To appreciate fully the ethical dimensions inherent in the literature of the eighteenth century it is necessary to understand the moral bias of an author, a bias often best ascertained by a study of the treatment he accords good nature and prudence. Although several scholarly articles and portions of longer studies recognize the importance of these virtues for individual writers, no single work has appeared which traces fully the history of the idea of good nature and prudence as complementary virtues in the eighteenth century. The present study provides a systematic analysis of these virtues as treated in theology, ethical philosophy, and fiction from the later seventeenth century to about 1800.

The eighteenth century is primarily known for the development of codes of etiquette, the refinement of manners and the artistic cultivation of the beautiful and the sublime, but there is at the same time a strand of highly visceral, often stomach-turning texts and images that coexist alongside the push for a much more polite and urbane culture. My dissertation, “Evoking Disgust in the Eighteenth Century,” looks at a wide range of scientific, literary and ephemeral texts to excavate the ways that disgust both persisted and transformed across the century. These range from the poems of Jonathan Swift, the novels of Tobias Smollett, Evelina by Frances Burney, and George Psalmanazar’s An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. I argue that disgust served as both a boundary line that can tell us the kinds of behaviors, objects and bodies that should not be tolerated in society, and as an emotion that could be trained and cultivated to guide the disgust reactions of readers.

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Cette thèse étudie la race, le mimétisme, l'ambivalence et la théorie du tiers espace dans The Woman of Colour: A Tale (1808). J'ai examiné les représentations des femmes de couleur dans ce roman et j'ai soutenu que ces dernières vont au-delà des représentations conventionnelles restreintes des femmes de couleur dans la plupart des romans du XVIIIe siècle. L'auteure anonyme de The Woman of Colour capte la coexistence, au début du XIXe siècle, de positions opposées envers les femmes de couleur des Antilles. De plus, j'ai examiné comment les femmes de couleur représentées dans ce roman peuvent créer une version d'un tiers-espace dans les interstices de cultures conflictuelles. Le tiers-espace est un concept que les critiques culturels et les théoriciens de la résistance utilisent pour définir une opposition aux forces dominantes par les personnes qui leur résistent. L'introduction fournit des discussions sur certains concepts de fond importants, notamment la race, le mimétisme, l'ambivalence et le tiers-espace. Le premier chapitre étudie les représentations des femmes de couleur dans le roman et le deuxième chapitre explore le tiers-escape qu'elles tentent de créer. / This thesis studies race, mimicry, ambivalence, and third space in The Woman of Colour: A Tale (1808). I have examined the representations of women of color in this novel and argued that these representations go beyond the restricted conventional depictions of women of color in most novels of the eighteenth century. The anonymous author of The Woman of Colour captures the coexistence, in the early nineteenth century, of opposing attitudes towards women of color from the West Indies. Furthermore, I have examined how the women of color represented in this novel could create a version of a third space in the interstices between conflicting cultures. The third space is a concept that cultural critics and resistance theorists use to define an opposition to dominating forces by the people withstanding them. The introduction provides discussions of some significant background concepts, notably race, mimicry, ambivalence, and third space. The first chapter studies to the representations of women of color in the novel and the second chapter explores third space they attempt to create.

