish. His parishioners considered his ministerial model a 'Methodist' one even though it was not technically part of Wesley's Connexion (other than the fact that his itinerants were guests in the parish). In all, it is the conclusion of this thesis that Fletcher's pastoral ministry represents some of the best work of Anglicanism in the eighteenth century, demonstrating that despite the manifest challenges of industrializing society, residual dissent, and competition from the church's rivals, the Establishment was not incapable of competing in the religious marketplace.

The prominent division in early America between the established eastern populations and communities in the West is evident when viewed through the lens of eighteenth-century Philadelphia newspapers, which themselves employed an East-West paradigm to interpret four events: the Paxton Boys Incident, Regulator Rebellion, Shays's Rebellion, and Constitutional Convention. Through the choices of what words to use to describe these clashes, through oversights, omissions, and misrepresentations, and sometimes through more direct tactics, Philadelphia newspapermen revealed a persistent cultural bias against and rivalry with western communities. This study illustrates how pervasive this contrast between East and West was in the minds of easterners; how central a feature of early American culture they considered it to be.

Au carrefour de l’histoire des idées linguistiques et de l’histoire des représentations, cette thèse étudie les discours savants et fictionnels sur la surdité au tournant des Lumières. Cette période correspond à des changements qui ont affecté le cours de l’histoire des sourds en France et la façon dont ils étaient perçus. L’apparition d’un discours spécialisé sur la surdité, la création d’institutions consacrées à l’éducation collective des sourds et l’élaboration d’un langage gestuel destiné à leur alphabétisation, marquent les débuts de l’insertion des sourds dans la société. Pédagogues et philosophes ne sont pas les seuls à débattre de la surdité ; les sourds et leur éducation passionnent aussi les romanciers et les auteurs de fictions courtes. Le roman sentimental s’approprie le personnage muet et son langage gestuel, parfois en le dissociant de la surdité. Ce n’est pas tant la surdité que la mutité, qui semble avoir intéressé les romanciers, sans doute parce qu’elle permettait d’interroger la fonction sociale de la parole. Dans leurs oeuvres, les (sourds)-muets romanesques révèlent par contraste les dérèglements de la parole provoqués par la Révolution. L’objectif de ce travail est double. Il s’agit d’abord de replacer les discours sur la surdité dans le contexte savant du tournant des Lumières et de montrer leur pertinence pour comprendre les mutations linguistiques, anthropologiques et philosophiques qui le caractérisent. Il s’agit ensuite de montrer, grâce à l’histoire des représentations, comment savoirs et fictions se rencontrent dans le travail de métaphorisation dont la surdité est l’objet au tournant des Lumières. / At the intersection of the history of linguistic ideas and the history of representations, this thesis studies scholarly and fictional discourses on deafness between the final years of the Ancien Régime and the beginning of the Restoration (1776-1815). This period covers the years where the Abbé de L'Épée and the Abbé Sicard carried out their work. It matches the period of changes in the course of the history of the deaf people in France and how they were considered. The emergence of a specialist discourse on deafness, the setting up of institutions dedicated to the collective education of deaf people and the development of sign language and their literacy, mark the beginning of the integration of deaf people into society. Educators and philosophers are not the only ones to talk about deafness; the deaf people and their education also entrhal novelists and authors of short fiction. The sentimental novel seized the silent character and its sign language, sometimes separating him from deafness. Without doubt, the novelists have been interested much more by muteness than deafness, because the former enabled them to question the social function of speech. In their works, the novelists use contrast to reveal the malfunction of speech caused by the Revolution. The aim of this thesis is twofold. First, we put speech on deafness back in the scholarly context of the times and explain how it helps us understand the linguistic, anthropological and philosophical changes of this period. Secondly, through the history of the representations, we show how knowledge and fiction meet in the process of metaphorization of the idea of deafness of the end of the eighteenth century.

