Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, English (Arts and Sciences)

Distel's dissertation examines novels by Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, focusing on the ways in which female characters in each text experience, negotiate, or reject allocations of shame. The project posits that discussions of shame took narrative form in the long eighteenth century, making this era particularly important to examine because of the drastic improvements in print technology and a rapidly expanding female readership. In analyzing the era's fiction, Distel argues that if female characters do not actually suffer shame, they frequently demonstrate an awareness of its potentially destructive power, and of the fact that patriarchal social structures often demanded women's obedience and shamefacedness. Ultimately, the dissertation posits that the genre of the novel exposes in detail the process by which patriarchal power structures assign shame and impose gender and social norms onto women, while also revealing alternatives to those norms. Additionally, the project offers a bridge between modern (often sexualized) shame and shame experienced during the long eighteenth century, which is, Distel argues, the era in which detailed representations of female shame take narrative form and become a crucial feature of fiction. The dissertation thus serves as a prehistory to contemporary theories of shame, positioning analyses and allocations of shame in their respective historical moments.

Committee: Linda Zionkowski (Advisor) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Gender Studies; Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2019, English

Ekphrasis influences descriptions of female characters in early modern drama and prose fiction. These vivid descriptions are conveyed with such clarity that they highlight the constructed nature of ideal feminine behavior within a patriarchal system, thereby exposing abuses of patriarchal power. Classical ekphrasis is a technique capable of transcending genre, aiding in the exposure of abuses of power and eliciting emotional responses from audiences. Ekphrasis is an effective way to appeal to an audience's emotions—when descriptions develop vivid images, they can bypass mental and emotional barriers constructed to protect one's emotions or self-image. Authors elicit emotions from readers in order to teach them how to name their emotions and feelings; being able to name and understand feelings is a crucial part of developing understanding, especially in a society that increasingly relied upon empirical evidence to determine the truth.

Committee: Chris Flint (Committee Chair) Subjects: Literature; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2018, English

As consumer culture expanded in eighteenth-century Britain, British literature likewise took a turn toward “realism,” a more lifelike portrayal of characters and settings that regularly included object references or “literary objects.” This dissertation examines the usage of literary objects from the early 1700s to the early 1800s, tracing the ways authors adapted to the growing presence of object ownership in British culture and society through their inclusion of literary objects in their works. Through a combination of close reading and historical context, this thesis argues that authors used the presence of literary objects to convey multivalent information about both fictional and real-world society and culture, enabling authors to indirectly question overarching power structures in ways that would have been difficult to do directly. The first three chapters address how authors primarily used objects as indicators of boundaries (“walls”) and points of access (“doors”), with a third category of literary object that represented social and cultural authority. Building on these arguments, the last chapter investigates how booksellers used paratext involving literary objects, specifically through illustrations, to co-opt a degree of authorial status in reprinting formerly popular novels. The resulting body of evidence suggests a larger pattern of authorial use of literary objects to reflect an increasingly complex relationship between people and goods, as shown across a selection of eighteenth-century British fiction.

Committee: Christopher Flint Ph.D (Advisor); Athena Vrettos Ph.D (Committee Member); William Siebenschuh Ph.D (Committee Member); William Deal Ph.D (Committee Member); Christopher Flint Ph.D (Committee Chair) Subjects: British and Irish Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, History

This dissertation examines the relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe. Specifically, it explores how the Enlightenment produced the modern Western perception of the nature of the mind and its relationship to the body. While most traditional Enlightenment historiography argues that the movement was defined by radical, allegedly atheistic thinkers, like Diderot and Spinoza, who denied the existence of the traditional Christian immaterial and immortal soul, this project demonstrates that these extreme thinkers were actually a minority, confined largely to the intellectual fringes. By contrast, not only were many Enlightenment thinkers sincere Christians, but they were actually the most effective communicators of new ideas by showing how the Enlightenment supported, rather than attacked, traditional Christian beliefs. This moderate Enlightenment is responsible for developing Western ideas about how the mind and body are related, especially within the emerging fields of psychology and psychiatry in the mid-nineteenth century. This dissertation gains its focus through an examination of the work of two historiographically neglected enlightened thinkers—David Hartley in Britain, and the Abbe de Condillac in France. Both of them argued for the traditional Christian belief in an immortal soul, but used enlightened ideas to do so. The first two chapters look at how Hartley and Condillac developed this argument by making use of not only their published works, but also their private papers and correspondence. This evidence demonstrates that despite and even because of strong religious convictions, both thinkers remained open to new ideas about the relationship between the mind and the body. The later chapters examine how Hartley and Condillac's ideas about the human mind were received both geographically (in their respective home countries and throughout Europe and America) and chronologically (from their own lifetimes unt (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dale Van Kley PhD (Advisor); Matthew Goldish PhD (Advisor); Geoffrey Parker PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: History

