This dissertation analyzes the unlicensed mixtures of tragedy and comedy that appeared in the playhouses, periodicals, and novels of the eighteenth century. Scholars have argued that in the Restoration's coterie theaters, the tragicomic dialectic functioned as a heuristic device for debates about political theory. "Mongrel forms" extends this premise, contending that by the turn into the eighteenth century, the tidiness of bipartite tragicomedy had been replaced by powerful ideas about generic contagion and corruption. For an increasingly bourgeois audience, tragicomic monsters and mongrels, widely derided by literary and dramatic critics, became associated less with debates about kingship and more closely aligned with a discourse on the perils and pleasures of different kinds of social mixing. As dramatic genres were mediated by live, feeling bodies, the "mongrelization" of tragedy and comedy created sites of contact in which social categories, such as race, class, gender and sexuality, could be contested or confirmed. The social re-organization intimated by mixed genres could be attacked as aesthetically monstrous. The blended form was also deployed to make visible identities and experiences not otherwise legible.

The five chapters of the dissertation include a number of case studies in which mongrelizing tragedy and comedy creates a vital space in which players, writers, spectators, and critics imagine possibilities of change to aspects of English civil society. The first chapter begins with neoclassical critic Thomas Rymer's infamous 1693 treatise on Othello's comic flaws, an essay in which a critique of a corrupted tragedy becomes inseparable from fears about interracial desire. Colley Cibber's critically neglected writing for the tragic stage comprises the dissertation's second chapter. The third chapter assesses Nahum Tate's notorious adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear in light of the changing sexual politics of the London stage. The fourth chapter analyzes the tragicomic structure of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), a novel in which generic friction signals the obstacles faced both by Lennox's titular heroine and professional female authors at midcentury. The dissertation closes with a study of Sir Joshua Reynolds' Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy (1761), an allegorical canvas that assuages contemporary worries about actors' sexuality and rank.

From the earliest days of the novel, people have been threatening to kick interpolated tales out of it. Cervantes, Henry Fielding, and Walter Scott vilified interpolated tales as “foreign to the purpose,” “extravagant,” and “unnecessary,” yet their novels brim with such “idle stories.” Though interpolated tales are everywhere in eighteenth-century English novels, their function can be hard to hold in critical focus; as a concept, they elude us, and remain only loosely defined as “tales within a tale” or “twice-told tales.” While scholars have seized on these tales as a “site for critical performance” yielding scores of publications, this study is the first full-length work on the topic. “Idle Stories” explores the cultural value assigned to interpolated tales in a transatlantic range of novels by Sarah and Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, William Earle, Jr., and the ever-present “Anonymous.”

So often, interpolated tales are negatively or positively framed: they distract and mar or delight and beautify. I begin from the recognition that their bifurcated reception—their perseverating place in or out of the novel as a genre—constitutes a defining feature of the device. By operating as parts within the whole and as whole narratives in their own right, interpolated tales occur both in and potentially outside of the novels that contain them. Their partial assimilation makes for an awkward fit. However, it also allows these tales to mediate alternative perspectives without assimilating them fully into the primary narrative and its point of view. Set apart by an ironizable edge, interpolated tales are uniquely positioned to advance critiques of all kinds, whether of the primary narrative or of traditional ways of conceptualizing subject categories like gender, race, class, and the individual self. Thus, interpolated tales play a crucial role in the construction of subjectivity and difference as well as in the emergence of the novel.

Furbish’d Remnants argues that eighteenth-century theatrical adaptations set in the Orient destabilize categories of difference, introducing Oriental characters as subjects of sympathy while at the same time defamiliarizing the people and space of London. Applying contemporary theories of emotion, I contend that in eighteenth-century theater, the actor and the character become distinct subjects for the affective transfer of sympathy, increasing the emotional potential of performance beyond the narrative onstage. Adaptation as a form heightens this alienation effect, by drawing attention to narrative’s properties as an artistic construction.

A paradox at the heart of eighteenth-century theater is that while the term “adaptation” did not have a specific literary or theatrical definition until near the end of the period, in practice adaptations and translations proliferated on the English stage. Anticipating Linda Hutcheon’s postmodernist theory of adaptation, eighteenth-century playwrights and performers conceptualized adaptation as both process and product. Adaptation created a narrative mode that emphasized the process and labor of performance for audiences in order to create a higher level of engagement with audiences. Bringing together theories of emotion by philosophers such as Adam Smith and David Hume, and modern performance studies scholarship, I demonstrate how competing discourses of sympathy produced performance practices that linked stronger emotional response with theatrical artifice.

