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theses

This dissertation argues that eighteenth-century picaresque narratives opposed modern notions of individual autonomy and social progress by stressing questions of necessity. The picaresque highlights the kinds of causes - such as bodily need or economic hardship - that overpower individual and collective capacities for self-determination. Whereas eighteenth-century scholarship has long emphasized the affiliation between the rise of the novel and the rise of the autonomous individual, Picaresque Necessity argues that authors such as Daniel Defoe and Tobias Smollett were preoccupied with how states of extreme need threaten an individual's capacity for survival and social advancement. I argue that the open-ended and repetitive nature of the picaresque stems from its emphasis on the interminable demands of the body, and that its episodic narrative defies higher order modes of explanation by lingering on the irreducible power of bodily need. Necessity resists being apprehended in the objective language of social or political theory because its impetus can only be felt by the sufferer, whose testimony is thus often disregarded as irredeemably partial and subjective. By insisting that the immediate power of necessity cannot reliably be represented in language, the picaresque exposes a gap between social theory and individual need that continues to trouble socioeconomic discourse to this day.

ETD_7726

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Nathan Peterson

doi:10.7282/T3B85BFT

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.