|
Dissertation
of the Month: March 2001
Robert
Battistini
"Complexity and the Eighteenth-Century Literary Imagination:
Royall Tyler's Algerine Captive"
Department of English & Comparative Literature, Columbia
University
Royall Tyler,
an erudite Vermont jurist and one of America's first novelists,
stands apart from his late-eighteenth-century peers in his celebration
of diversity in early republican letters. His diversity is not
of the political or sociological variety that later American writers
would represent so successfully, one reason we have so much trouble
understanding it today. Tyler's stance is instead generic and
narratological in scope. In The Algerine Captive he saw
the problems and the story of his America in terms of the narrative
complexity that required generic hybridity. The result gives the
lie to e pluribus unum. Tyler knew that America remained
stubbornly e pluribus plures. Consider, for example, his
quick description of the "Lingua Franca" of the Algerines, a passage
obviously meant for Tyler's America:
[A] language
. . . appearing to be the shreds and clippings of all the tongues,
dead and living, ever spoken since the creation . . . . Every
person assumes a right to introduce words and phrases from his
vernacular tongue, and with some alteration in tongue they are
readily adopted. (II, 8; 55-56)
In this, the
longest fictional work of his career, Tyler insists that his dynamic
vision of language -- "every person assumes a right to introduce
words" -- dictates the nature of literature. To understand
The Algerine Captive we must first accept Tyler's emphasis
on "the shreds and clippings" of many genres and discursive styles,
all couched in a spirit of ready adoption. . . .
Download
Complete Text in PDF Format
View
Figure 1 (taxonomy)
View
Figure 2 (map)
Dissertation
of the Month: February 2001
Simon Dickie
The Mid-century "Ramble" Novels (Chapter 8)
Department of English, Stanford University 2000
Modern scholars
need to be reminded of the sheer quantity and popularity of crude
comic novels in the mid-century print market. Of the list of almost
two hundred "low" novels that Colman attaches to his preface to
Polly Honeycombe (1760), most were productions of the preceding
fifteen years. Pamela, Clarissa and other sentimental
novels were swamped, in the mid-century print market, by a mass
of comic or semi-comic "lives," "histories," "rambles" and "adventures."
The mid-eighteenth-century was, as Francis Coventry put it --
justifying his choice of a dog as the hero of Pompey the Little
-- "a Life-writing Age," when "no Character is thought too inconsiderable
to engage public Notice, or too abandoned to be set up as a Pattern
of Imitation." Even the "lowest and most contemptible Vagrants,
Parish Girls, Chamber-maids, Pick-Pockets, and Highwaymen," Coventry
observed, "find Historians to record their Praises, and Readers
to wonder at their Exploits." As an abstract category, this sheer
mass of texts provides literary historians with evidence of readers'
demands for representations of individual consciousness -- a characteristic
that looks forward to the great realist and modernist novels.
Once one descends to particulars, however, most of these texts
belie this literary-historical generalisation. For while many
spiritual biographies and criminal confessions give detailed representations
of individual consciousness, many more "lives" and "adventures"
are primarily comic, providing only the most rudimentary representations
of individual consciousness, offering little more than aimless
amusement. Their protagonists are often stock comic characters
rather than unique individuals in particular circumstances, and
their stories merely string together a series of familiar comic
situations from the jestbooks and popular comic traditions. In
all of these texts, action and incident predominate decidedly
over character and consciousness. . . .
Download
Complete Text in PDF Format
Dissertation
of the Month: November 2000
Mary Helen McMurran
Translation & the Novel, 1660-1800
Department of Comparative Literature, NYU 1998
My dissertation
is based on the claim that the history of the novel in the eighteenth
century cannot be properly understood within the framework of
a single language or nation. The eighteenth century saw the novel's
consolidation as a genre in Britain and France, but this did not
occur in national isolation. At the same time that the novel supposedly
emerged, French and British novels were being translated in significant
numbers and in both directions for the first time. I'm not arguing
that translations caused the emergence of the novel, but have
discovered that fictional narrative had long been translational.
I understand this translationality as a continual tension between
the novel's national and transnational potential. There are two
parts to this argument. First, translation as a cultural concept
and as a practice was deeply embedded in the novel's history.
This includes both the histories of the genre written in the eighteenth
century, and novels as composed rhetoric. Most novelists, like
other writers in the eighteenth century, were educated to practice
translation; not surprisingly, they frequently imitated foreign
novels, translated them whole, and used bits and pieces of a foreign
novel in their own work. Translation was embedded in the novel's
very writing. Secondly, the field of French and British novel
translations in the eighteenth century -- how much was translated,
by whom, and to what effect -- reveal further issues of translationality
and how they were evolving.
PDF
Download
Dissertation
of the Month: October 2000
John P. N. Austin
The Literary Compilation in Antebellum America: 1820-1850
English Department, Columbia University 2000
Compilations
of fiction constitute an important, if overlooked, element of
the antebellum book trade. The thirty year period between 1820
and 1850 saw the publication and success of Irving's Sketch Book,
the rise and fall of the literary annual (compilations of prose
fiction and poetry intended as Christmas and New Year's gifts),
and a minor explosion in the publication of single author collections
and anthologies. This dissertation explores the appeal compilations
had for publishers, editors, and authors, and it offers, through
a series of case studies, an account of their place in American
literary culture. To study the compilation - perhaps the most
important literary commodity of the antebellum period - is to
study the history of the institutionalization and commercialization
of American literature. In its changing forms, we see American
literary culture in the process of defining itself, and we chart
the shifting relations between art and commerce at a critical
moment of national formation. The first section excerpted below
explores the literary and commercial impulses that converged to
popularize the compilation form and briefly describes the uses
to which the form was put. The final section employs quantitative
evidence drawn from existing bibliographies to survey the market
in literary commodities from 1820 to 1850. My research suggests
that this market is much more diverse than commonly believed and
that during the 1830's and 1840's the compilation competed on
equal terms with the novel.
PDF
Download
|