Date of Award
2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in English
Department
English
First Advisor
Sarah Eron
Abstract
How did eighteenth-century audience members or novel readers come to see beyond the facades of literary characters and narrators? By looking into moments of bodily concealment in the eighteenth-century novel and theater, this dissertation examines how authors and playwrights in this period wrote with subtly and force to make the body as and in many instances more legible to their readers as the words on the page or the dialogues on the stage in attempts to suture the gap that lies between what a writer intends and what a reader grasps in a literary work. It also stresses the body’s role in reading and in doing so it also observes a system of meaning-making separate from the denotations of words that prompts novel readers and theatergoers alike to reference their own body to reveal and confirm meaning. This paper examines William Wycherly’s The Country Wife, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, especially studying the main characters Harry Horner, Yorick, and the titular Joseph Andrews respectively to study the significance of addressing moments in eighteenth-century literature where issues of concealment in Enlightenment literature are foregrounded and ultimately resolved by using the body as a system of meaning-making that supplements written words and speech utterances. This dissertation gestures toward what makes concealment identifiable or known in social environments filled with concealment, and where language often fails to communicate. Rather, in studying automatic bodily responses and with their own embodied and lived experiences in mid, readers and theatergoers counter characters’ attempts to conceal feeling and meaning.
Recommended Citation
Gomes, Nilton X., "FROM PAGE TO STAGE: ENLIGHTENMENT COMMON SENSE & THE SEMIOTICS OF THE BODY, 1660–1820" (2024). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 1711.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/1711
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