This thesis explores how Anna Letitia Barbauld's book Lessons for Children Aged Two to Three Years (1778) facilitated the development of the conversational primer. This genre, which has not yet been theorised, may be identified by the way the texts present themselves as verisimilar and replicable sets of conversations, and depict parent-teachers and child-pupils as companions. This genre challenges the idea that there is a dichotomy between 'adult' and 'child' readers, a concept that inflects many contemporary approaches to children's literature studies. Through a close reading of Lessons for Children and subsequent conversational primers, this thesis suggests that Barbauld's Rational Dissenting value of discursive diversity influenced British middle-class children's culture, enabling the voices of verisimilar children to proliferate children's books on a previously unknown scale. The Introduction establishes ways in which concepts of child-parent relationships were used as paradigms for understanding modes of government in eighteenth-century Britain. Chapter One examines how children's books prior to Lessons for Children addressed different types of implied child readers with the aim of producing members of an ideal society. Chapter Two explores how Barbauld created a space in which parents could participate in the children's literature market through her introduction of the parent-author as a literary trope, her portrayals of verisimilar mother-child interactions in accessible, domestic spaces. Chapter Three charts how Lessons for Children became the prototype from which subsequent conversational primers drew their literary identity. The fourth chapter contextualises Lessons for Children as an expression of Barbauld's Rational Dissent, and posits that the rise of the conversational primer is indicative of the influence of Rational Dissenting values upon British middle-class children's culture. Chapter Five contrasts the afterlife of the conversational primer with children's books that generated readers' imaginative identification with characters. This comparison suggests that conversational primers encapsulated middle-class Georgian ideals regarding familial learning; an historical specificity that is, in part, responsible for the genre's popular demise. This thesis studies the lifecycle of the conversational primer in the British children's literature market. It examines the porousness between paratextual materials and texts, and shows how an individual author stimulated generic development by popularising specific literary tropes. By theorising the genre of the conversational primer, this study provides a new and productive discourse concerning adult-child interactions in children's literature.

This study explores the development of a discourse of global civility in English travel writing in the period 1636-1863. It argues that global civility is at the heart of cross-cultural exchanges in both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and that its evolution can best be traced by comparing accounts by travellers to the already familiar Ottoman Empire with writings of those who ventured into the largely unknown worlds of the South Pacific. In analysing these accounts, this study examines how their contexts were informed by Enlightenment philosophy, global interconnections and even-handed exchanges across cultural divides. In so doing, it demonstrates that intercultural encounters from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries were much more complex and multi-layered than one-sided Eurocentric histories often suggest. The first case study analyses the inception of global civility in Henry Blount’s Voyage into the Levant (1636). In his account, Blount frequently admires Ottoman imperial achievements at the same time as he represents the powerful Islamic empire as a model that lends itself to emulation for the emerging global reach of the English nation. The next chapter explores the practice of global civility in George Keate’s Account of the Pelew Islands (1788), which tells a story of shipwreck, salvage and return. Captain Wilson and his men lost their vessel off the Palau archipelago, established mutually improving relations with the natives and after their return familiarised English readers with the Palauan world in contemporary idioms of sentiment and sensibility. Chapter four examines comparable instances of civility by discussing Henry Abbott’s A Trip…Across the Grand Desart of Arabia (1789). Abbott is convinced that the desert Arabs are civil subjects in their own right and frequently challenges both received wisdom and deeply entrenched stereotypes by describing Arabic cultural practices in great detail. The fifth chapter follows the famous pickpocket George Barrington and the housewife Mary Ann Parker, respectively, to the newly established penal colonies in Australia in the first half of the 1790s. Their accounts present a new turn on global civility by virtue of registering the presence of convicts, natives and slaves in increasingly ambivalent terms, thus illustrating how inclusive discourses start to crack under the pressures of trafficking in human lives. The next chapter explores similar discursive fractures in Charles Colville Frankland’s Travels to and from Constantinople (1829). Frankland is at once sensitive to life in the Islamic world and aggressively biased when some of its practices and traditions seem to be incommensurate with his English identity. The final case study establishes the ways in which representational ambivalences give way to a discourse of colonialism in the course of the nineteenth century by analysing F. E. Maning’s (fictional) autobiography Old New Zealand (1863). After spending his early life in the Antipodes among the Maori, Maning changes sides after the death of his native wife and becomes judge of the Native Land Court. This transition, as well as Maning’s mocking representation of the Maori, mirrors the ease with which colonisers manage their subject peoples in the age of empire and at the same time marks the evaporation of global civility’s inclusiveness. By tracing the development of global civility from its inception over its emphatic practice to its decline, the present study emphasises the improvisational complexities of cross-cultural encounters. The spaces in which they are transacted – both the sea and the beach on the one hand; and the desert on the other – encourage mutuality and reciprocity because European travellers needed local knowledge in order to be able to brave, cross or map them. The locals, in turn, acted as hosts, guides or interpreters, facilitating commercial and cultural traffic in areas whose social fabrics, environmental conditions and intertwined histories often differed decisively from the familiar realms of Europe in the long eighteenth century.

