To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: English literature – 19th century.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English literature – 19th century'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'English literature – 19th century.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Heath, Veronica. "Tradition and innovation : Proust and 19th century English literature." Thesis, University of Reading, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.327883.
Full text
2
Neal, Allison Jayne. "(Neo-)Victorian impersonations : 19th century transvestism in contemporary literature and culture." Thesis, University of Hull, 2012. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:7208.
Full text
3
Hanes, Stacie L. "The sense and sensibility of the 19th century fantastic." Thesis, Kent State University, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3618887.
Full textAbstract:
While studies of fantastic literature have often focused on their structural and genre characteristics, less attention has been paid to the manner in which they address social issues and concerns. Drawing on theoretical, taxonomic, and historical approaches, this study argues that 19th-century England represented a key period of transformation during which fantastic literature evolved away from its folkloristic, mythic, and satirical origins and toward the modern genres of science fiction, feminist fantasy, and literary horror.
The thesis examines the subversive and transformative function of the fantastic in nineteenth-century British literature, particularly how the novel Frankenstein (1831), the poem “Goblin Market” (1862), and the novel Dracula (1897) make deliberate uses of the materials of fantastic literature to engage in social and cultural commentary on key issues of their time, and by so doing to mark a significant transformation in the way fantastic materials can be used in narrative.
Frankenstein took the materials of the Gothic and effectively transformed them into science fiction, not only through its exploration of the morality of scientific research, but more crucially through its critique of systems of education and the nature of learning. "Goblin Market " transformed the materials of fairy tales into a morally complex critique of gender relations and the importance of women's agency, which paved the way for an entire tradition of such redactions among later feminist writers. Dracula draws on cruder antecedents of vampire tales and the novel of sensation to create the first modern literary horror novel, while addressing key emerging anxieties of nationalism and personal identity.
Although historical connections are drawn between these three key works, written at different points during the nineteenth century, it does not argue that they constitute a single identifiable movement, but rather that each provided a template for how later writers might adapt fantastic materials to more complex literary, social, and didactic ends, and thus provided a groundwork for the more complex modern uses of the fantastic as a legitimate resource for writers concerned with not only sensation, but significant cultural and social concerns.
4
Roach, Katherine. "Between magic and reason : science in 19th century popular fiction." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2011. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13687/.
Full textAbstract:
The scientist in fiction is much maligned. The mad, bad scientist has framed much of the debate about literary representations of science and with good reason since he is a towering icon of popular culture. Yet, I will propose that an equally preeminent figure provides an alternative model of science in fiction. This is the detective. Links between developing scientific disciplines and the emerging genre of detective fiction have been well described to date. Yet the history of the detective as scientific icon has not been told, particularly not as it engages with the history of the mad scientist. These two paragons of modem culture developed from a groundswell of gothic narrative and imagery that emerged in the late 18th century and continued to entertain and challenge audiences throughout the 19th century, as they still do to this day. My aim is to recover some of the complexity of past public images of science, and the understandings that such icons relate to, as they develop and meander through a variety of 19th century fictions. In a series of time slices I relate these figures, their iconography and narratives, to contemporary debates about science and follow through the elements that each generation retains, remoulds and claims for their own time. Ultimately, I hope to show that an panalysis of the mad scientist alongside other fictional scientific figures provides a far more nuanced picture of potential meanings, than the negative and fearful response that he is often assumed to represent. This is significant because both these icons are current in popular culture today and as such are part and parcel of the present pool of cultural resources that provides tools for thinking about science and society in the 21st century.
5
Bouagada, Habib. "Orientalism in translation: The one thousand and one nights in 18th century France and 19th century England." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/26857.
Full textAbstract:
The objective of this study is to show how translation contributes to the "Orientalist" project and to the past and present knowledge of the Orient as it has been shaped by different disciplines such as anthropology, history and literature. In order to demonstrate this, I have decided to compare the Arabic text Alf Leyla wa Leyla (The One Thousand and One Nights) with the French translation by Antoine Galland (1704-1706) and the English translation by Sir Richard Burton (1885).
According to Edward Said, the Orientalist project or Orientalism is mainly a French and British cultural enterprise that has produced a wide-ranging wealth of knowledge about an Orient that has been represented as an undifferenciated entity with despotism, splendour, cruelty, or even sensuality being its main attributes.
I have chosen these translations because they come from places with a long Orientalist tradition. In 18th century France, the age of the Belles infideles, Galland is a man of the Enlightenment who appears to be a precursor of Orientalism as embodied in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and Votaire's zadig. A century later, Burton's The Arabian Nights, backed by a deep knowledge of Islam, is published. Burton is an official in the service of the British Empire---an empire that takes pride in having the highest number of Muslim subjects.
