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Character under the influence in eighteenth-century Britain
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Allred, Nicholas A.. Character under the influence in eighteenth-century Britain. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-gt0a-1c11

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TitleCharacter under the influence in eighteenth-century Britain
NameAllred, Nicholas A. (author); Festa, Lynn (chair); McKeon, Michael (member); Zitin, Abigail (member); Silver, Sean (member); Mack, Ruth (member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2022
Other Date2022-05 (degree)
SubjectEnglish literature, Literature, Addiction, Alcohol, Character, Drinking, Eighteenth-century Britain, Fiction
Extent203 pages
DescriptionI argue that alcohol, as a paradigmatic mind-altering substance, becomes a test case for the eighteenth-century development of fictional character because of the challenge that it poses to Enlightenment models of personhood. In this period, thinkers like John Locke had begun to explicitly define a person in philosophical, economic, and legal terms through continuous consciousness, possession of one’s body and its labor, and a will that could be held liable for transgressions. Drunkenness could disrupt all three of these criteria: blacking out memory, taking control of the body, and influencing the will to the point that it was no longer clearly the drinker’s own. From the comparisons of drinkers to animals in seventeenth-century sermons and satires to Henry Fielding’s mock-hydraulic accounts of intoxicated minds at work, writers of this period wrestled with how to describe people whose behavior seemed determined by a chemical influence rather than a rational will. These descriptions of drinkers thus wind up highlighting the differences between fictional character and personhood as means of conceiving identity: instead of autonomy and continuous consciousness, the discourse of character defines a person through an inner nature that can change over time, as a repeated behavior becomes a characteristic habit.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-gt0a-1c11
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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