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2020, English

Jonathan Swift's travel narrative, Gulliver's Travels, addresses a middle-class Englishman sailing around the world and encountering new populations with unique features. Published in 1726, when British colonization was rampant, Swift's story confronts the effects of colonization on previously untouched civilizations. This paper touches on two of Gulliver's journeys, to Brobdingnag and to the land of the Houyhnhnms. Citing the works of Aime Cesaire and Homi Baba, two prominent scholars in the field of post-colonial theory, this paper examines how colonization harms the parties involved, both those who are colonizing and those who have been colonized. Countering the contemporary view that colonization would benefit any civilization that receives contact, the paper notes how it rather leaves destruction in its course.

Committee: Cynthia Richards (Advisor); Rick Incorvati (Committee Member); Timothy Wilkerson (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2014, History

The late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries saw England experience a dramatic shift; this transformation took place in both the public sphere and print culture. It also occurred in the government's involvement in and management of these two theaters of the social landscape. To grasp this change and gauge how it happened over time this thesis analyzes four instructive events, or in some cases series of events, and the changing political and cultural contexts surrounding them to demonstrate the government's evolving involvement in and management of the public sphere through print media during this period. The specific episodes of interest are the Popish Plot and subsequent Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, the Sacheverell “incident” and its aftermath, and the peace campaign that brought about the end of the War of the Spanish Succession and the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Each is examined both quantitatively and qualitatively using a combination of primary sources in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, and other pieces of print media and secondary analysis. This investigation demonstrates that the importance of the public sphere and of print expanded during this timeframe and that to achieve its goals and maintain political stability the government had to expand its participation in and management of these emergent spaces of power brokering – a task it successfully did by 1713.

Committee: Michael Graham Dr. (Advisor); Michael Levin Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: History

M.M., University of Cincinnati, 0, College-Conservatory of Music: Music History

Chromatically meandering, even teasing, Carmen's Seguidilla proves fatally seductive for Don Jose, luring him to an obsession that overrides his expected decorum. Equally alluring, Dalila contrives to strip Samson of his powers and the Israelites of their prized warrior. However, while exotic femmes fatales plotting ruination of gentrified patriarchal society populated the nineteenth-century French opera stages, they contrast sharply with an eighteenth-century model populated by merciful exotic male rulers overseeing wandering Western females and their estranged lovers. Disparities between these eighteenth and nineteenth-century archetypes, most notably in treatment and expectation of the exotic and the female, appear particularly striking given the chronological proximity within French operatic tradition. Indeed, current literature depicts these models as mutually exclusive. Yet when conceptualized as a single tradition, it is a socio-political—rather than aesthetic—revolution that provides the basis for this drastic shift from femme ideale to femme fatale. To achieve this end, this thesis contains detailed analyses of operatic librettos and music of operas representative of the eighteenth-century French exotic archetype: Arlequin Sultan Favorite (1721), Le Turc genereux, an entree in Les Indes Galantes (1735), La Recontre imprevue/Die Pilgrime von Mekka (1764), and Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail (1782). Taking cues from Edward Said's concept of Orientalism as a reflection of the collective fears of western society, it places them within a socio-political and cultural context via appropriate primary and secondary sources. It applies the same method to operas representative of the nineteenth-century French exotic archetype: L'Africaine (1865), Carmen (1875), Samson et Dalila (1877) and Lakme (1883). To account for the nineteenth century's break with eighteenth-century exotic plot archetypes, this study documents the socio-political backlash against female li (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jonathan Kregor Ph.D. (Committee Chair); bruce mcclung Ph.D. (Committee Member); Mary Sue Morrow Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2009, History

This thesis explores the various factors leading to the adaptation of western style scientific cartography by Japanese mapmakers in the employ of the Tokugawa government in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It situates Japan not as a passive recipient of European cartographic techniques, but rather an active producer of geographic information in an exchange that began in the late 16th century. It focuses on the conflict over Ezo (modern day Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril islands) between Russia and Japan as a catalyst for the Tokugawa Shogunate's early 19th century mapping programs. Beginning with an analysis of the development of mapmaking in Europe, I examine the political, military, and economic character of the broader exchange as well as its effect on the mapping of Ezo itself. I conclude that the Tokugawa government actively employed both native and foreign cartographic techniques to solidify its hold over both Ezo and represent Japan as a unified whole. Through continuing cartographic exchange western-style Japanese maps were transmitted to Europe, helping to formalize European representations of Japan.