The evolution of Alf Leyla wa Leyla and its translations is followed by an analysis of the shifts applied to the representations of Oriental elements found in it (social and religious practices). These shifts as well as the annotations that refer to Arabo-Islamic culture are related to Galland and Burton's intellectual development and to the socio-historical context of their respective translations.
6
Pieri, Giuliana. "The influence of English Pre-Raphaelitism on 19th-century Italian art and literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.313182.
Full text
7
Garske, Kevin T. "Society and Suffering: City as Character in 19th Century Realism." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1219.
Full textAbstract:
The aim of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between the city and the individual in literature, thereby acknowledging the anthropomorphic qualities we endow with our cities and in turn, how these qualities consolidate into the trope of the city character. We build this understanding by discussing the social, moral, political, literary, etc. associations of the city, and how these lend themselves to expressions of human energy or reflections of human character. These understandings are then given form through close readings of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
8
Jones, D. Michael. "The Byronic Hero and the Rhetoric of Masculinity in the 19th Century British Novel." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2017. https://www.amzn.com/1476662282/.
Full textAbstract:
From action movies to video games to sports culture, modern masculinity is intrinsically associated with violent competition. This legacy has its roots in the 19th-century Romantic figure of the Byronic hero--the ideal Victorian male: devoted husband, sexual revolutionary and weaponized servant of the state. His silhouette can be traced through the works of authors like Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde. More than a literary genealogy, this history of the Byronic hero and his heirs follows the changes that masculinity has undergone in response to industrial upheaval, the rise of the middle class and the demands of global competition, from the Victorian period through the early 20th century.https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1121/thumbnail.jpg
9
Hines, Chad Allen. "Evolutionary landscapes: adaptation, selection, and mutation in 19th century literary ecologies." Diss., University of Iowa, 2010. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/514.
Full textAbstract:
How can a literary theorist account for unselected texts and narratives, and measure the importance of voices no longer audible to readers today? The following dissertation uses various, and variously successful 19th century literary texts as a point of departure for considering the complex forces affecting the fragment of texts selected over time from within a wider field of anonymous and unwritten narratives.
Bridging literary theory and Darwinian science, "Evolutionary Landscapes" argues that concepts of mutation, replication and selection can provide a framework for thinking about how narratives and genre developed in the 19th century United States. Current attempts to bring biological insights directly into literary study through evolutionary psychology or cognitive Darwinism ignore the complex systems, including cultural and market forces, that might have been used to predict a given text's chances for longer-term survival. The figure I choose to represent these economic, unwritten, and cultural influences on literary texts is the "adaptive landscape" developed by the geneticist Sewall Wright, and recently adapted by the evolutionary theorist Michael Ruse.
The relationships between texts and ecologies fore-grounded in the following chapters, even when dealing with individual authors, necessitates looking at literature from the point of view of the random mutation and subsequent selection of texts in the face of a collectively determined ecology of formal expectations. My approach to the evolution of literature builds on the work of the literary critic Franco Moretti and the philosopher Daniel Dennett, although a turn to U.S. rather than British fiction casts a different light on literary evolution than that described yet by Moretti, and deals more specifically with questions of literary and cultural history than either Dennett's philosophy of memetics or Carroll's socio-biologically inflected Literary Darwinism alone would allow.
The 19th century literary ecology to which the fictions of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Edward Bellamy and Mary Wilkins Freeman were well or poorly adapted can be imagined as a kind of fitness landscape where literary publications are drawn towards the peaks climbed by previous writers, representing conventions or formula that proven successful in the past. A gradualist focus on textual silence and extinction within literary evolution, along with evolutionary and ecological theory, can provide abstract models to make visible the complex ecology of oral, cultural, written, printed and reprinted information that constitutes the "soft tissues" always missing from the archival past.
10
Cattell, Victoria Fayrer. "Irony and alazony in the English Künstlerroman." Thesis, McGill University, 1986. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=65961.
