Eighteenth century

In the eighteenth-century, the novel grew from a new medium to a dominant form of expression. This space, where readers and authors come to grips with the nature of fictionality, serves as a theoretical proving ground for New Materialist, agency-first reading practices. Caught U…

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…

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…

This dissertation provides a scientific and social history of ventilation in the British Atlantic World during the long eighteenth century. Emerging amidst the enlightened craze for improvement, the first ventilating machines, or “ventilators,” aimed to extend the providential b…

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…

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. …

This dissertation considers social and narrative value of the sense of touch in eighteenth-century British literature and culture. By paying close attention to moments of touching and being touched, this project reveals how haptic sensations subtended social relations in the per…

During the first half of the `long' eighteenth century the English were, as anation, vehemently anti-Catholic, yet the art that was most admired, collected andtalked about, was Catholic in origin and subject matter (pictures showing theintercession of saints or the figure of God…

In 1965, when editor Robert Halsband published his text of the Turkish Embassy Letters of eighteenth-century traveler and writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, his work was on par with the best critical editions for eighteenth-century literary work produced at the time. But even the…

On account of their supposed link to nature, women in post-revolutionary France were pigeonholed into a very restrictive sphere that centred around domesticity and submission to their male counterparts. Yet this thesis shows how a number of women writers – Cottin, Genlis, Krüden…

Britain's foreign relations formed a crucial component of the political nation during the eighteenth century. Foreign affairs were a key issue of state, and perceived failure within European power politics could cause the fall of government ministries. Britain's foreign relation…

In late-eighteenth-century Dublin, options were limited for an expanding reading public who wished to consult quality printed works. During this period of the Anglican Ascendancy, membership to institutional libraries or participation in associational activities was largely limi…

Manuscript recipe books come in all shapes and sizes and run from tens to hundreds of pages. Those from the eighteenth century are not exclusively culinary, also incorporating medical, veterinary and household recipes. Surviving examples are almost all from genteel or elite hous…

The aim of the present thesis is to analyse how the narrative affects the various philosophical debates in Tristram Shandy and Jacques le fataliste. Contrary to what one expects from a philosophical novel, Sterne and Diderot do not impose upon the reader an authorial and authori…

This thesis explores James Macpherson’s The Highlander (1758) in relation to originality, Scottish identity and historiography. It also situates the Ossianic Collections in the context of Macpherson’s earlier poetical and later historical works. There are three parts to it: a bi…

Modern freemasonry emerged in Britain during the eighteenth century, combining earlier stonemason customs and methods of organization with the popular passion for clubs and societies. Although by no means unique in its ideology and constitution, freemasonry established itself af…

The Scots MPs of the eighteenth century have traditionally been portrayed in a negative light. In a century once noted for electoral corruption and the abuses of patronage, they were seen by contemporaries and later writers as among the worst examples of their kind: greedy, self…