Award Date
5-1-2021
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
First Committee Member
Timothy Erwin
Second Committee Member
Anne Stevens
Third Committee Member
Megan Becker-Leckrone
Fourth Committee Member
Gregory S. Brown
Number of Pages
244
Abstract
This dissertation examines the formal indeterminacies in unfinished novels of the eighteenth-century. My methodology emphasizes the productive conditions that lead to structural and linguistic gaps, including the literal death of the author, the abandonment of the work, the distortions of censorship and translation, and the discursive afterlife of the novel. These narratological considerations provide an opportunity to discuss the relationship between form and content, especially in relation to the radical politics of these enlightenment authors. The novels that I will examine are Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798), Denis Diderot’s Mystification (1768), Friedrich Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer (1787-1789), Laurence Sterne’s A Political Romance (1759), Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer (1794), and three novels by the Marquis de Sade: The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), Justine (1791), and Juliette (1797-1801). One of my primary goals in this dissertation is to lay out new directions in the discussion of these troublesome works. As such, these essays are comparative in nature: I will incorporate discourses from critical theory, art theory, and especially film theory as a means of revealing thematic connections between the eighteenth-century and the modern condition. In this fusion of discourses, I highlight the interrelation between the work as a partially-determined utterance and the work as commodity.
Keywords
Hermeneutics; Indeterminacy; Novel
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities
File Format
File Size
4500 KB
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Rhoades, Andrew Joseph, "The Unfinished Enlightenment Novel: Comparative Studies in Indeterminacy and Democracy" (2021). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 4187.
http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/25374080
Rights
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