Full text
11
Bending, Lucy. "The representation of bodily pain in late nineteenth-century English culture." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1997. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:751a567b-8260-4dfc-8e9e-904b7e1da20f.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation presents a study of the ways in which concepts of pain were treated across a broad range of late Victorian writing, placing literary texts alongside sermons, medical textbooks and campaigning leaflets, in order to suggest a pattern of representation and evasion to be perceived throughout the different texts assembled. In the first two chapters I establish the cultural and historical background to physical suffering in the late nineteenth century, as the Christian paradigm for suffering (the subject of the first chapter) lost its pre-eminance to that of medicine (Chapter Two). The next two chapters are concerned with the problem of the expressibility of pain. In Chapter Three I argue that despite popular belief, voiced most clearly by Virginia Woolf, that 'there is no language for pain', sufferers find language that is both metaphorical and directly referential to express their bodily suffering. Chapter Four takes up the cultural restrictions placed on the expression of pain, using the acrimonious debate over vivisection that arose at the end of the century. Bringing together the prolific texts of both vivisectionists and antivivisectionists, I display the possibilities and limitations of particular literary forms, arguing, for example, that language appropriate to medical textbooks proved to be too shocking in books with a wider circulation. The final chapter is concerned with the ways in which pain was schematised in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. I explore the basis of belief in pain as a shared, cross-cultural phenomenon and make the case, using the examples of invertebrate neurology, fire-walking and tattooing, that the understanding of pain is sharply affected by class, gender, race and supposed degree of criminality, despite the fact that pain is often invoked as a marker of shared human identity.
12
Stone, Heather Brenda. "Companionable forms : writers, readers, sociability, and the circulation of literature in manuscript and print in the Romantic period." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:63f652fc-c4c2-4c3a-bc5c-893d4b922db1.
Full textAbstract:
Following recent critical work on writers' representations of sociability in Romantic literature, this thesis examines in detail the textual strategies (such as allusion, acts of address, and the use of 'coterie' symbols or references) which writers used to seek to establish a friendly or sympathetic relationship with a particular reader or readers, or to create and define a sense of community identity between readers. The thesis focuses on specific relationships between pairs and groups of writers (who form one another's first readers), and examines 'sociable' genres like letters, manuscript albums, occasional poetry, and periodical essays in a diverse series of author case-studies (Anna Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, John Keats and Leigh Hunt). Such genres, the thesis argues, show how manuscript and print culture could frequently overlap and intersect, meaning that writers confronted the demands of two co-existing audiences - one private and familiar, the other public and unknown - in the same work. Rather than arguing that writers used manuscript culture practices and produced 'coterie' works purely to avoid confronting their anxieties about publishing in the commercial sphere of print culture, the thesis suggests that in producing such 'coterie' works writers engaged with and reflected contemporary philosophical and political concerns about the relationship between the individual and wider communities. In these works, writers engaged with the legacy of eighteenth-century philosophical ideas about the role (and limitations) of the sympathetic imagination in maintaining social communities, and with interpretative theories about the best kind of reader. Furthermore, the thesis argues that reading literary texts in the specific, material context in which they are 'published' to particular readers, either in print, manuscript, or letters, is vital to understanding writer/reader relationships in the Romantic period. This approach reveals how within each publication space, individual texts could be placed (either by their writers, by editors, or by other readers) in meaningful relationships with other texts, absorbing or appropriating them into new interpretative contexts.
13
Dabek, Diana I. "Misinterpreted experiences : the tension between imagination and divine revelation in early 19th century Anglo American Gothic fiction." FIU Digital Commons, 2010. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/2649.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of this study was to analyze the ways in which 19th century Gothic fiction novelists Charles Brockden Brow and James Hogg explore the themes of religious enthusiasm and divine revelation. A close look at these texts reveals a common interest in the tension between the imagination and reality. By analyzing the philosophical and theological roots of these issues it becomes clear that Wieland and Confessions of a Justified Sinner mirror the anxieties of 19th century Anglo American culture. Questions regarding voice and authority, the importance of testimony, and religious seduction are common to both novels. I maintain that these authors comment on the obscure nature of human rationale by presenting readers with narrators that exhibit traits of delusion and spiritual awakening.
14
Brookman, Helen Elizabeth. "From the margins : scholarly women and the translation and editing of medieval English literature in the nineteenth century." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609521.
Full text
15
Emig, Rainer. "The end of modernism in English poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1992. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c02149d4-6f3b-4368-b20e-d8e669514ccf.
