Making Status Legible: Self-Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century

dc.contributor.advisorBohls, Elizabethen_US
dc.contributor.authorMorrison, Leslieen_US
dc.date.accessioned2014-09-29T17:49:53Z
dc.date.available2014-09-29T17:49:53Z
dc.date.issued2014-09-29
dc.description.abstractThis project analyzes discourses of social legibility in eighteenth-century self-writing to argue that status-based conceptions of identity continued to influence perceptions of the self in society. Studies of the eighteenth century have been dominated by a "rise of the middle class" narrative that tends to underestimate the resilience and continued relevance of conceptions of rank as an essentialized or innate quality. However, social legibility--the idea that status was encoded on the body through clothing, manners, beauty, grace, and countenance--continue to function, particularly in the self-writing of this period. By examining these epistolary novels, fictional memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, and letters, this project clarifies how people imagined social hierarchy operating at the level of the body. The ways people recognize, enact, theorize, and represent status help us better understand how identity was reconceived between the Restoration in 1600 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/18398
dc.language.isoen_USen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Oregonen_US
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserved.en_US
dc.subjectBritish literatureen_US
dc.subjectEighteenth-centuryen_US
dc.subjectIdentityen_US
dc.subjectStatusen_US
dc.titleMaking Status Legible: Self-Writing in the Long Eighteenth Centuryen_US
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertationen_US
thesis.degree.disciplineDepartment of Englishen_US
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Oregonen_US
thesis.degree.leveldoctoralen_US
thesis.degree.namePh.D.en_US

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