Ce mémoire étudie la prostitution dans le roman Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure de John Cleland comme moyen réussi d'indépendance financière et de mobilité sociale dans une société patriarcale du XVIIIe siècle. Respectivement, il met en évidence la résistance de l'héroïne à ces structures. Dans le premier chapitre, j'analyse le personnage de Fanny Hill et l'importance des choix qu'elle fait pour transformer son statut financier. Ainsi, je discuterai des maquerelles, les femmes qui supervisent l’affaire du bordel, en tant que figures centrales dans la formation de la personnalité de Fanny en plus de sa relation amoureuse avec Charles, le jeune homme qu'elle rencontre dans le bordel et s'échappe avec lui. Dans le chapitre 2, j'aborde, à travers la figure de Fanny, la notion d'un corps féminin en contrôle, et les manières dont Cleland dépeint l'agence de Fanny à travers son corps ; Fanny présente son agence à travers son corps de plusieurs façons. L'une des principales façons dont elle le fait est de faire des choix concernant ses expériences et ses relations sexuelles. Tout au long du roman, elle a un certain nombre de rencontres sexuelles avec différents hommes, et elle est souvent décrite comme contrôlant ces rencontres.. Dans ce chapitre, je discuterai le pouvoir des femmes à travers le thème de la virginité feinte telle qu'elle est représentée dans le roman et le mariage comme un concept transgressif qui remet en question les normes patriarcales. / Through a reading of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), this thesis explores prostitution as a means of financial independence and social mobility within the patriarchal structures of eighteenth-century Britain. It considers the resistance of the novel’s heroine, Fanny Hill, to these structures. In Chapter 1, I analyze Fanny Hill’s character and the importance of the choices she makes in her attempts to transform her financial status. Thus, I discuss Cleland’s portrayal of the ‘bawds’— the women who oversee the brothel business in which Fanny becomes involved — as central figures in shaping Fanny’s personality, while also considering her developing amorous relationship with Charles, the young man she meets in the brothel and escapes with. In Chapter 2, I address, through the figure of Fanny, the notion of a female body in control, and the ways in which Cleland portrays Fanny as finding agency through her body. She does so by making choices about her sexual experiences and relationships. I demonstrate that, throughout the novel, Fanny has a number of sexual encounters with various men, and that she is often depicted as being in control of theses encounters. In this chapter, I discuss female empowerment through the phenomenon of feigned virginity and through a particular version of marriage that challenges patriarchy.

In a well-known verse Swedish eighteenth century writer Anna Maria Lenngren advise her fictive daughter to avoid reding, since it might distract her from her household chores. This paper intends to examine attitudes towards women’s reading in eighteenth century Sweden, using different kinds of sources: Satirical verses, conduct books for girls and young women and genre paintings by Swedish painter Pehr Hilleström, depicting bourgeoise and aristocratic interiors. In my analysis I make use of the public-private distinction formulated by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas describes the literary public debate as a first step towards a political public debate. The private sphere, in which women a supposed to remain, is in Habermas version divided in an economic and an intimate part, centered on the family and the home. In the satirical verses reading and books aren’t a prominent topic but is mentioned as one of many vices connected to conspicuous consumption and a life “à la mode”. The verses like to contrast the vane, modern woman to the ideal of the good householder. The conduct books give a more nuanced picture of reading as a part of an aristocratic or bourgeoise woman’s life. Reading can be seen as a useful pastime, preferable to playing cards or making idle gossip. According to the conduct books the main purpose of reading should be to inform and educate the reader, not just to entertain her. The paintings confirm the impression that reading was a well-established part of domestic life for women of the leisured classes, but some of them still allows for a more critical view, like the one seen in the verses. The written sources are consistent in the conviction that women’s reading shouldn’t lead to their participation in any public debate. Reading and the fruits of reading are seen to develop and expand the readers personality, and possibly make her more attractive to a future husband, but it is meant to be kept in the private, intimate sphere of the home.

This dissertation explores the intellectual and cultural history of natural knowledge at the eighteenth-century court of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (r.1782-1799), and the ways in which this knowledge was both a product of Mysore’s local context and its wider global connections. It argues that more attention to Mysore’s sources and perspective is needed in the history of science given the power and productivity of the court before it was conquered by the British East India Company (BEIC) in 1799. After 1799, the BEIC dispersed the Mysore’s court’s library and artifacts, and obscured the court’s contributions to knowledge-making. This dissertation demonstrates that Mysore’s library and gardens were sites of natural science collection, experimentation, and production worthy of study. The extant collection of Tipu Sultan’s manuscripts remains understudied, especially those related to science. This dissertation outlines the surviving library texts related to natural knowledge and provides case studies of particular manuscripts that showcase Tipu Sultan’s interest in collecting, organizing, and producing encyclopedic knowledge of nature and natural processes. It further emphasizes that many (often unnamed) hands and labors enabled the natural sciences to be produced and disseminated in the eighteenth century, through close readings of Persian, French, and English texts and diplomatic records related to Tipu Sultan’s court. It thus seeks to recover both the elite contributions of Tipu Sultan and his courtiers engaged in natural knowledge production as well as the more obscure, but no less vital contributions of unnamed actors.