Full textAbstract:
'End' as 'goal' and 'limit' is explored in signs, symbols, metaphors, metonymies, and myths in the works of G.M. Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, before the study examines the aesthetics of modernist poetry which - through psychoanalysis, economy, and language philosophy - presents itself as one facet of the 'modernist project'. Modernist poetry struggles with its material, the lacking motivation of signs, the unstable connection of signifier and signified. Already in Hopkins this creates tensions between mimetic endeavour and construction. Appropriation and distancing as compensation strategies prefigure modernism's tendencies of simultaneous expansion and reduction. They produce impasses, evident in attempts to signify the self: absence, dissolution, and submission to myth, recurring limits in modernist poetry. Yeats's poems avoid mimetic tensions by focussing on opaque signifieds of symbols, intertextuality rather than empiricism. Yet the excluded 'outside' in the shape of history questions works and their creator. Again, silence, dissolution, or superhistoricism become refuges, leading to dissolution of symbols into metaphors and metonymies or their sublimation in myth. Eliot's poems seemingly return to realism. Yet their focussing on everyday life disguises the internalisation of reality in psychological landscapes. Difficulties of drawing borderlines between subject and object(s) result: objects become threatening and characters mutilated in reifications, processes expressed in shifts from metaphor to metonymy. Pound's stabilising strategies reify language itself. His personae try to legitimise poems by incorporating histories of others, but produce overcharge and disintegration. Imagism refines modernism's reductive move, but creates monadic closure. Attempts at impersonality and superhistoricism lead to the dominance of the suppressed. Vorticism's construction/destruction dialectic does not tolerate 'works'. Only the ideogrammatic method achieves the shift to signifiers only which enables poems to 'include' reality and history at the cost of blindness towards themselves. Psychoanalysis displays analogies in its holistic concepts and simultaneous internal delineations, its distrust of signs and incomplete and lacking constructs deriving from them. Modernist poetry's struggle with tradition in order to legitimise its existence mirrors the individual's subjection to the 'law of the father'. Individuation is achieved by mutilation; the return to imaginary wholeness preceding it, although Utopian goal, remains impossible; it appears in poems as self-destruction. The economy of modernist poems shows their fight against expenditure, creation of artificial value through symbols, eventually a reductio ad absurdum in poems producing only themselves in reification. Work and subject become borderlines when reality shifts into the text altogether and the signified is eliminated. Language philosophy reproduces the positions of modernist poems towards reality, admitting the separation of language and objects: Nietzsche in disqualifying truth, Wittgenstein uncovering language's impotence. Again the excluded appears as the mystical which Heidegger re-integrates by setting up language as reality's creator and receptacle of Being. The nominalist upside-down turn of his linguistic universe is analogous to modernism's myth of itself. Adorno criticises the closed nature of works as statements and advocates a 'true' modernism in the fragmentation of the work and openness towards heterogeneity. Like Baudrillard, he stresses the riddle of art which permits its orbital position, neither detached from societal conditioning nor completely subjected to it, thus capable of unveiling the relativity of master-narratives. The 'true' modernist poem displays its tensions and 'sacrifices itself in order to remind its reader of the damages of existence.
16
Dredge, Sarah. "Accommodating feminism : Victorian fiction and the nineteenth-century women's movement." Thesis, McGill University, 2000. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36917.
Full textAbstract:
The research field of this thesis is framed by the major political and legal women's movement campaigns from the 1840s to the 1870s: the debates over the Married Women's Property Act; over philanthropy and methods of addressing social ills; the campaign for professional opportunities for women, and the arguments surrounding women's suffrage. I address how these issues are considered and contextualised in major works of Victorian fiction: Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871--2).In works of fiction by women, concepts of social justice were not constrained by layers of legal abstraction and the obligatory political vocabulary of "disinterest." Contemporary fiction by women could thus offer some of the most developed articulations of women's changing expectations. This thesis demonstrates that the Victorian novel provides a distinct synthesis of, and contribution to, arguments grouped under the rubric of the "woman question." The novel offers a perspective on feminist politics in which conflicting social interests and demands can be played out, where ethical questions meet everyday life, and human relations have philosophical weight. Given women's traditional exclusion from the domain of legitimate (authoritative) speech, the novels of Gaskell, the Bronte's, and Eliot, traditionally admired for their portrayal of moral character, play a special role in giving voice to the key political issues of women's rights, entitlements, and interests. Evidence for the political content and efficacy of these novels is drawn from archival sources which have been little used in literary studies (including unpublished materials), as well as contemporary periodicals. Central among these is the English Woman's Journal. Conceived as the mouthpiece of the early women's movement, the journal offers a valuable record of the feminist activity of the period. Though it has not been widely exploited, particularly in literary studies, detailed study of the journal reveals close parallels between the ideological commitments and concerns of the women's movement and novels by mid-Victorian women.
17
Ranum, Benedikte Torkelsdatter. "Typecast Victorians : uses of biblical typology in late nineteenth-century literature." Thesis, University of Stirling, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/2007.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the literary uses of biblical typology in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. It aims to show how late Victorian writers, having opted out of the orthodox Christian beliefs of the age, were still writing from within a cultural discourse shaped by, and based upon, such faith. Covering works as diverse as Sartor Resartus, De Profundis, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, and discussing writers who range from Mary Augusta Ward via Hardy to Strindberg and Dostoevsky, my contention is that these writers not only used the structure, terminology, and imagery of biblical typology to express their religious doubts, but that they 'reclaimed' what was strictly seen as a mode of exegesis and transformed it into a richly suggestive signifying system. Through this reconstructed mode of expression, they could offer to their readers ideas of a new 'religion' or, at least, a possible way out of the despair caused by the ultimate failure of Christian faith. The thesis is presented in three parts, the first of which briefly details the various available definitions of biblical typology itself. Following this, each sub-section of Part One traces a different aspect of late Victorian typology usage. Parts Two and Three deal with what I claim to be the two major strains of the late nineteenth century's secular use of typology - those concerned, respectively, with the 'imitation of' or 'association with' biblical types in their relation to literary characters. The changes made to the traditional biblical typology by late Victorian writers, as examined in this thesis, brought the biblical anti-type closer to the Jungian archetype, just as it brought the Nineteenth Century closer to our twentieth-century view of our religious and textual inheritance.
