"Do not be a martyr to philosophy, which you will be, if you do not take more exercise, be a little more foolish, and look at the world with all its awkward things, its clumsy, lumpish forms, its fools, its cockscombs, and its scoundrels with more endurance". This study makes no pretensions to provide full biographical coverage of Hays's life (1759-1843) or a comprehensive, critical exploration of the total range of her works. A thesis produced in 1971 purports 'to provide a definitive study of her literary achievements [...] and to place the complete corpus of Hays' extant works (ten in all) in the perspective of the literature of her time [...]2 and I am indebted to this exhaustive study of the author and her background. However, as the preface to her thesis declares, Gina Luria had deliberately excluded consideration of the correspondence between Hays and William Godwin, then recently purchased by the Pforzheimer Library, New York, as she had intended future publication of it. Subsequently, the project was abandoned. I have made extensive use of this correspondence to explore Hays's novels and to challenge much of the adverse criticism surrounding her writing, which I believe is based on misreadings of the texts themselves as well as on a willingness to emphasise the notoriety surrounding the authoress as a female and then as a female Jacobin. Rather, I am focusing on the aspects of Hays's life which enabled her to articulate her concerns through a series of social and intellectual 'voices' which she systematically experimented with, but ultimately rejected. It seems likely that Hays felt a need to affix a label on herself whether it were Dissenter, Wolistonecraftian, Helvetian or Godwinian, and this need suggests that she was searching for an identity in a shifting and perplexing political and philosophical climate. The adoption of an identifiable 'position' might have suggested to her security and control. Most importantly, I am concentrating on the means she adopted in order to justify her apparent 'failure' to live up to the ideals of William Godwin.

This study examines the cultural and historical constructs of the patriarchal father, the dutiful daughter, and the “Cult of Southern Womanhood” that have impacted the depiction of the relationship between fathers and daughters in the works of southern writers Shirley Ann Grau, Gail Godwin, and Alice Walker. The authors illustrate fathers who influence their daughters by supplying their needs and supporting their desires, but also of fathers who have hindered the emotional growth of their daughters. The term father-force describes the characters’ understanding and revision of the power of the fathers over their lives. Evidence includes the primary works by the writers themselves, criticism of these writers from other sources, and their own words about their works. New Historicism theory supports the position that Grau, Godwin, and Walker use the historical context of the 1960s to help shape and articulate some of the more contemporary issues, anxieties, and struggles, reflected in the literature. The impact of father-daughter relationships in southern novels is an important aspect in the understanding of Grau, Godwin, and Walker’s contributions to American literature. These writers try to discover acceptable methods of dealing with their characters’ relationships with their fathers within the requirements of a society that has established clear roles for both father and daughter. The three writers emphasize good and bad examples of the cultural contexts being explored, and their writings show a historical perspective of the changes that have occurred in the South in father-daughter relationships from 1950 until the present time. The authors show their characters often becoming successful in the real world outside the home in an effort to gain their fathers’ recognition of their accomplishments, his acceptance of their individuality and differences from him, and his approval of their methods of gaining success. Strong feminists characteristics are displayed in the writings of the three authors. Grau, Godwin, and Walker share the characteristics of female characters that connect with their fathers through race, the burden of the past, gender, class and religious expectations. / Dr. Ronald R. Emerick Dr. Karen A. Dandurand Dr. Kelly L. Heider

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Aberdeen University, 2009. / Title from web page (viewed on Sep. 2, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.