Committee: Philip Brown PhD (Committee Chair); James Bartholomew PhD (Committee Member); Alan Beyerchen PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Cartography; History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, English

England has historically conceived of chastity in two ways: 1) virginity prior to marriage followed by continence – i.e., self-restraint from sexual intercourse – within marriage and 2) simplicity of clothing and ornamentation. This dissertation, Fashioning Chastity: British Marriage Plots and the Tailing of Desire, 1789 and 1928, focuses on a time when these two definitions coexisted. British marriage plots typically concentrate on two female characters: one who overvalues fashion and engages in pre-marital sexual activity (only to make a poor marriage or become a fallen woman) and another who favors conservative dress and guards her chaste reputation (for which she is rewarded with an affectionate marriage). While the fallen women's scandalous sexuality attracts critical attention, the marriage plot's heroines – perhaps because they appear to reify orthodoxy – tend to generate less analytical attention. This dissertation examines the latter group: the overlooked, chaste protagonists. By unpacking sartorial motifs in Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895), and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), I illustrate how these authors use clothing's symbolic relation to contemporary issues to complicate the appearance feminine, chaste sexuality. Ultimately, this dissertation draws upon and contributes to feminist and sexuality studies by helping us to better understand the complexity of female chastity throughout the long nineteenth century. While Enlightenment thinking led contemporary religious, marital, and sartorial discourses to back away from defining husbands as the undisputed rulers of their households, the Marriage Act of 1753 solidified the importance of female virginity, as verbal spousehoods were no longer legally binding. Concurrently, republican and capitalist belief systems deified the pursuit of happiness in marriage and promoted the interests of the rising middle-class, emphasizing women as the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Marlene Longenecker PhD (Advisor); David Riede PhD (Committee Member); Amanpal Garcha PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature; Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2012, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This thesis reports on the themes of madness, unreason, and wonderment in Jacques Cazotte's Le diable amoureux, a late-eighteenth-century recit fantastique, and the third book of Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit, an early-nineteenth-century prose poetry collection also considered a fantastic piece of literature. By analyzing 1750s-1850s literary sources belonging to the fantastic genre in which the experience of dreaming is central and whose authors or main characters suffer from a certain type of madness that could be defined as delusion through the informed regard of Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, literary theories, and Continental Philosophy, this thesis explores the problem of ego construction and self-fashioning, asking what it might mean to become a thinking subjectivity and trying to describe that very process. The two literary sources analyzed in this paper are excellent examples of what one could call Bildungstraumes, that is, dreams that implement the main mechanisms of the mind and show in allegories the symbolic mental representations presiding over our psychic agencies.

Committee: Jonathan Strauss PhD (Advisor); Elisabeth Hodges PhD (Committee Member); Randolph Runyon PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; European Studies; Language Arts; Literature; Philosophy

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2024, College-Conservatory of Music: Music (Musicology)

Pleasure gardens first came to prominence in early eighteenth-century London as venues where visitors from diverse social strata could promenade about the walks, enjoy entertainments, and see and be seen. In an issue of his Review of the State of the British Nation dated 25 June 1709, Daniel Defoe distinguishes seven social classes in England, including a group he describes as “the middle sort . . . who live the best, and consume the most . . . and with whom the general wealth of this nation is found.” Recognizing the potential to profit from the newfound wealth of the “middle sort” (and adjacent, similarly centralized socioeconomic groups), entrepreneurs marketed new leisure activities to them, including trips to London's three chief pleasure gardens: Marybone (also spelled Marylebone), Ranelagh, and Vauxhall. Although garden refreshments were notoriously overpriced, the cost of admission was relatively modest, enabling even those from the poorer classes to attend at least occasionally. At the other end of the social spectrum, the attendance of royal family members enhanced the prestige of the gardens. Music presided over the pleasure garden experience, facilitating exchanges amongst the classes and providing unprecedented opportunities for social emulation: the process whereby the “middle sort” could imitate their social superiors, and could themselves be admired and imitated. This dissertation examines the complex function(s) of music, musicians, and performance in London's three leading pleasure gardens—focusing primarily on their eighteenth-century heyday—and the intersections of these elements with the progression of capitalism and the commercialization of leisure. Through this examination, it reveals the pleasure gardens as apt stages for the social transgression, subversion, and emulation performed by garden visitors, and provides a more nuanced understanding of the role(s) that music, musical works, and musicians played in such performances.