18
Sunbul, Cicek. "Nineteenth-century Women." Master's thesis, METU, 2011. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12612905/index.pdf.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis proposes to demonstrate the representation of women in the 19th-century fiction through an analysis of the characters in George Eliot&rsquos Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy&rsquo
s The Return of the Native and Tess of the D&rsquo
Urbervilles. The study starts with an outline of the intellectual and industrial transformations shaping women&rsquo
s position in the 19th century in addition to the already existing prejudices about men&rsquo
s and women&rsquo
s roles in the society. The decision of marriage and its consequences are placed earlier in these novels, which helps to lay bare the women&rsquo
s predicaments and the authors&rsquo
treatment of the female characters better. Therefore, because of marriage&rsquo
s centrality to the novels as a theme, the analysis focuses on the female subordination with its educational, vocational and social extensions, the women&rsquo
s expectations from marriage, their disappointments, and their differing responses respectively. Finally, the analogous and different aspects of the attitudes of the two writers are discussed as regards their portrayal of the characters and the endings they create for the women in their novels.
19
Abraham, Adam. "Spurious Victorians : imitation and the nineteenth-century novel." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cbf24b85-cc63-42be-ba84-2f065942c4d8.
Full textAbstract:
In 'A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism', Jerome J. McGann writes, '[A]n author's work possesses autonomy only when it remains an unheard melody'. For the published and successful writer in the nineteenth century, such autonomy was often unattainable. Publications such as The Pickwick Papers inspired an array of opportunistic successors, including stage plays, unauthorized sequels, jest books, song books, and shilling and penny imitations. Despite the proliferation, this strain of writing is rarely studied. This thesis recovers ephemeral, scurrilous texts, often anonymous or pseudonymous, and reads them in the context of their canonical sources. Retrieving bibliographical environments, it demonstrates how plagiaristic, parodic, and willfully unoriginal works impacted on the careers of three novelists: Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and George Eliot. The thesis argues that formal distinctions among modes of Victorian writing - criticism, parody, and plagiarism - often blur. Further, it argues that our understanding of a particular novelist's work must be broadened to include sequels, spinoffs, and imitations: to know a particular author means to know the spurious and oftentimes bad (morally or aesthetically) works that the author inspired. The Spurious Victorians of the title form something of countercanon to the 'major' writers of the period. Thomas Peckett Prest, Rosina Bulwer Lytton, and Joseph Liggins, among many others, informed and influenced the literary history that has in turn denied them admission. William Makepeace Thackeray wrote, 'If only men of genius were to write, Lord help us! how many books would there be?' Of course, Victorian print culture found room for the genius and the subgenius, Boz as well as Bos. 'Spurious Victorians' recovers works that have been lost from view in order to better understand the process by which an individual authorial voice emerged amid an echo chamber of competing, imitative voices.
20
Francis, Diana Pharaoh. "Models to the universe : Victorian hegemony and the construction of feminine identity." Virtual Press, 1999. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1159142.
Full text
21
Maxwell, Catherine. "Looking and perception in nineteenth century poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8f4ff9be-6c07-4060-b777-6a7402d024c7.