One of the major changes in English stage adaptations, I contend, is a new emphasis on strong emotion and a new set of strategies for rendering feeling onstage. The Restoration tragedy’s emphasis on pathos significantly preceded the cult of sensibility expressed in the sentimental novel, as shown by Elkanah Settle’s transformation of the character Roxolana from virago to tragic heroine in his stage adaptation of Madeleine de Scud�ry’s novel Ibrahim. Reading the English translations of Voltaire’s Oriental tragedies, I illustrate how the metatheatrical distance created by and eighteenth-century stage practices and Orientalist settings increases the opportunity for sympathetic exchange, by offering both the character and the performer as recipients simultaneously. This expansive vision of emotional sharing enlivens tragedy, but it also opens up the more dangerous possibilities of an uncontrollable contagion of feeling at a historical moment when contact with strangers increases. The exotic settings in adaptations of the Arabian Nights’ frame tale of Scheherazade paradoxically domesticate these stories of marital cruelty, unfamiliar aesthetics on top all-too-recognizable sexual violence. At other moments in the period though, as in John O’Keeffe’s adaptation of “The Little Hunch-Back,” those blurred boundaries between individuals and nations enable cross-cultural sympathetic identification along with their exoticism. In adaptations portraying the Orient, these settings provide a reflexive space for eighteenth-century English texts to explore questions of genre, nation, and feeling as British imperial power expanded but before European hegemony was a foregone conclusion.

The middling sort was often thought to be immune or ill-suited to tragedy, its modest, commercial way of life ensuring, in the words of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), that those in the middle station went "silently and smoothly thro' the World." This project assembles an archive of eighteenth-century text and performance that contradicts this optimism. In contrast to the familiar critical narrative of tragedy's demise or stagnation in the eighteenth century, Modernity and Affliction argues that a body of work depicting the afflictions of the middling sort was vital to a series of cultural debates concerned with imagining modes of ordinary suffering and collective grief. Whereas heroic and neoclassical tragedy had rarified and idealized the afflicted subject, bourgeois tragedies probed the relation between existential misfortune and the emerging values that would define the everyday experience of the middle rank in Britain--among them domesticity, privacy, capitalism, and Protestantism. Far from triumphalist or complacent in its ideology, the very emergence of the genre suggests that the Crusoevian "rise of the middle class" was met with ambivalence, haunted by the possibility of that newfound value's loss and anxious about suffering's lurid portrayal in various experimental forms of early realism. The dissertation ranges across a body of works that includes George Lillo's pioneering domestic dramas, The London Merchant (1731) and Fatal Curiosity (1736), Samuel Richardson's landmark novel, Clarissa (1748), Edward Moore's prose tragedy, The Gamester (1753), Sarah Fielding's sentimental novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Laurence Sterne's ironic exploration of bourgeois mourning in A Sentimental Journey (1768), and several others largely absent from our critical histories, redefining bourgeois tragedy in order to better account for its energetic movement between page and stage, as well as the changing aesthetic conventions that governed the archive's production and reception in the period. Modernity and Affliction thus ultimately historicizes modes of bourgeois affect through which suffering was embodied, represented, and consumed in the period, tracing a process whereby the narrowly defined poetics of tragedy gave way to a broader, melancholic sense of the tragic as a condition of all modern life.

A Self-Reflexive Journey examines real-life, published accounts of popular

eighteenth-century travelers as a novel form of creative autobiography in which lived experience is translated as narrative experiment. As a subset of life-writing, the travelogue provides the occasion for authors to self-fashion their identities as traveling subjects and attempt to reconcile their personal and national identities with constant exposure to foreign customs and modes of thought. I argue that figurative and literal landscapes in eighteenth-century travel accounts function as a crucial site for the mediation of narrative identity, enabling the internal contestations of the evolving self to be enacted upon a global stage.

The introduction elaborates upon the critical approach of the dissertation and

discusses how Joseph Addison’s meditation on Virgilian poetical “landskips” in Remarks on Italy (1705) anticipates his eponymous persona in The Spectator (1711-1712) by reconciling the literary past with the literal present. Chapter two examines the letters Lady Mary Wortley Montagu composed during her eighteenth-month sojourn to Turkey beginning in 1716, posthumously published as Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), and her correspondence relating to her residence in Italy from 1739 to 1762. I interrogate how Montagu’s depiction of Turkey as the Elysian Fields in 1717, and her recapitulation of this metaphor to describe her departure for Italy twenty-two years later, serves as a paradigm for leaving behind her former English life and identity. In the third chapter I analyze James Boswell’s use of the geographical feature of the isthmus to stand in for his intermediary identity as a post-Union Scot in An Account of Corsica (1768) and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). The dissertation concludes by exploring Mary Wollstonecraft’s conflation of embosomed arboreal landscapes and the female breast in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) to politicize her identity as a mother and travel writer within the Radical context of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

This dissertation traces an alternative history of an understudied and often-maligned eighteenth-century genre: speech. Conventional narratives of the eighteenth century have tended to emphasize the increasing dominance of print, but my project recovers an active interest and confidence in spoken language.