En Angleterre, à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, le débat sur l’éducation des pauvres s’intensifie. La pauvreté, grandissante, est vue comme une menace pour la sécurité publique. L’éducation apparaît alors comme un moyen de la réguler et de résoudre les problèmes moraux qu’elle engendre. William Godwin, écrivain, philosophe et éducateur, prend part à ce débat qui articule éducation, pauvreté et politique. Ce travail se fixe pour objectif de réaliser une lecture de la philosophie politique et éducative de William Godwin à partir des positions qu’il a tenues sur la question de la pauvreté. Bien qu’il n’ait jamais explicitement indiqué que sa pensée éducative et sa pensée politique étaient destinées aussi aux couches défavorisées de la société, nous faisons l’hypothèse qu’une lecture cohérente de son œuvre peut être réalisée si on le suppose. Pour définir sa contribution au débat sur l’éducation des pauvres, réaliser un état des lieux du système éducatif existant a été nécessaire. Dans un second temps, a été menée une analyse du plan d’éducation godwinien qui s’oppose nettement à cette éducation. Axé sur l’égalité naturelle, le potentiel de progrès et le développement des différentes dimensions humaines, un tel projet éducatif permet à chacun d’atteindre l’autonomie et de vivre harmonieusement avec ses semblables. Enfin, éduquer, c’est former de nouveaux hommes capables de vivre dans une nouvelle société. Pour Godwin, la société du futur est une société où les hommes seront suffisamment éduqués et autonomes pour se passer d’État. Au terme de ces analyses, il apparaît légitime d’affirmer qu’il n’y a pas, chez Godwin, une société pour les riches ou une société pour les pauvres ni une éducation pour les riches et une éducation pour les pauvres, mais bien, une éducation et une société pour tous. / In England, at the end of the eighteenth century, the debate on the education of the poor gets stronger. Poverty is increasing and it is perceived as a threat to people’s safety. In that context, education appears as a means to regulate and solve the moral problems it triggers. William Godwin, a writer, a philosopher but also an educator takes part in the debate which articulates education, poverty and politics. The present research aims at carrying out a reading of William Godwin’s political and educationnal philosophy from the views he expressed, separately, on the issue of poverty.Though he never clearly mentioned that his educational and political thinking was also meant for the lower ranks of society, we believe that a coherent reading of his work can be performed if we suppose that his thinking was effectively destined for the poor. Defining Godwin’s contribution to the debate on education for all first implies to propose a description of the educational system in Godwin’s time. Then, an analysis of his educational plan that stands in total opposition to the education of his time has been suggested. Based on equality among men, their potential of progress and the developement of all human qualities, it intends to form independent human beings able to live harmoniously with other people. Eventually, educating means forming new men able to live in a new society. To Godwin, the new society is a place where people are educated and autonomous enough to get rid of the state. At the end of our study, it seems legitimate to assert that, in Godwin’s thinking, there is neither a society for rich people or a society for the poor, or an education for the rich and another one for the poor but rather an education and a society for everybody.

Cette thèse étudie un corpus de romans anglais, encore peu étudiés en France et jamais étudiés collectivement, publiés entre 1782 et 1805 par des écrivains et des écrivaines se rattachant par leurs idées et, pour certains, leur militantisme actif, au mouvement radical qui se développe en Angleterre dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, s’amplifie et s’organise sous l’impulsion de la Révolution française, puis, sévèrement réprimé par le gouvernement de William Pitt, s’effondre à la fin de la décennie. Cette séquence historique laisse des traces profondes dans l’œuvre des romanciers radicaux, dont beaucoup, comme William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft et John Thelwall, sont philosophes ou polémistes avant d’être romanciers et prennent la plume pour défendre les droits de l’homme (et de la femme) dans le débat anglais sur la Révolution française qui oppose Edmund Burke à Thomas Paine. En croisant l’histoire des idées politiques, l’histoire sociale et culturelle du mouvement radical, l’histoire du livre et la narratologie classique, ce travail s’efforce de mettre en lumière la façon dont les romans encodent une certaine idéologie politique dans leurs formes – du discours des locuteurs au format de publication des romans, en passant par leurs narrateurs, leurs intrigues, leurs personnages, leur style et leurs silences signifiants. Un tel examen fait ressortir, plutôt qu’une idéologie radicale unifiée, une tension récurrente entre deux versions, libérale et jacobine, bourgeoise et plébéienne, du radicalisme, dont l’articulation conflictuelle revêt différentes formes d’un auteur à l’autre et d’un terme à l’autre de la période étudiée, à mesure que la réaction conservatrice enterre les espoirs radicaux de réformes. / This dissertation examines a corpus of English novels which have been little studied in France as yet and never as a whole. The novels were published between 1782 and 1805 by a group of writers who, by their ideas and in some cases active political commitment, belong to the radical movement which developed in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, gained impetus and structure in the wake of the French Revolution, and collapsed at the end of the decade when faced with repression from the government of William Pitt. Radical novelists, many of whom, like William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Thelwall, were philosophers and pamphleteers before they took to novel-writing, flew to the defence of the rights of man (and of the rights of woman) in the revolution controversy which pitted Thomas Paine against Edmund Burke – and their work bears the mark of the rise and demise of the radical movement. Combining intellectual history with classical narratology, book history, and the social and cultural history of radicalism, this dissertation seeks to highlight the way in which political ideology is built into the very forms of the novels – in the characters’ speech and the characters themselves, in the novels’ plot and narration type, in their style and publishing format, as well as in their meaningful silences. Such a study brings to light, rather than a coherent radical ideology, a recurring tension between two versions of radicalism, liberal and jacobin, bourgeois and plebeian, whose partly conflicting conjunction assumes different shapes from one novelist to the other and between the early 1780s and late 1790s, as radical hopes of reform sink under the conservative backlash.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2008. / Additional advisors: Randa Graves, Daniel Siegel, Samantha Webb. Description based on contents viewed Feb. 10, 2009; title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-71).

