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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.

Angela Carter's death in 1992 heralded a surge of popularity and tributes. These latter tended to cast her as a "fairy godmother" or "white witch", labels which this thesis takes as starting points in its examination of the roles of author, narrator, hero, environment and reader; their interchangeability; and mutual affect. It focuses on the construction of the subject and her or his environment in Carter's fiction, measuring their interaction by way of generic filters, criticism, interviews and journalism. The introduction examines Carter's strategies and agenda within this context by way of a historical exploration of the Western subject's perception of her/his surroundings, with particular regard to the postmodern and feminist viewpoints. This is followed by an account of Carter's own publishing history envisaged as a landscaped, picaresque journey which typifies her characteristic blend of idealism and pragmatics. Her juxtaposition of the fantastical with the familiar continues to resurface as part of the debate in subsequent chapters, which use a succession of literary and cultural tools to illumine her texts in the light of the main project. Thus: her short fictions, radio plays and the film The Company of Wolves are examined as fairy tales; The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villainsexplored using theories of the Gothic and the dystopia; Love and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman assessed in light of pornography and the picaresque; The Passion of New Eve viewed in terms of constructions of gender; and Nights at the Circus and Wise Children seen alongside theories carnival and of time. Elements of film theory, urban studies and architecture are threaded throughout, and some conclusions are offered through a reading of the important tropes of dream and labyrinth in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders. Always, subversive and unpredictable, Carter's writing can nevertheless be viewed as a succession of rewritings depicting an evolution of a subject initially vulnerable to but ultimately able to manipulate history. This is signalled most clearly by the early figure of the witch-hysteric. She is gradually transformed into the sibyl-prophetess of the later texts, while in a parallel dynamic, the environment's external threatening constructions have been dismantled in favour of a self-fashioning world full of possibility.

Charlotte Smith is both a known radical sympathizer and an allusive writer. This thesis investigates the political meanings embedded through the selection and treatment of allusion in each of Charlotte Smith’s novels published between the outbreak of the French Revolution and the end of the Reign of Terror. Specifically, it investigates how Smith utilizes quotations from authors connected with political radicalism—John Milton, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—to work through the nuances of her own political thought. I argue that these specific authors feature significantly in her work because of their known republican sympathies. Yet, Smith frequently deploys these quotations in a context far from that which was originally intended by her source, capitalizing on their republican significations but making the actual polemical content all her own. Both the frequency and diversity of her allusive engagement increases during the period of the Revolution, which marks the Revolutionary period as one essential to the development of Smith as both a novelist and as a radical. Through tracking the presence of quotation in each novel, one published each year between 1791 and 1794, the thesis traces the evolution in Smith’s political thought and, specifically, her changing attitudes toward the French Revolution as it moves through its early utopian stages to the violence and excess of the Reign of Terror. Not only does this study contribute to recent scholarship on the use of quotation in eighteenth-century writing, but it also provides an in-depth study of Smith’s evolving radicalism. In this way, the project demands reassessment of critical studies of Smith’s work which have failed to recognize the extent of the polemical content within the first work in the sequence, Celestina, and the continuing commitment to republican sympathies despite burgeoning conservatism in the last, The Banished Man.

Laurence Sterne’s Textual Commerce provides a study of Laurence Sterne as a commercial writer. It demonstrates how his correspondence and transactions with booksellers in York and London, his methods of self-promotion, and his early critical reception as a writer of ‘great oeconomy’ shaped his authorial practice as provisional and, in Thomas Keymer’s terms, open to ‘determination from without’. In examining commercial exigency in relation to Sterne’s authorship between 1759-1768, I combine two areas of enquiry that can appear distinct: studies of writers’ interactions with the book trade, which often appear under the rubric of ‘book history’, and studies of the affinity between ‘fictionality’ and ‘credit’, which often perform at a more abstract conceptual level. I argue that, within Sterne’s career and writings, each illuminates the other: the terms of credit he negotiates with his booksellers mark the precise point at which the material fabrication of his books meets abstract concerns with reputation and value in his fiction. Chapter 1 examines Tristram Shandy’s function as a publishing protagonist. It shows how Sterne’s correspondence with bookseller Robert Dodsley changes the purview of his writings from a Swiftian satire on ecclesiastical intriguing to a ‘general’ and (within the context of the mid-century marketplace) ‘more sale< b >~a~ble’ (Letters, 97) fiction where readers no longer pursue coded real-life scandals behind parodies. Instead, readers engage sympathetically with a ‘creditable’ quasi-person, who, because he resists being ‘unlocked’ by keys or reduced to assorted referents, can be named and perform for Sterne as a publisher in advertisements for his Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760). Chapter 2 addresses Sterne’s chaptering in relation to the shifting term ‘oeconomy’. Chaptering allows Sterne at times to figure his text within a domestic architecture, at others to order a repository for his imagined Shandean archives. This connects Sterne’s chapters to older conceptions of ‘oeconomy’ as the management of household resources. Yet Sterne also explores how arranging a fiction using chapters might affect its market value. Inventorying chapters allows him to create a structure of deferred value in his serial text, strengthening his credit with readers at a time when Tristram Shandy’s continuation under new bookselling arrangements is not assured. At other points, Sterne self-consciously claims to exchange or reorder chapters with the aim of eliding affective and commercial value. Chapter 3 focuses on Sterne’s exchanges with the mid-eighteenth century’s critical reviews. Published serially, Tristram Shandy’s instalments are subject to unprecedented scrutiny from these new market-driven periodicals. The long-running dialogue that ensues between Sterne and the reviewers centres on questions of taste and on the respective credit each holds with their commercial readerships. As a metaphor, taste makes readers consumers. Moreover, like credit, the discourse of taste relies on an elusive je ne sais quoi, or tipping point, which emerges from aggregate experience, but is irreducible to any exact set of experiences. For Sterne, it also holds a bifurcated temporality. The critical ‘tasting’ of his fiction marks a present moment of discrimination that augurs its consecration in history.