In the discussions about contemporary celebrities, the femme fatale, the bad boy, the child star, and the wannabe have become accepted and even celebrated figures. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, actors and actresses who challenged acceptable strategies for celebrity behavior were often punished by exile, debt, disgrace, and humiliation. Some performers even faced a veritable textual and historical oblivion. Illegitimate Celebrity considers the careers of Dorothy Jordan, William Henry West Betty, Edmund Kean, and Margaret Agnes Bunn, and offers a historical genealogy of "illegitimate" performers who dared to break with social convention and struggled to define and redefine themselves according to strict social codes that dictated their behavior both onstage and off. By examining celebrity productions, portraits, caricatures, and performances as elements to producing celebrity, I demonstrate how the audiences used these public figures to create complex narratives regarding class, femininity, masculinity, marriage, nationalism, among others. Ultimately, the study of illegitimate celebrity reveals the role of celebrity in shaping these discursive structures and provides an important history for modern narratives regarding the role of celebrity in society. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / English / PhD; / Dissertation;

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2010. / Title from screen (viewed on July 28, 2010). Department of History, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Jason M. Kelly, Melissa Bingmann, Eric L. Lindseth. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-91).

This dissertation builds on existing work by members of the ‘Occupational Structure of Britain 1379-1911’ project, led by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and E.A. Wrigley. It addresses three central problems of the project, namely (a) the lack of geographical and temporal coverage by the project’s existing data sources before the nineteenth century, (b) the allocation of the numerous men with the indistinct denominator of ‘labourer’ to occupational sectors, and (c) the correction of occupational structures derived from single-occupation denominators for the (presumed) ubiquity of dual employments in the early-modern world. The solutions to these problems result in a set of estimates for the male occupational structure of England and Wales between 1600 and 1850, in twenty-year time intervals, at the level of sectors (primary, secondary, tertiary) and sub-sectors (farmers, miners, textile workers, transport workers, etcetera), at national, regional, and local geographical scales. These estimates raise important questions regarding the validity of conclusions drawn in the highly influential national accounts literature. Firstly, they place the structural shift from agriculture to industry firmly in the seventeenth and, to a lesser degree, even the sixteenth century, well before the Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, means that productivity growth in the secondary sector during the Industrial Revolution must have been much higher than previously thought, and thereby also the effects of technological and organisational innovation. Secondly, it provides strong evidence that although economic developments during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century may seem to have been limited and gradual at the national scale, this surface calm hides diverging regional developments which were anything but limited and gradual, held together by a persistently growing transport sector. The result was a regionally specialised yet integrated economy, firmly in place at the eve of the Industrial Revolution which – in light of the known role of small, specialised regions as incubators of technological innovation and novel forms of economic organisation in present-day economies – may well have contributed to Britain’s precocious transition to modern economic growth.