Das Volk bilden: The Pursuit of Volkstümlichkeit by Berthold Auerbach, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gottfried Herder examines the theorization of the concept of the Volk and Volkstümlichkeit by three authors from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Berthold Auerbach, Heinrich Heine and Johann Gottfried Herder. The term “volkstümlich” has no exact equivalent in English, although it has been rendered as “popular” “folkish” or even the slightly pejorative “folksy.” In German, it expresses both the quality of something proper to a given people or Volk, and the notion of popularity or commonness at which the English terms gesture. I analyze how these authors aim to expand the contemporaneous reading public by shaping the reading practices of audiences otherwise ignored by traditional belletristic literature. It also interrogates how they conceive of the Volk as a co-producer of literature and culture. Each author uses the terms “Volk” and “Volkstümlichkeit” in programmatic texts to refer to shared characteristics among a given people and as a distinction between high and low culture. All three also pursue the goal of creating a widespread reading public through their own literary practices: Herder in his collections of song and poetry, Heine in his poetry, criticism and journalism, and Auerbach through a thematic focus on the village in his fiction and the serial form of the Volkskalender in his role as editor. Each of them pursues a program that is both national and cosmopolitan, writing as they did during a period when invocation of the Volk was not yet primarily the province of conservative nationalists. Chapter one shows how Berthold Auerbach used his dual role as author of the immensely popular Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten and as editor of and contributor to various Volkskalender to elevate the way of life he portrays. In doing so, he aimed at uniting the disparate audiences of the common people and the educated, as well as urban and rural populations into a single Volk. Chapter two focuses on several key texts of Heinrich Heine’s to show that he conceived of the Volk as an ideal addressee capable of resolving the contradictions that plague civilization. Contrary to much of the scholarship that sees a pessimistic turn in Heine’s later work, I use his many remarks on the common people throughout his work to draw out a utopian, trans-historical element in his thinking. Two early texts by Johann Gottfried Herder, Über die neuere deutsche Literatur: Fragmente and the Volkslieder project, make up the focus of the third chapter. By importing genres associated with oral traditions and performance into his collections, together with texts by Shakespeare, Herder effaces existing distinctions between popular forms and high literature. The chapter shows that Herder conceives of the Volk not just as a public, but as active participants in literary world-making. My dissertation intervenes in existing scholarship on the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by centering Volk as one of the defining concepts of the era and demonstrating how different literary media has been used to imagine and establish relations to it.

Rhetoric, seen either as the art of persuasion or as the art of figurative expression, has been largely neglected as an approach to the poetry of the Romantics. The most important reason for this seems to be the rejection of rhetoric by the Romantics themselves. As a result of negative comments about rhetoric by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, scholars seeking clues about the Romantics' literary principles in their critical writings have agreed that eighteenth-century rhetoric was either abandoned or substantially altered by early nineteenth century poets. The eighteenth-century belief that figures possess a unique power of communicating an author's passions and emotions continued to be transmitted as a viable literary tradition in the nineteenth century. Poetry was thought to have special privilege in the employment of rhetorical devices. In practice, if not in theory, early nineteenth-century poets did not abandon the use of such devices in their creations. An analysis of the role of rhetorical figures in the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats demonstrates that it is a mistake to envision the poetry of the Romantic movement as a spontaneous outgrowth of an abrupt shift in poetic taste, a shift which demanded the omission of classical poetic devices. Often the Romantic poets were more nearly in accord with the strictures of rhetoricians such as Blackwall or Ward than many of the Augustan poets had been.

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