This thesis examines women writers’ contributions to the development of Whig literary culture in the bitterly partisan era known as ‘The Rage of the Party’. It takes as its focus the drama and poetry of three contemporaneous female authors – Catharine Trotter, Susanna Centlivre, and Sarah Fyge Egerton – a circle of self-confident female wits, who emerged in the decades after the Glorious Revolution, and wrote in support of Whig ideology and aesthetics. This project, then, challenges the received notion that Toryism was more conducive to early modern women’s public voice. It also contributes to the study of Whig cultural formation, which has hitherto focused on male writers and the genre of poetry. Pioneering scholarship on literary Whiggism has revealed the existence of a dynamic Whig literary culture long occluded by a ‘Scriblerian’ notion of literary history. Through the recovery of female interventions in Whig public discourse, this study modifies our view of early Whig culture, revealing a richer, more complex picture of the breadth and variety of the Whig cultural programme than previously conceived. A major focus of my research is the significance of the post-Revolution stage as an important site of Whig cultural production and a vital source of support for women writers, who capitalized on the patronage and industry networks of the theatre to enable and support their literary careers. This study’s engagement with female responses to partisan debates produces some surprising results. Trotter’s identity as a Catholic did not preclude her from articulating vigorous support for the tenets of the Revolution, nor did it prevent her from receiving the patronage of a number of Whig luminaries. This illuminates the richness and variety of early Whig culture, which accommodates surprisingly divergent religio-political positions. The focus on Egerton’s political poetry reveals a hitherto unacknowledged picture of her as a patriotic Whig poet, whose well-known feminist views are enabled and informed by the ideology and tropes of Whig verse. While readings of women’s Whiggish interest have largely focused on their concerns with marriage and a Lockean social contract, my research illustrates how Whiggish women’s political identities are more often articulated through their attitudes to partisan national issues: war, peace, martial heroism, commerce, speculation and religious toleration. Women engaged with these masculinist themes in explicit dialogue with their male contemporaries, refashioning the norms of the dominant culture, and alerting us to the nature and extent of female political agency.

This thesis examines women’s mock-heroic verse on domesticity, focusing on four female poets of the eighteenth century. Despite critical work on women’s poetry, on the mock-heroic, and on the rise of a cult of domesticity during the period, there has been little sustained criticism of women’s verse about domesticity, and even less about women’s use of mock-heroics. This thesis closes a gap in the work of the past few decades by adding the work of women poets to the discussion of domesticity and mock-heroic verse. The mock-heroic has been identified as ‘the exemplary mode of the eighteenth century’ and ‘the dominant idiom of the age’: a form which late seventeenth and early eighteenth century poets developed to criticise the status quo. The fact that female poets wrote mock-heroic poems and sections of poems in the mock-heroic mode, as well as the range of poems by women which may be considered mock-heroic, demonstrates that women’s use of what might be called the domestic mock-heroic merits more and different critical attention than it has received until now. This dissertation traces the use of mock-heroic poetry by four different female poets of the eighteenth century: Mary Leapor, Mary Jones, Elizabeth Moody, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. It demonstrates that the mock-heroic poems written by women differed significantly from those written by Scriblerians such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Gay – both in form and in tone. Further, it argues that mock-heroics by women contributed significantly to the form’s development throughout the century and to the intellectual shifts that occurred throughout the century.