It is widely accepted that description was used by eighteenth-century writers for the purposes of documentary or ornamentalization. That it was also used to manage the emotions of readers is less often discussed. “Dispassionate Descriptions” corrects this imbalance by attending to the ways in which descriptions in certain scientific and poetic works from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries were used to dampen the intense emotions that scenes of violence and death tend to inspire, be they sympathy, anger, or love. Writers ranging from William Harvey to James Thomson to John Gabriel Stedman, I argue, taught their readers how to remain dispassionate in the face of suffering and injustice by describing moving bodies and scenes in terms of their physical features alone. By presenting the blood spurting from the wounds of vivisected animals in relation to the regular beat of the heart, a drowning cat in terms of the movements of its head and paws, and the dance of enslaved persons in terms of its irregular beat, the writers I study demonstrated how the disorderly movements of pain or rebellion could be read as expressive of overarching classificatory schemes. Through cultivating dispassion for movements commonly thought to incite passionate responses, these writers worked to maintain the ethical and political status quo. By examining the emotional work descriptions of motion do, “Dispassionate Descriptions” traces an alternative history of how motion from the 1660s to the 1790s was understood outside of the predominant frameworks of mechanism and vitalism. While motion was regarded as inextricable from the literary and scientific discourses of this period, scenes of motion, as I demonstrate, were paradoxically also thought to facilitate emotional retreat. They were thus used by writers to advance a mode of ethics that prized non-interference and the disavowal of moral responsibility.

White women who inhabited the West Indies in the eighteenth century fascinated the metropole. In popular prints, novels, and serial publications, these women appeared to stray from “proper” British societal norms. Inhabiting a space dominated by a tropical climate and the presence of a large enslaved African population opened white women to censure. Almost from the moment of colonial encounter, they were perceived not as proper British women but as an imperial “other,” inhabiting a middle space between the ideal woman and the supposed indigenous “savage.” Furthermore, white women seemed to be lacking the sensibility prized in eighteenth-century England. However, the correspondence that survives from white women in Jamaica reveals the language of sensibility. “Creolized” in this imperial landscape, sensibility extended beyond written words to the material objects exchanged during their tenure on these sugar plantations. Although many women who lived in the Caribbean island of Jamaica might have fit the model, extant writings from Ann Brodbelt, Sarah Dwarris, Margaret and Mary Cowper, Lady Maria Nugent, and Ann Appleton Storrow, show a longing to remain connected with metropolitan society and their loved ones separated by the Atlantic. This sensibility and awareness of metropolitan material culture masked a lack of empathy towards subordinates, and opened the white women these islands to censure, particularly during the era of the British abolitionist movement. Novels and popular publications portrayed white women in the Caribbean as prone to overconsumption, but these women seem to prize items not for their inherent value. They treasured items most when they came from beloved connections. This colonial interchange forged and preserved bonds with loved ones and comforted the women in the West Indies during their residence in these sugar plantation islands. This dissertation seeks to complicate the stereotype of insensibility and overconsumption that characterized the perception of white women who inhabited the British West Indies in the long eighteenth century.

This dissertation examines the confluence of ideas about classicism, commerce, and authorship in Britain in the final decades of the eighteenth century, when the commercial potential of classical forms and, conversely, the artistic potential of ‘mechanical’ forms of production both seemed greater, and yet more vulnerable, than they had ever been. While classical antiquity was a crucial source of artistic authority in this period, the emergence of a model of individual, inwardly generated, original authorship provided a different opportunity for commercial classicists to distinguish themselves in a crowded and competitive marketplace. In successive chapters of the dissertation, I discuss four makers whose works were produced in the context of competing models of authorship and authority: the architect, Robert Adam; the potter and manufacturer, Josiah Wedgwood; the painter and printmaker, Angelica Kauffman; and the sculptor and designer, John Flaxman. Each of these authors straddled the worlds of the mechanical and liberal arts, using a self-consciously classical artistic vocabulary in conjunction with highly commercial production and marketing strategies. They increasingly shaped and presented their works and style as their own proprietary creations, capitalising on emerging concepts of original genius and individual authorship: the very concepts that seem to be at odds both with academic classicism and with reproductive practices. Adam, Wedgwood, Kauffman, and Flaxman demonstrate how classicism, the idea of genius, and commercial, industrial modernity were mutually constitutive, resulting in the creation of artistic styles that are still associated with their authors today.

The state often enacts violence against marginalized groups by rendering them monstrous. The early eighteenth century saw early and stellar instances of this phenomenon in the way the British Empire pursued and executed pirates. These "golden age" pirates represented an extraordinary cross-section of marginalization politically, economically, socially, and otherwise, all of which threatened the political and social mores of Imperial Britain. In order to implement a policy and practice of pirate annihilation, British authorities constructed pirates as monstrous by racializing, dehumanizing, and emphasizing the supernatural quality of pirates. This study analyzes three eighteenth-century piracy trial transcripts--those of William Kidd, Stede Bonnet, and William Fly--in order to assess how lawyers and judges constructed pirates as monstrous so as to justify the massive and total violence inflicted on them as a class resulting in their complete destruction. In so doing, this study tracks rhetorical tactics and strategies still used by empires and the state today against marginalized peoples to an original historical source.