Full textAbstract:
The thesis examines a series of nineteenth century poets whose poems are concerned with complex relations of looking and perception, and concentrates on Shelley and the poets he influenced: Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hardy. It focusses on poems dealing with the visual arts and aesthetic modes of perception, and concludes with a study of Walter Pater - an unrecognised follower of Shelley - and his notions of artistic character. An emphasis on the way face and bodily form are scrutinised, in poems concerning painting, sculpture and portraiture, leads to the hypothesis that the way the poet pictures essence or character through corporeal form is correlative to the essence or character of his own poetry. The particular spatial relations and visual representations of the poetry provide an index to specific patterns of reading. At the heart of this examination is a Shelleyan conception of the "unsculptured image", the characterising force and pre-given perspective of a poet's poem, which has a primary shaping effect on his language and representations, and continues to exert itself in the poem's reading. As this "image" is an imaginative rather than purely linguistic force, the analyses of selected poems avoid reduction to considerations of language and rhetoric alone, seeking rather to engage with the question of what constitutes a writer's own essence or particularity and what gives a strong poem its compulsive power. The thesis draws on the work of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot to inform its ideas of poetic space and depth, and to produce an understanding of the poetic text very different from that given by a classical reading; and so alter the way one perceives the poem as literary object. In addition to this, certain nineteenth century and earlier aesthetic writings, and the prose works of the poets themselves, establish the critical basis of the arguments advanced. The thesis also endeavours to follow through the arguments of traditional scholarship in order to provide critique on distinctions or departures made. Chapter I examines Shelley's 'On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery'; Chapter II deals with portraiture in Browning's 'My Last Duchess' and Rossetti's The Portrait'; Chapter III turns to the sculpture of the hermaphrodite in Swinburne's early lyric 'Hermaphroditus'; Chapter IV looks at Thomas Hardy's poems about sketches and shades; Chapter V is an epilogue in which the work of Walter Pater draws together the ideas developed in the rest of the thesis.
22
Sturgeon, Sinéad. "Law & literature in the writings of Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, and James Clarence Mangan." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.711601.
Full text
23
Tumbridge, Mark. "Indenture wreathed in opium : Asian presence in the Caribbean : literary representations of Indo-Caribbean and Sino-Caribbean subjects from the 19th century to the present." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2012. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/51661/.
Full textAbstract:
The 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed large-scale migration from Asia to various parts of the world, including the Caribbean, through the indentured labour system. My research will analyse representations of indentured labour and Asian diasporic presence in Caribbean literature. Firstly, focussing on 19th century journals, diaries, and other texts from the archive, I will analyse how Indian and Chinese subjects are represented. Following this, a similar analysis will address 19th-century literary representations of Asian subjects. Thirdly and in response to these foregoing analyses, this thesis will be concerned with how 20th-century authors renew and rejuvenate representations of indentured labourers and their descendants. The theme that runs through the thesis is death in its literal and symbolic sense. Throughout this thesis, I will pay close attention to the migrant's relation to the voyage, the sea (kala pani), and arrival in the Caribbean, tracing how these become symbolically important. The thesis will be concerned at each stage with tracing migrant transnational experience and identity; as such, the focus for some subjects is their identification with or relation to the creolisation process. Questions of gender and sexuality will also be important categories for analysis, as will religious beliefs, socio-cultural practices, and the use of vernacular forms. The structuring of narrative time and form within each work will be examined with the aim of revealing the ideological underpinning behind the texts and enabling a comparison. Some authors, such as Cristina García, examine Britain's global imperial presence and explore interdependencies and relations among various colonial structures and locations. In this respect, the connection between the indenture system and opium production, distribution, and consumption is analysed with regard to its affect on the representation of both Indian and Chinese subjects as well as the wider implications for Empire. Therefore, the representation of how events and agendas in Asia impact upon migration and the Caribbean experience will figure in my analysis of the subject as a contested site of multiple colonial histories and trans-local affiliations.
24
Pittock, Murray. "Decadence and the English tradition." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6fa01d5c-e900-4ee8-9fb6-a8c3645e0bdd.
Full textAbstract:
