Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Bromwich, David
Abstract
“Character in Conflict” explores the function of the soldier as a literary character in multiple genres of literature across the long eighteenth century. It constructs a series of literary case studies drawn from multiple genres, supplemented at times by soldier memoirs, drill manuals, political pamphlets, and other historical materials, to argue that soldiers make an ideal test case for literary characterization. To that end, this project examines soldier-characters that appear in Theophrastan character books, early eighteenth-century comedy, and the mid eighteenth-century novel. “Character in Conflict” uses these character case studies to explore the transhistorical properties of martial form and situates them within broader currents of thought during this period. Each of the soldier-characters I examine embodies the dialectical oppositions that represent the affordances of martial forms: tensions between typification and singularity, object and subject, form and history. This project ultimately argues that soldier-characters, when deployed by authors interested in generic innovation, become a limit case for character—a form that can demarcate, probe, contest, and expand the boundaries of what a literary character might represent.
Recommended Citation
Keller, Adam C., "Character in Conflict: Soldiers and Eighteenth-Century English Literary Character" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1492.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1492
