Browsing by Subject "eighteenth century"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Looking for comfort: heroines, readers, and Jane Austen's novels(Texas A&M University, 2007-04-25) Himes, Amanda E.Comfort??????with its various connotations of physical ease, wealth, independence, and service??????is an important concept to Jane Austen, who uses comfort in her novels to both affirm and challenge accepted women??????s roles and status in her culture. In the late eighteenth century, new ideas of physical comfort emerged out of luxury along with a growing middle class, to become something both English people and foreigners identified with English culture. The perceived ability of the English to comfort well gave them a reason for national pride during a time of great anxieties about France??????s cultural and military might, and Austen participates in her culture??????s struggle to define itself against France. Austen??????s ??????comfort?????? is the term she frequently associates with women, home, and Englishness in her works. Austen??????s depiction of female protagonists engaged in the work of comforting solaces modern readers, who often long for the comfort, good manners, and leisure presented in the novels. Surveys of two sample groups, 139 members of the Jane Austen Society of North America and 40 members of the online Republic of Pemberley, elicit data confirming how current readers of Austen turn to her works for comfort during times of stress or depression. Although some readers describe using Austen??????s novels as a form of escapism, others view their reading as instructive for dealing with human failings, for gaining perspective on personal difficulties, and for stimulating their intellects. Austen??????s fiction grapples with disturbing possibilities, such as the liminal position of powerless single women at the mercy of the marriage market and fickle family wishes, as much as it provides comforting answers. Comforts (decent housing, love in marriage, social interaction) are such a powerful draw in Austen??????s works because women??????s discomfort is so visible, and for many, so likely. Thus, Austen??????s comfort challenges as much as it reassures her audience.Item The Roosevelt Inlet shipwreck: identification, analysis, and historical context(Texas A&M University, 2008-10-10) McVae, Bridget ChristineShipwrecks have a way of catching the imagination of both professionals and the general public. During the fall of 2004 a shipwreck was discovered in Delaware Bay near Lewes, Delaware. This vessel, believed to be British, was lost during the second half of the eighteenth century. Preliminary examination of the wreck site suggested that it was a merchant ship bound for the colonies. While wrecks dating to this period representing various countries have been found, no British merchant vessels bound for the colonies have been examined archaeologically. This project provided the opportunity to investigate a ship and its cargo in light of the historical events of the period. Analysis of artifacts recovered from the site provided important glimpses of colonial American consumer practices in the period leading up to the American Revolution. In light of the general colonial displeasure over increased Parliamentary restrictions, colonists adjusted their buying habits. Study of the artifact assemblage suggests British merchants were attempting to substitute non-British manufactured goods for some objects. This study also indicated that colonists were perhaps not idealistic in practice when it came to denying themselves consumer goods. Further excavation of this vessel, and the study of other inbound merchantmen, should help confirm the conclusions regarding British policy and its effect on pre-revolutionary consumer practices. Based upon evidence derived from a handful of artifacts, this study tentatively identified the vessel as the ship Severn, lost in 1774 off the coast of Delaware.Item "The shame of our community": authors' views of prostitutes in late eighteenth century England(Texas A&M University, 2004-11-15) Gillard, Shannon ElayneThis thesis attempts to identify authors' attitudes toward late eighteenth century London prostitutes. Through the examination of several selected sources, one can isolate feelings that eighteenth century writers had about prostitution and those who practiced it. In these works, prostitutes were always rendered as of the lower orders, which the authors acknowledged and emphasized in their writings. What is striking is that none of these authors acknowledged the culpability of the male in the client-prostitute relationship. Therefore, in a close examination of eighteenth century authors' views of prostitutes, one can find both classist and sexist attitudes. The incorrect formulation of the situation is ironic, given that most of the writers of such works were attempting to reform English society and devalue the debauchery and lust that prostitution represented to them. The thesis begins by providing historical background of the lives of prostitutes in late eighteenth century England, showing that the prostitutes provided services to men of higher social and economic classes than they were, and were often young and economically disadvantaged. The main textual chapters are divided into three sections: the first examines works directly related to the Magdalen Charity for repentant prostitutes, namely sermons and titles written to govern or establish the charity, and finds that the authors of these works viewed the prostitute as someone who needed to be instructed in the correct ways to live her life. The second analyzes short works written to address what their writers saw as the problem of prostitution, and discovers that although these writers found different reasons for the causes of prostitution, they all agreed that prostitutes debased society and needed to reform so that the nation would not be ruined. The third researches works of fiction and advice literature, and determines that although women in these works were presented as wealthier than actual prostitutes were, they nonetheless were of the lower orders and should protect themselves from clever and seductive men. The conclusion emphasizes the ways that this study provides new insight into the problem of prostitution and how that relates to race and class in modern society.Item Writing the life of the self: constructions of identity in autobiographical discourse by six eighteenth-century American Indians(Texas A&M University, 2004-09-30) Pruett, David AlanThe invasion of the Western Hemisphere by empire-building Europeans brought European forms of rhetoric to the Americas. American Indians who were exposed to European-style education gradually adopted some of the cultural ways of the invaders, including rhetorical forms and operations that led, via literacy in European languages, to autobiographical writing, historical consciousness, and literary self-representation. This dissertation uses rhetorical criticism to analyze autobiographical discourse of six eighteenth-century American Indian writers: Samuel Ashpo, Hezekiah Calvin, David Fowler, Joseph Johnson, Samson Occom, and Tobias Shattock. Their texts are rhetorically interrelated through several circumstances: all of these men were educated in a missionary school; most of them probably learned to read and write in English at the school; they left the school and worked as teachers and Christian missionaries to Indians, sharing similar obstacles and successes in their work; and they are Others on whom their teacher, Eleazar Wheelock, inscribed European culture. The six Indian writers appropriate language and tropes of the encroaching Euro-American culture in order to define themselves in relation to that culture and make their voices heard. They participated in European colonial culture by responding iv to, and co-creating, rhetorical situations. While the Indians' written discourse and the situations that called forth their writing have been examined and discussed through a historical lens, critiques of early American Indian autobiography that make extensive use of rhetorical analysis are rare. Thus this dissertation offers a long-overdue treatment of rhetoric in early American Indian autobiography and opens the way to rhetorical readings of autobiography by considering the early formation of the genre in a cross-cultural context.