Serial Selves:Identity, Genre, and Form in the Eighteenth Century.

eighteenth century;self;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language and Literature

Hartwick, Andromeda L.Faller, Lincoln B. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: eighteenth century;    self;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language and Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/111403/ahartwic_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation studies modes of fashioning textual selfhood in the eighteenth century. It begins with an exploration of how a critical paradigm of modern selfhood functions in current eighteenth-century criticism, and then attempts to build from theories of diaries and periodicals a second category, which I call ;;modes of seriality,” to determine how the features of serial production and publication might interact with or disrupt the expectations engendered by the paradigm of the modern self. The first part addresses two serial life writing texts. In a reading of Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs I demonstrate how she manipulates serial features in the telling of her own life, so that her identity becomes a patchwork, woven together through the words and experiences of others. The chapter on Charlotte Charke’s Narrative examines how the actress negotiates serial features and the conventions of confessional narrative to create an identity that both conforms to and resists the expectations of criminal auto/biography. Reading these serial lives helps me build a framework for understanding how writers of lives engage with serial features.The second part of the dissertation uses that framework to interrogate three texts from genres that are often referenced in eighteenth-century discussions of modern selfhood. First I look at how Daniel Defoe’s use of serial features in Robinson Crusoe call into question the myth of the modern individual’s dependence on the teleology of progress and interiority. The next chapter examines how Benjamin Franklin’s sense of community identification is both reproduced in and reflected by serial features in his Autobiography. The final chapter in this section engages with recent criticism on sentiment and identity to examine how the form of Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph routes selfhood through engagement and exchange with others.The third part of the discussion turns to two periodicals, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator and Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator, to examine how periodical texts that model and participate in collaborative construction interact with features of modern individualism. This dissertation seeks to broaden our understanding of the processes available for constructing a ;;self” in the eighteenth-century.