The thesis sets out to do two things. It seeks first of all to describe the revival of interest in the Caroline era which defines the nature of an "English Tradition" in the Eighteen Nineties. Secondly, in doing so it seeks to reappraise three significant poets of that era, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Francis Thompson, in terms of their participation in this revival. The first chapter, "Craving Viaticum", deals with the general background of the Eighteen Nineties period. It suggests that the Symbolist movement equates with the Decadent one in a more direct way than has often been allowed, and deals with the era's enthusiasm for nostalgia and past ages as part of its reaction against current society. It also explores the period's allegiance to hero-figures. The second chapter, "The French Connection: Pater's Part", deals with Walter Pater, and evaluates him in terms of his art and criticism, suggesting how these develop from a nostalgic desire to re-create past ages in the image of his present ideals. The more exaggerated claims made by critics of his work for the influence of French writers on him are questioned, and Pater's relation to the "English Tradition" is discussed. In the third chapter, "The French Connection: Other Approaches", the tendentiousness of those critics who attempt to define the entire Decadent era in Britain in terms of French influences is discussed and exposed. The fourth chapter, "New Births of Decadence: The English Tradition and the Seventeenth Century", deals with the relation of the literature of the period to the Caroline era in detail, and the fifth chapter, "Of Academic Interest", is concerned with analysing this relationship through discussion of both contemporary and present-day critics, adducing statistical evidence to prove a resurgence of interest in the writers of the Caroline era in the period 1880-1910. The sixth chapter, "By the Statue of King Charles: The Jacobite Revival" deals with the political and religious aspects of the Caroline revival, and charts the growth of neo-Jacobitism in the Eighteen Nineties and its relation to literary history. The seventh chapter, "Against Nature: Defining Decadence", suggests that the root of Decadent thinking is myth, and that the counterpart of Symbolism in the world of decadent nostalgia was the iconic religious and political culture of the court of King Charles I, a convenient archetype for Decadent myths of ritual, aristocracy, and martyrdom. This discussion closes the first part of the thesis. "Francis Thompson, Faithful Decadent: Catholics and Criticism" is Chapter Eight. It discusses Francis Thompson in relation to his critics, and the manner in which views of his work have been polarised between two main schools of criticism. Chapter Nine, "Faithful in my Fashion", suggests a resolution of this historically polarised critical discussion by assessing Thompson's poetry in close relationship with the work of the seventeenth-century sacred poets. The tenth chapter, "Waif of Romance: The Poetry of Ernest Christopher Dowson", assesses Dowson in relation to Herrick and the Cavalier lyrists, discussing also how he stands as a type in relation to his age. The eleventh chapter, "Lionel Johnson: One of Those Who Fall: His Life and Ideas", is concerned with the crisis in Johnson's thought over the natures of guilt and beauty, and how this is illustrated in his poetry. The twelfth and final chapter, "The Life and Work of Lionel Johnson: A Long Blast Upon the Horn: His Work and Themes", assesses Johnson's nostalgia for the Stuart era in terms of a resolution of his present poetic crisis through past values. His intellectual and intertextual relationships with Ben Jonson and Marvell are also discussed. The thesis closes with an assessment of Johnson's achievement based on his allegiance to the Caroline revival with which the argument throughout has been concerned.
25
Dudley, Shawna L., and University of Lethbridge Faculty of Arts and Science. "A chameleon role : how adoption functions in nineteenth-century British fiction." Thesis, Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Science, 2001, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/130.
Full textAbstract:
In my thesis I look at adopted characters in nine nineteenth-century works: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's Aurora Leigh, George Eliot's Silas Marner, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and both Bleak House and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. From these works we see that the figure of the adopted child both destabilizes and expands the Victorian concept of the family, a concept which the literature of the time was often concerned to reinforce. Since adoption implies the injection of a foreign element into the fabric of family life, it serves to underline the fragility of blood-ties. In this sense, the adopted child functions as a figure of subversion and instability within the heart of the family. But because adoption also implies a looser acceptance of what family means, it may serve to expand the definition of kinship. The tension between these two ideas is dealt with in my thesis. No two novels treat adoption in the same way and the possibilities for adoptive relationships are endless, with potential for good and bad relationships, allegory and realism, expansion and deconstruction of the family.150 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.
26
Prince, John S. "Utopia Victoriana : the utopian novel in late Victorian Britain, 1871-1905." Virtual Press, 2003. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1259302.
Full textAbstract:
This study focuses on three significant issues addressed by utopian literature of the late Victorian period: the class struggle and the resulting debate about capitalism and socialism, the nature and significance of language, and the influence of Darwin's theory of evolution on attitudes toward human existence. The utopian reaction to each of these three issues reflects the increasingly scientific investigation and analysis of specialized fields of knowledge that developed throughout the nineteenth century. Within the context of major scientific advancements in biology, geology, linguistics, and technology, utopian literature of the late-Victorian period, c. 1871-1905, responds primarily to two opposing nineteenth-century attitudes, the complacent optimism of laissez-faire individualism and the resigned pessimism of naturalistic determinism. Literary utopianism of the late nineteenth century is an attempt to resolve the philosophical and epistemological conflict between the impersonal and seemingly unalterable natural laws of science and the indomitable human will. I contend that the utopian novel re-emerges in the last third of the nineteenth century at the intersection of scientific discourse and literary discourse. I further argue that the late Victorian utopia marks a critical transition between the classic utopia the modern utopia.Department of English
27
Payne, Juliana. "The changing role and portrayal of 'the individual' in historical context in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Emma, George Eliot's Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d'Urbervilles." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 1994. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1109.
