UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
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Item Embodied Performance: War, Trauma, and Disability on the Eighteenth-Century Stage(2021) LeRoy, Tamar Dora; Rosenthal, Laura; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project brings attention to the emotional work performed by plays about war from the Restoration and eighteenth century—how these plays position soldiers and communities in relation to one another and the state and in what ways they contribute to the work of negotiating trauma. War-themed plays of the period obsessively reenact tropes and devices that communicate particular affective scenarios or experiences of wartime. These affective scenarios include the temporality of soldiering and enlistment that locks the recruit in a state of inevitable injury and injuring; the longings for return of someone seemingly lost or displaced and the simultaneous fear of the outcome of this return (or no return); and a sense of rootlessness or displacement that unsettles surety in homeland, homecoming, or nation. The tropes and devices that convey these affective scenarios include devices involving the literal substitution bodies, such as bed tricks and dead tricks; an obsessive repetition of scenarios of recognition of identity, reunion, and the many complications of mistaken identity; and humor, joking, and comic tropes (like the soldier breeches role) that communicate a sense of the corporeal/temporal experience of war through the body. From these devices an experiential bridge is created in the playhouse between home front and warfront that positions the soldier as well as the grieving individual as part of a larger affective community. These figures are not isolated by their potentially extreme experiences of the battlefield, enlistment, waiting, or mourning: through the collective space of the stage, their extreme experiences are shown to be acknowledged by the larger group. From these plays, we see the affective experience of war at home from the community networks touched by military conflict.Item "Je ne vous dirai point, mon très cher fils" Correspondance de Catherine de Charrière de Sévery 1780-1783(2016) Lanz, Anne-Marie; Benharrech, Sarah; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the principles of education imbued in a three year correspondence between an eighteenth century woman and her teenage son from the French speaking region of Vaud, current day Switzerland. Despite her great respect for the literature and ideas of the new pedagogues of the Enlightenment, especially J.J. Rousseau and Mme de Genlis, Catherine de Charrière de Sévery maintained the traditional perspective of education of the Ancien Régime. To explore the concepts of education and instruction through the epistolary practice, this research is based on the corpus of 107 letters that Mme de Sévery wrote to her son Vilhelm between 1780 and 1783. Additional documents - among them Mme de Sévery’s diaries - from the particularly rich archival holdings of this aristocratic family have been used to complement her correspondence. Most previous studies on family correspondence have dealt with mothers to daughters, or fathers to sons, whereas this research is centered on letters between a mother and her son. The location of this family – Lausanne and the Pays de Vaud – provides a particular regional perspective due to two factors: immersion into a region uniformly Protestant, and the dual-influence of Germanic and French cultures. The study analyzes the educational principles that appear throughout Mme de Sévery’s letters by comparison with three literary works of the 18th century: a familiar correspondence, the Lettres du Lord Chesterfield à son fils (1776); the fundamental education treatise by J.J. Rousseau, Émile, ou de l’Éducation (1762); and a pedagogical treatise written by Mme de Genlis as an epistolary novel, Adèle et Théodore, ou lettres sur l’éducation. Using letters as the main tool to guide her son’s upbringing, Mme de Sévery highlights the moral and family values that are most important to her and leads him to find his place in society.Item Private Scandal in the Public Sphere: Sexual Scandal as Early Eighteenth-Century Polemics(2012) Roby, Joanne W.; Rosenthal, Laura J; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Changes in literary strategies and polemical contest in the early eighteenth century legitimized the use of sexual scandal as a means of attack in the mainstream commercial press. Authors embraced scandal to obscure and temper partisan conflicts that motivated animosities, and in doing so they sanctioned inquiry into the private lives of public figures. This strategic use of scandal emerged as a reaction against the political–religious polemics of the English civil war of the mid 1600s. The discourse of scandal developed as an alternative to the discourse of politeness, which similarly evaded explicitly partisan exchanges. Instead of using politeness to cultivate decorous public debate, some authors turned to scandalous (often calumnious) exposés because it allowed them to veil troubling conflicts while still venting animosities. Chapter One examines how early modern sexual libels were transformed after the civil war. I show how in The Rehearsal Transpros’d Andrew Marvell adapted these precedents into his religious polemics; he redirected them against a quasi–public target, the Anglican cleric Samuel Parker, in order to ridicule Parker as an individual. Chapter Two demonstrates how Delarivier Manley perfected this strategy of obfuscation in The New Atalantis. At moments of political crisis throughout the text, Manley’s political narrative pivots towards amatory encounters to distract readers from the crisis at hand. By casting her political tract as a sexual allegory, she legitimized the personalization, privatization and sexualization of political discourse. As Chapter Three illustrates, in the Tatler and Spectator Joseph Addison and Richard Steele repudiated the public’s appetite for scandal, but their very censures reflect that scandalous discourse permeated public debate. Although known for shaping the public sphere, in denouncing scandal, they revealed skepticism of the public’s ability to engage in rational dialogue. Chapter Four shows that Alexander Pope and his literary rivals adapted scandal as a means of satiric attack against each other—that is, against private figures in the public eye—to undermine one another’s cultural standing. I reveal the buried political–religious conflicts that motivated these hostilities, and I demonstrate that Pope refined his use of scandal as a literary tool throughout his career.Item Dans le fleuve de l'oubli: Journal de Catherine de Charrière de Sévery(2008-05-02) Lanz, Anne-Marie; Letzter, Jacqueline; Frisch, Andrea; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The diary, as a first person literary genre, remains difficult to differentiate from its counterparts. The earliest diaries written in French date from the mid-eighteenth century when the concept of expression of the self was just emerging. Six diaries of Catherine de Sévery (1741-1796), an eighteenth century aristocrat living in Lausanne, not yet part of Switzerland, allow the readers to discover this emergence of the self while in the same time get a picture of the society in which she lived. Spread over forty years of her life, these diaries cover a variety of topics including health, political events, customs, and family relationships. Related to Isabelle de Charrière and Benjamin Constant, Catherine de Sévery likewise had close ties with British historian Edward Gibbon and physician Samuel Tissot . Containing numerous references to literary works, these diaries provide a rich source of information on the influence of the Enlightenment in the Pays de Vaud.Item Class by the Glass: The Significance of Imported Wine Consumption in America, 1750-1800(2007-05-03) Thomas, Catherine Stewart; Sies, Mary C; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper analyses the ritual of imported wine consumption in America between 1750 and 1800 and its significance in establishing a wealthy gentleman's power and place within a social hierarchy. My research was conducted by exploring contemporary written and visual records, as well as examining material objects and architectural spaces, specifically pertaining to the Annapolis, Maryland region. Beginning with a study of the varieties of wines consumed and their influence in the politically-charged environment prior to the American Revolution, the paper then explores why and how gentlemen used wine bibbing as an indication of one's identity in a burgeoning society. Quantities of wine-related furniture and decorative objects, in combination with architectural storage spaces, conveyed a life far above that of the average citizen. Finally, this paper examines to what degree historic house museums are interpreting the wine ritual and suggests steps that might be taken to do so more effectively.