Date of Award

Spring 5-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

Literary and Cultural Studies

Committee Director

Marc Ouellette

Committee Member

Edward Jacobs

Committee Member

Michael Carhart

Committee Member

E. Derek Taylor

Abstract

The chaotic masquerades that proliferated during the British long eighteenth century punctuated the period’s preoccupation with order and categorization. The identity categories that the masquerade disrupted, the novel reinforced, or perhaps even created. It was in the middle of this period, in the political center of Britain, that Samuel Richardson published his third and final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), a novel which centers England and was also centered by England, a national treasure entangled in literary and cultural history. Tracing the nexus of gender and nationalism in Grandison then becomes important given the novel’s active entanglement in the debates that birthed the modern individual and the “private” sphere. In part because of its historical positioning, Grandison serves as a catalog of the period’s identity debates. The dramatis personae divides characters into “men,” “women,” and “Italians,” but at the same time that the structure attempts to relegate characters to their respective narrative and social spaces, they resist, for the paratext provides framing that the narrative subverts. In the dramatis personae, characters dress for a masquerade; the text, however, rejects these superficial trimmings, stripping the characters, structure, and plot of their masks. The blurring between man and woman, Briton and Italian, realism and romance create crises of category, and so Grandison’s narrative uses disrupted generic modes and changeable character masks to imagine a stronger community not in spite of but due to the permeable boundaries of narrative, nation, gender, and even the human body itself.

Literary conventions speak through the text, and in asserting arbitrary divisions remind us that boundaries in general are masquerades, that even genre itself simply apes order, protecting against the chaos that would unsettle what we believe about identity, community, and creation. The study of Grandison, a literary model for questioning binaries of all kinds, contributes to the field of cultural studies by providing a long scope of the identity debates which entangle the twenty-first century, and by suggesting that it is through the imaginative potential of fiction that we may begin to disentangle ourselves.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/chqd-8172

ISBN

9798379741570

ORCID

0009-0007-5836-9379

Download

Share

COinS