Novel possibilities: Constructing women's futures through fiction, 1697--1799

In 1697 Daniel Defoe designated his moment in history as the "Projecting Age." My dissertation takes this term literally and examines its implications for understanding the fiction of the subsequent century, especially that produced by women writers. While scholars have often emphasized eighteenth-century writers' attempts to negotiate their relationship to the past, I argue that the novels I examine are equally concerned with constructing and critiquing models of projecting the future. As mothers and educators, women had a primary role in producing the future, but were largely excluded from scientific, legal, and economic institutions of projection. Many women writers (and some men interested in improving female futures) experimented with visions of the future through fiction, working to focus conversations about the future on particular and idiosyncratic cases. I draw from feminist scholarship and theories of the novel's development, and I situate the novels I read within a rich archive of conduct books, palm-reading manuals, natural philosophy, and other genres that project futurity in order to place fictions that narrate women's lives within larger cultural conversations.;My study is framed by two very different moments in the distinctly modern project of projecting futurity: the late seventeenth century, when visions of the future were informed largely by Lockean empiricism and the establishment of the Royal Society, and the 1790s, famously marked by widespread anxiety about Britain's future in the wake of the French Revolution. Each chapter pairs contending projections of the future in order to examine debates about futurity within particular moments: Chapter 1 investigates competing visions of the second sight in The History of the Life and Adventures of Duncan Campbell (1720) and Eliza Haywood's Spy on the Conjurer (1724) and The Dumb Projector (1725); Chapter 2 examines contending projections of the future in Samuel Richardson's Pamela and its official continuation (1741-2); Chapter 3 explores the construction and deconstruction of female utopias in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762) and Mary Hamilton's Munster Village (1778); and Chapter 4 studies the practice of diagnosing the future from the female body in Frances Burney's Camilla (1796) and Hannah More's Strictures on Female Education (1799).