Text

theses

"The Shape of Intimacy" explores the significance of a growing material culture of privacy to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literary history. In recent years, places such as the drawing room and coffee house have come to exemplify emergent norms of domestic and civil sociability. My project shifts our focus to less familiar spaces: the many variations of the closet, the period's quintessential private room, and the carriage, sometimes characterized as the closet's mobile counterpart. Closets and carriages, I argue, are not merely incidental settings in an increasingly quotidian literary landscape; rather, for many British writers of the period, they serve as vehicles for an array of charged and unstable extrafamilial encounters. Tracking the wide range of formal innovations and affective investigations associated with closets and carriages, my dissertation illuminates the double movement of the period's social imagination, which retreats into real and projected intimacies even as it reaches out into ever more expansive, abstract, and anonymous public realms.
The first chapter studies the convention of naming printed collections after closets and cabinets. I argue that publishers invoked these elite, exclusive spaces to affirm the cultural capital of knowledge circulating faster and further than ever before, thereby shoring up an enduring paradigm of reading as voyeurism. Turning from printed closets to courtly ones, Chapter Two considers the slippery navigations of power and pleasure in Anthony Hamilton's Memoirs of Count de Gramont, suggesting that the orientalist flourishes in an intrigue set in a Restoration bathing closet -- an interior Charles II had redesigned in Ottoman fashion -- work to underscore the declining political stakes of homoerotic alliances. Chapter Three centers on Jonathan Swift's poem about the pair of privies he built on his friends' country estate. Composed a few decades before water closets would become the newest site of intra-domestic retreat, "Panegyric on the Dean" links the breakdown of communal values to the excretory solitude that seems a travesty of closet prayer. The final chapter contrasts carriage sociability in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey with earlier satirical scenes of awkwardness between strangers on the road. The vehicle called the Vis-a-vis is Sterne's figure for the possibility of intimate anonymity.

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references.

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.13492

ETD_243

doi:10.7282/T3TX3FR7

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.

application/x-tar

13573120

48a2fccc4b2a30fa0e574bda389ed380145f6690

ETD

other

windows xp

application/x-tar