In this dissertation, I argue that modern understandings of both technology and gendered selfhood were mutually fashioned across the long eighteenth century. This argument makes a number of interventions in current scholarly narratives by contending, first, that interiorized subjectivity was conceptualized in the eighteenth century as constructed from (and perceptible through) a series of technological objects; second, that as gender difference was increasingly inscribed on bodies thought to be characterized by intrinsic biological variance, the importance of technological supplements to defining bodily capacities meant that this variance was often realized through artificial objects; and third, that the mechanization of the British textile manufacture, which has been identified as the industrial revolution’s catalyst, was premised not on machines’ inherent efficacy, but on the identification of technological ingenuity with a new kind of British masculinity, and a concurrent devaluation of supposedly primitive Indian and British female labourers. In my first chapter, I explore the relationship between optical technologies and stage machinery through a reading of Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon, arguing that Behn’s play enacts a radical revision of technological empiricism by privileging experiences of feminized spectacular materiality as sites of knowledge. My second chapter traces the afterlife of Restoration mechanical philosophy in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and explores how Clarissa’s interiority is conceptualized by both Lovelace and Richardson as fundamentally technological. In my third chapter I turn to John Cleland’s pornographic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, showing how the text’s representations of the technologies of textual production are intimately linked with its eroticism and violence. In my final chapter, I analyse a collection of political pamphlets and popular treatises to show how the industrialization of the British cotton manufacture erected a technological nationalism through the mechanical appropriation of women’s labour. By attending to the material, textual, and conceptual operations of eighteenth-century technologies through readings of a wide range of literary and popular works, this project ultimately demonstrates how the boundaries of modern gender difference were constructed along with and out of the body’s most artificial parts. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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This thesis contributes insight into the lives and injury experiences of the working poor of London, UK during the “long” eighteenth century. The distribution of fracture types within individual bodies and the larger experiences of those living and dying during this period are explored. Skeletal evidence, drawn from five London cemeteries, and historical evidence, in the form of contemporary hospital admission records and surgeons’ and physicians’ notebooks, speak in concert to reveal evidence of sex-based differences in fracture patterning and evidence for interpersonal violence. Sex-based differences in fracture patterning reveal that males and females suffered differing constellations of fractures and that the risk of fracture for males and females differed throughout the life course. Patterning of fractures in the male skeletal sample suggests that males’ lives were punctuated with episodes of interpersonal violence, supporting the historical data found in contemporary court records. Significant differences observed in the fracture frequencies in the skeletal and archival datasets indicate that not all fractures were being treated in a hospital setting. These results allow for examination of the intangible notion of human choice regarding health care in the past. The mixture of healed, healing, and perimortem fractures found in the skeletal sample allows for a relative timeline of fracture events to be reconstructed, contributing to a more comprehensive life course understanding of fractures in this group. Ultimately, the combined skeletal and archival datasets contribute to anthropological and historical studies of fractures and health care by placing the working poor at the centre of their own narrative. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation examines intersections of the development of maps from the Native American-European encounter to the establishment of the New Republic and transatlantic British and American narratives of women’s travel of the long eighteenth century. Early European and American maps that depict the Americas analyzed as parallel “texts” to canonical and lesser-known women’s narratives ranging from 1688 to 1801 reveal further insights into both maps and these narratives otherwise not apparent. I argue that as mapping of the New World developed, this mapping influenced representations of women’s geographic and social mobility and emergent “American” identity in transatlantic narratives. These narratives, like maps of the New World, reveal disjunctures in representation that disseminate deceptive portrayals of the New World. Such discrepancies open a rhetorical gap, or a thirdspace, of inquiry to analyze the gaze at work within these cartographic and women’s narratives. The representations of women’s geographic and social mobility remain constricted within the selected narratives of women’s travel. While the heroines do travel, in most cases they travel as captives or in some form of escape. These narratives include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (1767), Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794), and Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), among others. However, these narratives do highlight similarities of an emergent “American” identity as Native American, hybrid, and fluid as represented in contemporaneous maps. Literary Landscapes also addresses the narrativity of maps as auto/biographical and even satirical expressions as related to the women’s narratives analyzed in this study. For, J. B. Harley discusses how a map conveys his own life and contains his memories in his essay “The Map as Biography,” while Roland Barthes argues that mapping is a sensorial experience in his brief essay “No Address.” Furthermore, allegorical maps like Jean de Gourmont’s The Fool’s Cap Map of the World (ca. 1590) and Madeleine de Scudéry’s Carte de tendre (1678) reflect aspects of the human condition such as folly and friendship.