Allegorical romance on stage and page in mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain

Theatrical presentation of character relies on embodiment and mimesis where the novel constructs plausible character through the diegetic presentation of consciousness and action. This article argues that, with the introduction of stage censorship in the 1730s, allegorical prose romance mediates the transition from theatrical to novelistic modes of rendering plausible embodied character. Theatre and the novel in the mid-eighteenth century share a preoccupation with the relation of embodiment to allegorical abstraction, often represented in the figure of the Quixote, who mistakes one for the other. This essay charts the translation of techniques found in Henry Fielding’s satirical allegory in his short stage plays of the 1730s with three allegorical romances of 1736 that take Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his new bride, Princess Augusta of Saxa-Gothe-Altenburg, as the hero and heroine: Celenia and Hyempsal, The Adventures of Prince Titi, and The Adventures of Eovaai. Discursive play with the magical reincarnation of “dead” figures in new forms of embodiment—puppets, ghosts, supernatural visitation—is central to these acts of generic transformation. Allegory, as we see in Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry (1754), has an unacknowledged afterlife in the mid-century novel

The Eastern Tale and the Candid Reader: Tristram Shandy, Candide, Rasselas

Voltaire’s Candide, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas and the first two volumes of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759. All three works pursue an agenda of practical scepticism. Textual allusions to the Mille et une Nuit inform the ambivalent pursuit of sceptical reading in these works. Uncovering this hitherto unacknowledged shared source in the Arabian Nights adds new support for readings of these works as critiques of the “ lunacy” of the Seven Years War.En 1759 parurent Candide, Rasselas et les deux premiers volumes de Tristram Shandy, trois oeuvres marquées d’un même scepticisme, scepticisme auquel contribuent des allusions textuelles aux Mille et une nuits. Cette source commune, jusqu’alors non repérée, appuie le type de lecture qui voit dans ces trois oeuvres une critique de la folie de la guerre de Sept Ans.Ballaster Ros. The Eastern Tale and the Candid Reader: Tristram Shandy, Candide, Rasselas. In: XVII-XVIII. Revue de la société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. N°67, 2010. L’attrait de l’Orient / The Call of the East. pp. 109-125

Who’s the dupe? A farce

Review of Hannah Cowley’s Who’s the Dupe? A Farce, Script-in-Hand Performance, Mordan Hall, St Hugh’s College, Oxford, 3 May 2022

Familiar collaboration and women writers in eighteenth-century Britain : Elizabeth Griffith, Sarah Fielding and Susannah and Margaret Minifie

Between 1740 and 1770, a number of women writers choose to make explicit in their printed texts their collaboration with a ‘familiar’: a family member or close friend. In so doing, they strategically enact their personal relationships through the medium of print in order to claim for themselves a level of literary power and delineate the terms on which they entered the marketplace as authors. This thesis argues that familiar relations expressed along a horizontal axis – those of husband, wife, brother, sister and friend – offer a relatively flexible model of familiar relations in which women could acquire a level of agency in self-definition, supported by ideologies that valued women’s contribution to the polite sphere of sociable conversation. It demonstrates that Elizabeth Griffith, Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and Susannah and Margaret Minifie not only engage in collaborative literary production that is thoroughly inflected with the pressures of their historical context but that through familiar collaboration women writers display their professional authorial personae and generate social and literary criticism. Through close readings of carefully selected collaborative texts in the corpus of each writer, including the material history of the texts themselves, and the relationships expressed through those texts, this thesis highlights the complexity with which family relations interacted with print culture in the period. Far from using the familiar relation as a means of modestly retiring to the domestic sphere these women writers used their familiar relations as a basis from which to launch, describe and defend their authorial careers.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Eighteenth-century women writers and the tradition of epistolary complaint

