Eighteenth century

Virginia in the early eighteenth-century was undergoing extensive change. Wealth had recently boomed in the colony due to rising tobacco prices and increased land holdings, slavery was becoming firmly entrenched, and the gentry class continued to cement their place at the top of…

This dissertation analyzes the cultural urgency of dread—a profound feeling of fear about the future—in a range of canonical and popular British novels, poems, periodicals, and philosophical treatises. In our own time, we tend to think of dread as a negative, paralyzing affect. …

Kingship in 19ᵗʰ century Ethiopia has received little attention. This study documents the evolution of kingship in the region of Shewa through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The research methodology is based upon indigenous, visual documentation, that traces the histor…

Because novels reflect history as well as art, this work seeks to identify the historical origins of gender bias—the categories of Male Law and Female Sacrifice—as they are characterized in Defoe's Roxana (1724), Richardson's Clarissa (1747), and Walpole's The Castle of Otranto …

Mme. de Pompadour was presented as mistress to Louis XV in 1745 and remained at the Court of Versailles until 1764. France faced monumental challenges at this time. The Wars of the Austrian Succession from 1740 to 1748 and the Seven Years' War in 1756 to 1763 crippled France mil…

The dynamics of Ottoman administration in eighteenth-century Bosnia, as seen through the provincial governor's office, demonstrate that the populace and the state's representatives cooperated to realize societal needs. Proof of this assertion at a general level comes from asking…

This dissertation examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels that use forced marriage as a plot structure to expose and subvert the oppression of women in British society. Each of the novels studied at length re-writes the forced marriage plot of Samuel Richardso…

This study examines the effects of two concurrent cultural developments on British attitudes towards gender during the long eighteenth century: the introduction and popularization of actresses to the British public stage and the ongoing British colonial project. The goal is to d…

This study examines the contents and the role of the Restoration and eighteenth-century serious dramas that stage the Orient, namely the Muslim Orient. Critics have analyzed the rise and the role of these dramas differently. For instance, Edward Said in Orientalism views Orienta…

This dissertation deals with the corpus of icons painted by Serbian artists between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, after the conquest of the Byzantine Empire by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The icons were housed in Serbian Orthodox churches in Bosnia-Herzegovina at th…

This study, which examines the French experience of captivity in the Barbary States of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco, considers both the mechanics and perceptions of an often forgotten phenomenon that pitted Crescent against Cross and implicated tens of thousands of subjec…

During the eighteenth century, a number of novels entered the literary marketplace featuring an Oriental traveler who wrote letters recording his observations of the West. In fact, these novels were written by Europeans who sought to satirize their cultures through the comments …

This thesis is a historical study of a commercial partnership between two families of Sephardic Jews, the Ergas and the Silvera, which was based in Livorno (Tuscany) and Aleppo (Syria) and operated during the first half of the eighteenth century, when Livorno was the most import…

This dissertation explores the roots of modern Arab history from the perspective of indigenous sources of change. Orientalist and Arab nationalist historians once saw the 18th century as a period of cultural stagnation, civil strife, and economic decline. These assumptions have …

My dissertation focuses on the two best-known works by Clara Reeve, the novel The Old English Baron (1777) and the critical treatise The Progress of Romance (1785), reading The Progress of Romance as Reeve's effort to outline a feminine, Christianized narrative tradition to serv…

Exoticism underwent significant transformation during the eighteenth century. This dissertation traces and defines this transformation through a series of studies of turquerie, exoticism's predominant visual form in eighteenth-century France. Stepping away from established modes…

This dissertation delineates two new political and cultural visions that emerged in Central Asia in the eighteenth century. These visions shaped Central Asia's political and cultural boundaries and its perception of self-image, and became the mode of cultural discourse in that p…

This dissertation introduces the work of the eighteenth-century Particular Baptist London minister Benjamin Wallin. After providing an overview of Wallin’s life and ministry, the dissertation turns to an examination of his teaching and preaching. Benjamin Wallin was a known clos…

This dissertation asks how the British anti-slave-trade movement permeated musical culture of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how musical activities, in turn, were used to support the cause. It examines a group of newly discovered musical scores—described here a…

From the late sixteenth through the nineteenth century, Great Britain expanded across the globe building an empire in diverse regions of the world on every livable continent. British engagement in overseas expansion initiated new cross-cultural exchanges on an unprecedented scal…