Committee: Stephen Meyer Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Christopher Segall Ph.D. (Committee Member); Amanda Eubanks Winkler M.A. Ph (Committee Member); Scott Linford Ph.D. (Committee Member); Angela Swift Ph.D. D (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, English (Arts and Sciences)

This study documents patterns of description of Roman Catholic characters, beliefs, cultural attitudes, dispositions, doctrines, worship and ceremonial rites, and visual and material culture in eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century British prose fiction. From Daniel Defoe's Religious Courtship (1722) to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), British prose fiction wrestles with the problem of religious difference between Anglo-Protestants and a defamiliarized Catholic other. Delineating Roman Catholicism the spatial-geographical as well as timebound “constitutive outside” of Protestant Great Britain, numerous British novels portray Catholics and Catholic religion as shadows of a dark age past from which Britain itself has emerged, enlightened and whole. And yet certain features of these fictions belie a clean, easy separation and indeed problematize Anglo-Protestant identity itself. Describing in fetishistic detail Catholicism's visual and material culture, to emphasize its strangeness and outlandishness to British observers, British writers draw attention to Protestant Britain's own lack of internal religious unity and coherence, which is often symbolized by the novel's inability to render a rival Protestant religious imaginary on the page. I argue that the stark contrast between the visible and embodied evidence of Roman Catholic religion and an Anglo-Protestant religious imaginary that both contains and resists Catholic art and artifice, is a constant source of unspoken disquiet and tension in the British novel. British writers of the eighteenth-century wrestle with the question or what Britons have lost or gained in shedding the visual and material culture of Catholicism for comparatively immaterial and rational constructions of faith. In consequence, however, a Catholic religious imaginary and sacramental universe—part of England's religious heritage from the Catholic Middle Ages—is preserved in the realm of the symbolic, and becomes a challenge to b (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Linda Zionkowski (Committee Chair); Michele Clouse (Committee Member); Nicole Reynolds (Committee Member); Joseph McLaughlin (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; History; Literature; Religion; Religious Education; Religious History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

This dissertation will present a novel corpus of eighteenth-century medical satires to perform a reparation on the secular epistemological terrain of the eighteenth-century Medical Enlightenment. It employs an allegorical method of interpretation informed by syncretic-feminist theology to a collection of eighteenth-century Enlightenment literature to demonstrate how the satirical mode was used to push back against the bodily technologies of the medical profession. This project helps us to identify the characteristic features of these topical satires, which voice a deep epistemological discomfort with the principles, methods, and practices of the emergent secular medical field. Medical satires feature narrators and targets that elide the figures of the physician and the satirist as humoral healers, scientific methodologies applied to absurd and bawdy topics, and a considerable amount of human and animal suffering resulting from poorly-applied medical treatments. This dissertation then reads Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as a virtuosic representative of the medical satire subgenre whose narrator thoroughly foils both his own and a reader's attempt to rationalize and unify his creation and circumstance. This project hopes to offer literary and medical scholars an allegorical perspective into medicine's literary origins and entanglements to support the gradual recovery and revitalization of pre-Medical Enlightenment medical wisdom.

Committee: Sandra Macpherson (Advisor); Jennifer Higginbotham (Committee Member); David Brewer (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2022, College-Conservatory of Music: Conducting, Choral Emphasis

