This dissertation focuses on the many tales of distressed women found in mid-eighteenth-century British magazines and essay serials. On the one hand, I argue, scenes of “virtue in distress” and amatory fiction more generally demonstrate the increasing commercialization of literature and the rise of the sentimental reader. On the other hand, they reveal the periodical writers’ drive to educate readers both in and through the passions. I propose that two factors complicate the pathos of these narratives. In the first place, the periodical form was thought to work against the arousal of vehement passions. In the second place, even if such passions could be raised in the miscellaneous format, there were moral reasons why indolent, distracted periodical readers craving sympathetic identification should not be indulged. Driven by market forces and yet constrained by the unique nature of periodical publication, writers of miscellanies responded with ingenuity to these challenges, crafting and deploying literary depictions of “virtue in distress” that suited this compressed and constrained medium. In part because of the challenges and risks associated with raising powerful feelings on the limited canvas of the periodical, some periodicalists worked to suppress or otherwise complicate the most affecting aspects of their amatory fictions. Others strove to correct the reader’s passions in their operation; and others still called into question, elsewhere in their periodicals, the suitability of a passionate response. All attempted to justify their efforts on aesthetic and/or ethical grounds. Drawing on their knowledge of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, classical models of rhetoric and composition, and early modern theories of the passions, periodical writers strove to raise useful, calm passions through their fictions—passions in some sense suited to the periodical form—and to suppress vehement, dangerous ones. By examining mid-century periodicals in relation to broad strands of enlightenment and also classical thought, my thesis uncovers an important proto-disciplinary moment in eighteenth-century Britain, when the fields of psychology, rhetoric, and moral theory were not yet separated. The organization of my study is, with some exceptions, chronological, with sections on Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744-46), Samuel Johnson’s Rambler (1750-52) and Idler (1758-60), Christopher Smart’s Student (1750-51) and Midwife (1750-53), John Hawkesworth’s Adventurer (1752-54), and Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1760-61). My purpose is not to chart a change over time, but to reveal the innovative ways mid-century periodical writers responded to a set of interrelated questions and concerns: is it possible to import the famously sentimental motif of “virtue in distress” into the miscellany, given the structural limitations of the form; which passions should, ethically speaking, be raised by depictions of distressed women and which suppressed; and what aesthetic and rhetorical resources can be mobilized to convey such depictions effectively to readers and thereby influence their passions?
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/38005 |
| Date | 20 August 2018 |
| Creators | Pahl, Chance David |
| Contributors | De Bruyn, Frans, Landreth, Sara |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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