Despite a perception in the period that speech was transient, mutable, and vulnerable to corruption, I show that, paradoxically, eighteenth-century authors consistently turn to speech—both as a formal device and a conceptual trope—in order to legitimize their writing. Biographer and compulsive journal-writer James Boswell pursues self-knowledge through transcribed conversation; letter-writing lovers (Swift and Stella, Sterne and Eliza, Thrale Piozzi and Conway) establish intimacy through the trope of the “talking” letter; and female grammarians and lexicographers assert linguistic authority through their mastery of spoken language. These examples demonstrate that questions about the value of speech were at the crux of many pivotal eighteenth-century debates, including where to locate the authentic self, how best to standardize the English language, and what kinds of knowledge should matter or “count.” Moreover, these examples point to the role of speech in shaping four quintessential genres of the Enlightenment: the journal, the biography, the letter, and the dictionary or grammar. In looking at how spoken language influences writing, my work makes clear that the eighteenth-century debate about speech sets up a false dichotomy between these two categories; in fact, speech and writing are far more intimately connected than modern critics have allowed.

This dissertation argues that eighteenth-century British authors often employed atheism to explore both the limits of modern selfhood and the limits of literary representation. Authors like Jonathan Swift, Sarah Fielding, Phebe Gibbes, and William Cowper imagined godless worlds dominated by atheists and atheistic tenets to interrogate Lockean and later Scottish Enlightenment understandings of the self. These authors cast the atheist as the fundamental incarnation of a completely autonomous self, and they each raised the issue of that self's ability (or, more accurately, inability) to integrate successfully into a wider community defined by developing notions of civility, sociability, and fellow feeling. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this atheistic self was found wanting. For the authors discussed throughout “Unbelief,” a truly sociable self was a believing self. And, because atheism barred one from sociability, theists from all corners of Britain's empire were entitled to participate, if in varying degrees, in the believing world these authors promoted. How authors went about this was counterintuitive. Instead of directly addressing atheistic arguments in the manner of sermons and apologetic tracts, literary works instantiated a speculative genre that takes atheism's premises for granted, depicting worlds in which God is absent and atheists rule the roost. Hence, the narrator of Swift's An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708) begins by informing us that two men recently discovered there is no God. Swift notably satirizes these British atheists by juxtaposing them to Turkish Muslims, who to their credit still believe in God. Although Swift most certainly felt little attraction to Islam, it is nonetheless telling that the chasm between real, substantive Christianity and the religions Britain encountered in the East was narrowed for him by the more troubling presence of atheism at home. In response to atheism's perceived spread, this chasm continued to shrink throughout the century. Thus, just as texts like Swift's Argument present speculative fictions meant to forestall the rise of real-world unbelief, so too did religious pluralism arise, at least in part, as a reaction against atheism.

This dissertation suggests we regard critics of empire as belonging to a subcategory of the dominant paradigm of ambivalence I call “ameliorative imperialists,” a term borrowed from the West-Indian slavery debate to describe those Britons who offered sympathetic approaches to colonialism in India, proposing solutions to ameliorate or improve the conditions of British, Indian, and other residents of the subcontinent.

By studying the early Anglo-Indian novel beginning with the first, C.W.’s Memoirs of a Gentleman (1774), and ending with a comparison between Mary Martha Sherwood’s evangelical children’s novels and the first decolonization Anglo-Indian novel, Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary (1811), this dissertation offers a cultural history of some minority ameliorative imperialisms in the Romantic era. This dissertation follows arguments among often conflicting philosophies of empire, including, for example, competing interests that propose to craft India into an “ancient” Eden or a “modern” utopia. It also demonstrates a contest between the causes of early protofeminism and transnational equality, suggesting that many British women writers attempted to differentiate British women from Indian men and women in order to assert their own utility in the empire abroad. Rather than allying with Indians as mutual subjects of British men, British women largely sided with British men in subjugating Indians, though they purported to offer more kindness to their Indian subjects. I conclude with a discussion of ameliorative imperialism’s manifestation in the early nineteenth-century missionary debate, in which evangelists justified the empire in India by claiming that it ultimately helped to save Indian souls.