This thesis considers the presence of the epistolary tradition of female complaint in the writings of five late eighteenth-century women writers: Hester Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Turner Smith, Mary Robinson, and Frances Burney D’Arblay. The epistolary female complaint tradition is premised on the suggestion that readers are permitted, through the literary endeavours of male authors/transcribers, a glimpse into the authentically felt woes of women; the writers in this study both question and exploit this expectation. Often viewed by critics like John Kerrigan as a tradition that stifled female creativity, epistolary female complaint proves, this thesis argues, a lively and enlivening tradition for women writers; it provided opportunities for literary experimentation and enabled them to turn their experiences into artistic form. Five themes central to the epistolary female complaint tradition are considered: betrayal, absence, suicide, falls, and authorship. Each chapter looks at one theme and one author specifically. Chapter 1 examines the narrative of betrayal Hester Thrale Piozzi established in her journals from 1764 to 1784. Chapter 2 turns to Mary Wollstonecraft and her accounts of absence in her private letters to Gilbert Imlay, and her epistolary travel account, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Chapter 3 discusses Charlotte Turner Smith’s engagement with the theme of suicide in her Elegiac Sonnets (1784) and her epistolary novel, Desmond(1792). Chapter 4 considers the strategies employed in Mary Robinson’s autobiographical, poetic, and fictional writings, which work to move beyond the moral fall the tradition implied. Chapter 5 focuses on the recurrent theme of authorial debt in Frances Burney D’Arblay’s journals, plays, and fiction. I conclude by considering Jane Austen’s appropriation of the tradition in her final novel, Persuasion (1818), and her transformation of the tradition by providing a resolution to the cause of complaint.This thesis is not currently available in ORA

Reading Theories and Telling Stories in Contemporary Fiction

My thesis engages with reader-response theory in order to show how the realisations it makes might be refined by deconstruction. Reader-response theorists such as Stanley Fish and Norman Holland acknowledge that a subjective element inheres within all interpretation. This has an unsettling effect for literary criticism, which traditionally grounds its claims on notions of objectivity. Criticism must be rethought; both Fish and Holland promise to practise a self-conscious literary criticism which represents more accurately the experience of reading. My thesis begins with an analysis of reader-response which demonstrates, however, that its attempt to inscribe the act of reading fails; it takes place within a text which is read. Reading inevitably recedes. Neither Fish nor Holland explicitly addresses this dilemma. Deconstruction, on the other hand, takes it into account; it works with, not in spite of, it in order to show that self-consciousness must be approached in a certain way if it is to remain useful. My thesis does not therefore offer a new theory of reader-response but rethinks this phase within the history of theory by responding to the challenge presented by a recent self-consciousness in theory and literature alike. I show that it is possible, in reading works of contemporary fiction alongside texts by Derrida (and those who think after him), to deepen our understanding of what it is to read. Reading cannot be grasped; it is marked by that which cannot be known. Its drama resounds with the recent shift towards a notion of ethics predicated upon the unknowability of the other. My thesis wonders repeatedly what consequences this appearance of the unknowable has for literary criticism; to acknowledge its centrality is to accept that the role of criticism cannot be to fully capture the text. Instead, the readings I offer remain attentive, in the face of their failure, to the irrecoverable. </p

Quixotic exceptionalism: British and US co-narratives, 1713-1823

Scholars have long since identified a quixotic mode in fiction, acknowledging the widespread influence of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605-15) on subsequent texts. In most cases, “quixotic” signifies a preponderance of allusions to Don Quixote in a given text, such that most studies of “quixotic fictions” or “quixotic influence” are primarily taxonomic in purpose and in outcome: they name and catalogue a text or group of texts as “quixotic,” then argue that, by virtue of the vast and protean influence of Don Quixote, the quixotic mode in fiction is always divided, lacking any semblance of ideological consistency. I argue, however, that the very characteristics of Don Quixote that make him such an attractive literary model for such a broad range of narratives—his bookish idealism, his fixation on the upper-classed grandiosity of the lives of noble knights—also form the consistent, ideological groundwork of quixotism: the exceptionalist substitution of fictive idealism for material reality. By tracing the ways in which quixotes become mouthpieces for various exceptionalist arguments in eighteenth-century British and American texts, like Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), Tobias Smollett's Launcelot Greaves (1760), Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792-1815), and Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797), among others, I demonstrate the link between quixotism and exceptionalism, or between fictive idealism and the belief that one (or one's worldview) is an exception to the scrutiny of the surrounding world.This thesis is not currently available in ORA