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1966 P499 / Master of Science

This thesis is a study of the representations of childhood in the works of the family circle of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin and their intellectual inheritors, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. It argues that their literary representations of the child, as a group, form an index of their political resistance to the dominant cultures of their era. The thesis situates these representations of childhood against the backdrop of the Romantic-era cultural celebration of childhood as established in works by historians and critics such as Philippe Ariés and James McGavran, Jr. It argues that the new sentimental category of the child established in the writings of Rousseau and Wordsworth, paradoxically, tends to marginalise the child from the socially powerful world of adults, even while establishing the child’s new specificity. This ethical impasse is resolved by the Wollstonecraft-Godwin family circle through its literary representations of the child, where the child becomes a shifting metaphor for all socially oppressed groups. Moreover, the adult author invites the child to participate in the world of adult power, eschewing a totalising adult perspective that erases the child’s specific concerns. This thesis tracks the development of the versions of the child in the works of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin family circle, from their early, discursive, political works such as Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Godwin’s Political Justice, where they represent their late-eighteenth century ideals of political emancipation through the education of the child, to more imaginative versions of the child in their later works. I locate a moment in each writer’s career at which the adult-child divide observed in their early works collapses: their doubts about rationalist epistemology crystallise, and they switch to open-ended modes of discourse in literary genres such as novels, which allow more freedom for the coded expression of radical political ideas through the representations of the child. In their later works, especially in Godwin’s radical publications for children, the adult-child hierarchy is dissolved: the child becomes a complex metaphor, representing the varied political concerns of disempowered adults and children. The discussion concludes with a sketch of the imaginative appropriation and transformation of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin representations by the Shelleys. Mary Shelley, and to a lesser extent, Percy Bysshe Shelley, adapt the radicalism of their predecessors’ literary representations of the child to suit their own altered socio-political contexts.

No description available.

Feeling forgotten charts a shift in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English literature that is structured on a crisis of memory. This shift consists in a movement towards a literary construction of aesthetic and moral self-forgetfulness that draws its intense power from an anxiety about human mortality and historical forgetting. Through analyses of texts that depict the need to overcome individual and cultural loss through a desire for oblivion, Feeling forgotten contends that the Romantic period gave birth to anti-mnemonic aesthetic in which the displacement of a perceived loss of the feeling of lived memories into various literary fictions preserves the past in such a way as to answer an unavoidable loss of feeling by asserting that the past, one's own and others, can be felt (again) in the complex affective experience found in reading about the past. In a more ambitious sense, Feeling forgotten attempts to point the way towards an understanding of Romantic and post-Romantic nostalgia as a strong rejection of its melancholic forbearers and as a response to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century self-forgetting. Indeed, the rejection of this more complex Romantic form of nostalgia, one in which the always frustrated attempt to inscribe forgetfulness itself into the text of memory is productive of the ongoing act of writing, would become the founding principle for later forms of nostalgia that seek to render forgetting as an act that resides outside the written text. Based on a reorientation of Charlotte Smith's poetic archive of feelings, which defines feeling as the failure of poetry to contain and defuse feelings themselves, and the passionate rationalism of William Godwin's early nineteenth century texts, in which self-analysis serves as both the generator and corruptor of the sympathetic feelings found in sentimental literature, Walter Scott's passive, amnesiac romances stage the fantasy of an evasion from the political and material significance of history. / text