From the eighteenth century to the present, commentators on the music of Marianna von Martines (1744-1812) have noted her compositions' mixture of old and new musical styles. Existing scholarship, however, lacks a critical assessment of style across a group of her works, or of how her approach to style relates to that of her contemporaries. The present study addresses this lack, by examining Martines's four settings of the Latin mass as a group and by placing them in conversation with compositional traditions of the eighteenth century. This study begins by surveying eighteenth-century conceptions of style, interrogating the many meanings of the term “galant,” and examining trends in mass composition in eighteenth-century Vienna. This document's central project is an analysis of musical style in Martines's masses. It outlines a provisional chronology for the masses, arguing that the undated “Messe No. I” is in fact the latest of the four. Subsequent chapters examine three key aspects of Martines's style: form and tonality, galant schemata, and the learned style. These chapters investigate how her approaches followed, developed, bent, or flouted contemporary stylistic conventions, and identify a number of broad progressions throughout the masses. Formal and tonal organization develop significantly. Galant schemata play an increasingly important role in motivic and tonal development. Learned gestures increasingly serve schematic and developmental goals. In light of such stylistic interweaving, this document also calls for a broad re-evaluation of the relationship between the concepts of “galant” and “learned.” The concept of “concealed art” was fundamental to the galant aesthetic; thus, when eighteenth-century European composers fashioned galant schemata out of learned materials, this interweaving embodies the very essence of galant behavior. Additionally, sacred choral music deserves broader consideration in studies of galant music, as one of the primary (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: L. Brett Scott D.M.A. (Committee Chair); Matthew Peattie Ph.D (Committee Member); Joe Miller D.M.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

Literary representations of incest occur with marked frequency during the Romantic era—roughly equating to the years between 1780 and 1830. Much of this period overlaps with that of the tumultuous socio-historical timeline of the French Revolution, in which extensive reforms to both family and state authority in France were seen and debated across the Channel in England. So, too, was this a period in which the English revealed an intense focus on kinship and marriage alliance as a form of achieving social and economic security. This dissertation investigates the way in which these socio-political concerns are interrogated through the incest motif—a motif itself innately invested in transgression as it portrays kinship bonds that refuse to be constrained by societal laws or expectations. I provide close readings of the incest motif in more than one dozen texts including the male Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, gothic writer Matthew Lewis, dramatist James Cobb, and the novelists Frances Burney, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Robinson. In so doing, this dissertation reveals that this politicized motif took on a wide variety of forms that cannot be encapsulated by a single category or political ideology. Rather, I demonstrate that representing politics through incest is a feature of Romantic-era authorship and one which reveals an underlying moral mode for conceiving of one's highly individualized political ideology.

Committee: Clare Simmons (Advisor); Jacob Risinger (Advisor); David Brewer (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, English

Although the first balloon flights in 1783 created a sensation throughout Europe, human flight had long captured the imaginations of scientific and literary authors alike. Prior histories of flight begin with balloons, but earlier centuries boasted a strange and colorful aviary that shaped thinking about flight long before the first balloon ever left the ground. Taking a cultural materialist approach informed by a broad familiarity with the development of early flight machines and a deep familiarity with the literary conventions of the period, I analyze historical materials ranging from aeronautical treatises to stage pantomimes, from newspaper advertisements to philosophical poems, from mechanical diagrams to satirical cartoons. This earlier culture possessed high hopes and anxieties about human flight. I argue that early flight was lively and varied before the invention of a successful flying machine, and that these early flights were important because they established an aerial tradition astonishingly resistant to change. Rather than revolutionizing the culture, ballooning was quickly incorporated into it. Although ballooning came to be regarded as a failure by many onlookers, the aerial tradition had long become accustomed to failure and continued unabated. Human flight has always promised tremendous and yet debatable utility, a paradox that continues into the present age.

Committee: Roxann Wheeler (Advisor); David Brewer (Committee Member); Sandra Macpherson (Committee Member); Jacob Risinger (Committee Member) Subjects: Aeronomy; Aerospace Engineering; American Literature; Astronomy; British and Irish Literature; Comparative Literature; Engineering; European History; European Studies; Experiments; Folklore; Foreign Language; Germanic Literature; History; Language; Literature; Mechanical Engineering; Museums; Philosophy of Science; Physics; Science History; Technology; Theater; Theater History; World History

Master of Humanities (MHum), Wright State University, 2019, Humanities

This thesis explores the status of German women writers in the 18th century during the era of Enlightenment and Romanticism. I will examine the philosophical ideas and beliefs during these times, and the impact these ideas had on La Roche and Schlegel specifically, as well as society as a whole. While studying the life style, upbringing, and the most important literary works of the two women writers, I will show the advancements made by them towards greater autonomy for other women writers emphasizing their courage, alongside the hardship they often endured. Seeking greater recognition and freedom from male tutelage, La Roche and Schlegel took their destiny into their own hands, yet often retained, and even chose their traditional roles in life over a complete need to change their status. The question if these courageous women actually achieved advancement for future women writers is explored in detail.

