| This dissertation investigates the relation of persons and things in the eighteenth-century novel. It argues that the novel is deeply engaged with the propertied culture of eighteenth-century Britain, and that its configuration of persons and things intervenes into a fundamental aspect of eighteenth-century social formation: the construction of national, political, and social community through landed property. To reconstruct the novel's appropriation of a number of cultural practices that intersect the human and the material, I present four case studies, each drawing on law, landscape aesthetics, political theory, and architecture. I focus, in particular, on how the novel figures the modes by which things are possessed and distributed; the norms that determine the nature of rights and legitimacy; and the theories of the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime that shape eighteenth-century estates.; In chapter one, I present a revisionist case for the centrality of description in the possessive worlds of eighteenth-century fiction. In chapter two, I argue that the inventorial poetics of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe disclose the distanciation of human and material spheres as an irresolvable contradiction of early eighteenth-century economic realities. Chapter three contends that the depiction of landed property in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones contains these realities by using a descriptive mode which merges the order of things with the order of men into a pre-modern community. Chapter four demonstrates that Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest presents such continuity between human and material spheres as the repressive manifestation of a male property regime. The transformation of landed property in Walter Scott's Waverley historicizes Radcliffe's critique. Chapter five shows how, in removing property from its communal functions, Scott's descriptive practice figures the modern nation.; My study presents the decline of Britain's propertied culture as a gradual distanciation and idealization of human and material spheres. The eighteenth-century novel participates in this process by moving the person/thing relation from an unresolved contradiction between distanciation and incorporation in Robinson Crusoe to an elaborate mediation in Tom Jones, a tentative distancing in The Romance of the Forest, and a concealed disjunction in Waverley. |