This dissertation positions itself within the disciplines of English and Comparative Literature, its specific intervention in the areas of translation studies, eighteenth-century fiction in English, colonial culture and pedagogy in nineteenth-century India, Urdu prose fiction, and world literature. I argue that the Oriental tale, a popular form in metropolitan England, produced tropes of despotism, homelessness, and itinerancy around the figure of the Muslim over the course of the eighteenth century that eventually travel from the metropolis to the Oriental space itself. The European idea of what I call an Islamicate Orient, therefore, is premised on the notion of a roving and transient empire best exemplified in a series of works that include Antoine Galland's Arabian Nights' Entertainments (~1707), Frances Sheridan's The History of Nourjahad (1762), and William Beckford's Vathek (1786). These tropes are then replicated and reinforced in the late eighteenth-century scholarly Orientalism around the Indian colony, most noticeably and influentially, in the work of Nathaniel Halhed and William Jones. The Muslim, in texts such as Jones' Discourses (1784-9) presented to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, emerges as alien and invader to the original civilization that the British Orientalists claim to discover in India. The second part of the dissertation shows how a system of colonial pedagogy that begins with the establishment of Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800 becomes a conduit through which the arguments of the metropolitan Oriental tale travel from the European republic of letters into the Oriental space itself. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Fort William curriculum, designed largely for the linguistic instruction of Company officers in India, is disseminated through a colonial nexus of native schools. The critical contradiction produced here lies between the English desire to cultivate a "vernacular" language through which to govern, and the loosely, yet purposefully arranged local language complex the Orientalists encounter in north-India of which Urdu is hardly suited for universal utility. Texts commissioned at the College, including Bāġ-o Bahār (1804), modeled as an Oriental tale in a native Indian language, are mistakenly categorized under the names "Urdu" or "Hindi," causing, in the case of the former, a cleft tradition of prose writing. In the years following the Mutiny of 1857 and the fall of the titular Mughal throne, the association of the idea of a "literature" with native pedagogy becomes increasingly directed towards an infant, but emerging class of Muslim bourgeoisie. Just how deeply tropes of the metropolitan Oriental tale come to inhabit writing in the colonially sponsored vernaculars is best illustrated in Nazir Ahmad's reformist fictions, Mirāt al-`Arūs (1868), Taubat al-Naşūĥ (1872), and Ibn ul Vaqt (1888). In the first two of these novel-like works, bourgeois Muslims struggle to define themselves against both the plebian and the aristocratic, but also seem to mark themselves as essentially displaced in India, their true center located in the abstract notions of an Islamic center. I read the final text as a somber depiction of the inability of the Muslim to thrive in an empire that is not his own. The Oriental tale, then, finds a home in these reformist fictions, but with transformative effects on the way Muslim culture comes to define itself in colonial and independent India.

This dissertation examines how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British novelists—major authors, Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen, and lesser-known writers, Pierce Egan, Charles Jenner, and Alexander Bicknell—challenged Henry Fielding’s mid-eighteenth-century critique of caricature as unrealistic and un-novelistic. In this study, I argue that Sterne, Austen, Egan, and others translated visual tropes of caricature into literary form in order to make their comic writings appear more "realistic." In doing so, these authors not only bridged the character-caricature divide, but a visual-verbal divide as well. As I demonstrate, the desire to connect caricature with character, and the visual with the verbal, grew out of larger ethical and aesthetic concerns regarding the relationship between laughter, sensibility, and novelistic form.

This study begins with Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) and its antagonistic stance towards caricature and the laughter it evokes, a laughter that both Fielding and William Hogarth portray as detrimental to the knowledge of character and sensibility. My second chapter looks at how, increasingly, in the late eighteenth century tears and laughter were integrated into the sentimental experience. Sterne's readers wept sentimental tears for Tristram Shandy's (1759-1767) heartbroken Maria, but they also sought "delicate laughter" in the verbal and visual caricature of Dr. Slop. In the third chapter, I explore how Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818) mocks Sternean sensibility and its problematic idealization of fragile, female bodies by adapting tropes of visual caricature into literary form. The fourth chapter examines Pierce Egan's Life in London (1821), rarely read today, but hugely popular in the 1820s. Egan's protagonists are "men of feeling" who thrive on the thrills of "real life," which in the novel is best exemplified by caricature. The novelist follows in the comic realist tradition of Fielding, but embraces Sternean sensibility and its enthusiasm for caricature. Egan sees caricature and sensibility as interconnected, rather than opposed.