title: Mentoring Relationships in the Lives and Literature of Eighteenth-Century Prose Writers
Creators: name: Blunsden, Laura
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2029

description: Mentoring relationships can have profound significance in the life of an individual: an encounter with a truly inspirational mentor can alter the trajectory of the personal, as well as the professional, life of their protégé. Mentorship’s potential for effecting transformation lies in its emotional power: unlike other, more formal kinds of pedagogic relationships, mentoring is ideally reciprocal, conducted voluntarily, and founded in mutual care. This creates a relational space in which not just intellectual, but also interpersonal, psychological, and spiritual growth can be nurtured, and identity consolidated.
The word ‘mentor’, meaning ‘a person who acts as guide and adviser to another person’, was popularized during the eighteenth century, a period which was obsessively preoccupied with identity formation, evident in the publication of a wide variety of literature which shared a concern with education. It originates in François Fénelon’s didactic novel, Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse (1699), as the name of Telemachus’s wise and trusted counsellor. Fénelon’s characterization of Mentor as a benevolent, paternal figure struck a particularly resonant chord with Enlightenment sensibilities: the novel was widely read, translated and adapted numerous times, and inspired authors to take up the concept of mentorship in their own work. As different literary forms, genres, and conventions were used to narrate, dramatize, or even enact the mentoring relationship, it acquired the associations we are familiar with in modern usage. 
This thesis explores the process by which the concept of mentorship evolved during the eighteenth century, by considering how authors made use of it in their literature, often drawing upon personal experiences of relationships in their own lives. I use evidence from correspondence, journal entries, and biographical accounts to illuminate the ways that mentorships between authors informed their depictions of mentors and protégés in their works, and take insight from the psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic traditions in my approach. I also make use of traditional historicist scholarship, book history, and literary criticism to suggest how eighteenth-century culture and society shaped and was shaped by the concept of mentorship. 
In my examination of the significance of genre and form, my thesis considers: didactic literature, and the extent to which books are able to ‘mentor’ readers (Chapter One); letters and autobiography aimed at social reform, through mentorship of the community (Chapter Two); romance novels, and their characterization of the ‘mentor-lover’ trope (Chapter Three); and Gothic novels, and their depiction of dysfunctional and abusive mentoring relationships (Chapter Four). I conclude that the evolution of literary forms during the course of the eighteenth century is paralleled by the mentoring process itself, and culminates in the development of the Bildungsroman, a genre characterized by the independence of the 
protagonist.