This thesis argues that the representation of male thieves in eighteenth-century criminal life-writing is shaped by their relationship with objects, and shaped differently according to the nature of those objects. In spite of its formulaic, lowbrow and often uninspired characteristics, criminal literature proves in this respect a prime site for literary experimentation. Texts about criminals occupy a liminal space between high and low culture, a position mirrored by that of the criminals themselves and the objects they steal, as they circulate at the margins of legal society. The thieves' own hybridity is translated in the genres adopted by their biographers, ranging from poorly-written journalistic prose, more or less edifying sermons, to a plethora of literary forms such as plays or even epistolary fiction. The prevalence of objects as drivers of narrative affects every aspect of the criminal’s life, and invites investigation of matters of belonging, copyright, domesticity, gentility, and masculinity. Defined by their refusal, or inability, to conform with socially acceptable behaviours and occupation, thieves depend on their mastery of objects and the significations of those objects to succeed, whether in making a profit or evading arrest and execution. In accounts of thieves' lives, conversely, objects become animated and acquire a life of their own, dominating the narrative and representation, so that thieves themselves are in turn transformed into things, or manipulated into new functions. The thief’s relationship to objects varies in terms of both his own mobility and that of the objects he steals and fences. Hence, the thesis falls into two separate parts; the first considers London footpads and housebreakers, while the second is focused on highwaymen. While the London criminal circles might be seen as forming parallel dysfunctional underworld societies, highwaymen are more often treated as solitary itinerants at most in social relationship with an accomplice or a horse. I do not discuss female criminality except in so far as it plays a part in the biographies of the male felons examined here, as life-writing centred around criminal women focuses mostly on their illicit sexual practices rather than their relationship with the material world. An introductory chapter situates the analysis in relation to social, legal, and literary norms and conventions of the period as well as recent departures in critical thinking relevant to this thesis, such as thing theory and histories of material culture. Each subject chapter then investigates closely the distinctive and often carefully distinguished nature of an individual’s relationship with objects in the numerous publications that narrate his life. The first part of this thesis focuses on a London criminal underworld circle of the beginning of the century, each chapter dealing with one criminal figure in a group centred around the best known of them: Jonathan Wild. The first chapter is dedicated to footpad and housebreaker Joseph Blake, alias Blueskin (1700-1724), and his evolution from violent thug to picaresque figure. The next chapter follows escapist John Sheppard (1702-1724) and his struggle against material indicators of repressive legal power. The third chapter focuses on famed thief-taker and gang leader Jonathan Wild (1683-1725) and his peculiar position within eighteenth-century economic, criminal, and literary markets through his relationship with the material world. The second part of the thesis is centred on socially and geographically mobile highwaymen. It begins with a discussion of Dick Turpin (1705-1739) and his recreation and corruption of domestic structures. The next chapter is dedicated to James Maclaine, the Gentleman Highwayman (1724-1750), famed for his performative gentility, in which we observe character represented as possession. Finally, the last chapter focuses on John Rann, alias Sixteen-Strings Jack (ca1750-1774), and explores the representations of his sartorial choices in the context of popular gentility and masculinity.

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.

This thesis is a study of the representation of emigration to Canada in Scottish Romantic periodicals and fiction, and of the relationship between these genres and the little-studied genre of the emigrant's guide. Chapter One tracks the Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review's reviews of books on Canadian topics and demonstrates how the rival quarterlies respond to, and intervene in, the evolving public debate about emigration. Chapter Two examines depictions of Canada in Blackwood's Magazine and Fraser's Magazine, and reveals connections between these magazines' engagement with Canadian affairs and the concurrent reception of Scottish Romanticism in early Canadian literary magazines. Chapter Three argues for an understanding of the emigrant's guide as a porous form that acts as a bridge between nonfictional and fictional representations of emigration. Chapter Four reads novels with emigration plots in relation to the pressures of American, Canadian and transatlantic canon formation, arguing that these novels trouble the stark division between the American and Canadian emigrant experiences which was insisted upon by contemporary commentators and which continues to underpin criticism of transatlantic literary works. Chapter Five considers the relationship between Scottish Romanticism and nineteenth-century Canadian literature, a relationship which has often been framed in terms of the portability of a 'Scottish model' of fiction associated most strongly with Walter Scott. Overall, this thesis contends that foregrounding the literature of emigration allows for greater understanding of the synchronicity of Scottish Romanticism and the escalation of transatlantic emigration, offering an alternative to conceptions of Canada’s colonial and transatlantic belatedness.

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 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.

English women writers of the eighteenth century manifested enthusiasm for a form best described as a framed-novelle sequence, that is, a form in which conversations between characters/narrators are interspersed with embedded narratives. This thesis argues that the framed-novelle, with its distinctive juxtaposition of narrative and critical conversation facilitated feminine intervention in the period’s political, social, and literary debates. It demonstrates that Delarivier Manley, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier used the framed-novelle sequence to develop a feminine but nonetheless authoritative socio-critical voice which allowed them not only to intervene in contemporary literary debates about the risks and rewards of reading fictions (especially with regards to the wider significance of the feminocentric and apparently trivial matter of amatory, romantic tales)but also to construct timely argument about the effect of fictional exemplarity on readers. Consideration of the literary and cultural contexts of the framed-novelle’s production, specifically its relation to other forms of narrative sequences such as the oriental tale and the fairy tale collection and to the period’s ideals of sociable conversation and critical practice also allows this thesis to identify the framed-novelle’s importance within the larger field of eighteenth-century literary development. Through close readings in each main chapter of an earlier and later framed-novelle by each author, this thesis explores the distinctiveness and internal cohesion of the framed-novelle as a subgenre, while also recognizing the particularity of each writer’s protofeminist perspective on their accumulation of feminocentric tales.

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.