Committee: Renate Sturdevant Ph.D. (Committee Co-Chair); Donovan Miyasaki Ph.D. (Committee Co-Chair); Elfe Dona Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation analyzes emerging colonial subjectivities in eighteenth-century Spanish America. It focuses on Tucuman (center and northwest of Argentina), a border region of the Viceroyalty of Peru that became an intercolonial mercantile hub in eighteenth century. It analyzes texts on commerce and economy that circulated there during the last century of Spanish domination, alongside literary accounts produced from and about this region. Chapter 1 surveys seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantilist treatises dealing with the morality of commerce and its agents within the Spanish imperial project. This literature praised commerce beyond its economic role as a source of communication between Europe and the New World, and as a carrier of civilized values across society. It also created a discourse of virtue and utility around the figure of the merchant that informed accounts of eighteenth-century Tucuman society. Merchants active in this peripheral but pivotal area of the colonial economy reflected in writing on their position within the Spanish monarchy, resulting in a rich textual production. Chapter 2 examines the travel narrative, "El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes" (Lima, 1775) by Carrio de la Vandera, which dedicates several pages to Tucuman, where most of his informants were itinerant merchants of the inner colonial markets. Carrio outlines the contours of a mercantile subject with a utilitarian mindset that makes him a desired agent for an enlightened reform of the viceroyalty. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with "Fracasos de la fortuna" by Miguel de Learte (1770-1788), an autobiography meant to restore the author's reputation after falling in disgrace with the Spanish administration. Learte codifies his experience through his insertion in colonial markets. He suggests he is an honorable individual by defining himself as an agent of the colonial trade. These texts convey imaginaries and discourses of the world of commerce through which Tucuman's traders inscrib (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lisa Voigt (Advisor); Fernando Unzueta (Advisor); Alcira Dueñas (Committee Member) Subjects: Latin American History; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Literature; Romance Literature

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2017, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Studies of eighteenth-century British novels are typically centered on the alleged “rise” of the novel; that is, the formation of the novel as a genre distinguished from the epics, dramas, romances, and satires of past centuries. These new novels betray the critical trajectory of masculinity throughout the politically turbulent long British eighteenth century (1688-1815). While critics have studied individual constructions of masculinity within particular novels, or masculinity presented by a single author's corpus, this paper tracks the various constructions of masculinity and demonstrates the relationship between masculinity and political change. The novel's century-long “rise” presents the reflection of the English male society's struggle to redefine itself in the face of the economic change, social empowerment, and political turbulence that resulted from the Glorious Revolution (1688-89). The novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen reflect the direct relationship between the English political environment and turbulent trajectory and changing notions of masculinity. Defoe's Whig masculinity favors economic gain and imperial expansion and becomes apparent in Robinson Crusoe (1719). In responding to Richardson's portrayal of the gentry's abusive masculinity in Pamela (1740), Fielding presents what I term “heroic” masculinity in Joseph Andrews (1742). Sterne's 1759 critique of gentry men shows the complete lack of any traditional masculinity in what has become a totally effeminized, and thus ineffectual, asymmetric society. Finally, the anti-Jacobin, Tory Jane Austen brings a restoration of masculinity that results from a renewed interdependency of the sexes. In the neat conclusions of Austen's novels, women submit to male leadership but excel in supportive and managerial positions; men need to marry women and protect the lower ranks. This mutually rewarding synthesis reinstates the acceptable portions of tradition (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Rachel Carnell Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Adam Sonstegard Ph.D. (Committee Member); Gary Dyer Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2017, History

Through textual analysis and mapping of 1790s published travel accounts, this project examines how lower class individuals utilized the growing British Empire to expand their societal status and travel opportunities. Modeled on early novels of the mid-eighteenth century such as Robinson Crusoe and Pamela, these supposedly “true” travel accounts showed their protagonists using personal connections, patronage, and employment to overcome adversity and rise socially. Individuals demonstrated mobility through their public image, dress, and speech. Passing for middle class was difficult, although often achievable through education, conduct, and finances. A publicly available interactive map in ArcGIS Online was created. It shows the routes of travel, characteristics of the travelers' social status, and quotations from the primary sources, allowing them to be compared. The interactive map was built from the travel accounts descriptions of their travels, social status, financial status, and employment through manual data entry. The map is designed to be accessible and appealing to a broad public, enlarging the audience beyond specialists in digital humanities.

Committee: Renee Baernstein Dr. (Advisor); Lindsay Schakenbach Regele Dr, (Committee Member); Robbyn Abbitt Mrs. (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; European History; Geographic Information Science; Geography; History; Literature