Full textAbstract:
In an analysis of six novels published in the nineteenth century, the thesis examines the changing role and portrayal of the 'individual' in Victorian fiction. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876), and Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) are analysed in depth. The discussion focuses on how the social and historical context shapes the development of theme, character and plot in the novels, especially focusing on literary conceptions of character as an individualistic being within the wider framework of society. The emphasis is on the characters' engagement with their society, and how the portrayal connects with the social and historical context. The development of the novel as a literary form is examined in the light of literary history. The thesis discusses the relationship between recorded history and the development of literary characters. It analyses how the concept of the individual evolved: how the process enacted itself from traditional identity to one which is slowly revealed and unfolded within the text. It investigates the differences between the ideas of character identity as a given property, or identities which are formed and developed throughout the course of the novel in their historical context. The characters' relationships to their social worlds and its demands, and the process by which a character acquires subjectivity and involves him or herself in the social life of the society is investigated, in the light of the rapidly changing Victorian society. The eighteenth-century social inheritance is established, locating the origins and catalysts of change and how the nineteenth-century society's immediate ancestors fanned, and were fanned by, their social world. The sociological and historical framework of the Victorian world is examined and related to the portrayal and development of individuality. A vital consideration is the pervasiveness and rapidity of social change in the nineteenth century, to an extent previously never experienced by any society. The progression and effects of this change through the century are interpreted through the writers' portrayal of individuals. The tidal movement of ideas between progression and traditionalism, between character and fate will be charted through the century. The thesis questions how much freedom of choice, or the illusion of it, affects the unfolding concept of the individual.
28
MacDonald, Tara. "Men of the moment : emergent masculinities in the Victorian novel." Thesis, McGill University, 2008. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=105365.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation examines the behaviours and values that qualify as male sexual deviance in Victorian novels from the mid-century and 1890s. Male seducers from mid-nineteenth-century fiction have often been described as later versions of the eighteenth-century libertine or rake. This dissertation argues for a critical reorientation of these figures towards thefin-de-siecle. Specifically, I argue that mid-century depictions of vexed masculine behaviour anticipate important patterns in the representation of male sexuality and morality, and that they gesture to later-century portrayals of masculinity embodied in figures like the dandy or New Man. Examining fiction from these two periods, which are conventionally treated as ideologically discrete, reveals a dialogue about male sexuality between mid- and late-century novels. Indeed, although the 1890s was a decade of sexual change, a literary discourse questioning the boundaries of male sexuality was in formation throughout the Victorian period. [...]Cette dissertation examine les attitudes et valeurs considérées comme participant de la deviance sexuelle masculine dans la littérature de l’époque victorienne, de 1850 à 1890. Les personnages de séducteurs présentés par la littérature romanesque du 1ge siècle sont souvent considérés comme ayant leur origine dans les personnages de libertin ou de débauché dépeints par la littérature du 18e siècle. Cette dissertation suggère, cependant, que ce type de personnage a fait l’objet d’une réorientation critique vers la fin de siècle. En particulier, il est suggéré que les représentations, au milieu du siècle, de ces comportements masculins, anticipent d’importants changements dans la représentation de la sexualité et de la moralité masculines, tels qu’incarnés par les personnages du dandy et de l’Homme Nouveau. L’examen des oeuvres littéraires datant des périodes de la mi-siècle et de la fin de siècle, deux périodes habituellement considérées comme étant distinctes, révèle un dialogue entre celles-ci sur le sujet de la sexualité masculine. Ainsi, alors que les années 1890 sont caractérisées par des changements quant à l’approche à la sexualité, un discours littéraire remettant en question les limites de la sexualité masculine existait dès la période victorienne. [...]
29
Pauk, Filgueira Barbara. "Crossing the channel : socio-cultural exchanges in English and French women's writings - 1830-1900." University of Western Australia. School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2009. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2009.0083.
Full textAbstract:
The focus of this study is an investigation of cross-channel exchanges represented in travelogues, historical works, journalism, letters and journals written by English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh on France and by French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart on England. The work is based on the view that narratives about another culture betray preconceptions and beliefs and are never innocent descriptions. Nineteenth-century English descriptions of France, for instance, are not only marked by the stereotype of the gregarious French bon vivant but also by the often tense political relationship and economical concurrence between the two countries. French descriptions of England reflect the consciousness of England's superiority in the domains of economy, industry and colonialism as well as the stereotype of the boring, monosyllabic, haughty, egoistic and often xenophobic Englishman. Given that writings on the other culture are marked by practices and belief systems as well as notions of superiority and inferiority like texts emerging from a colonial context, ideas which have been developed in this field by scholars such as Sara Mills and Reina Lewis have been used as a basis for this investigation. I argue that the women whose texts I analyse strategically employ 'discourses of difference' (to use Sara Mills' term), or alignment and 'othering' in regard to nation, class, and political opinion, in order to gain positions which allow them to challenge contemporary ideologies of femininity. They take advantage of their positions in very different ways, according to their personal, class and economic situations, their agenda, and their gendered position within society which changes significantly during the century. The English women Frances Trollope, Lady Margaret Blessington, George Eliot and Julia Kavanagh construct themselves as part of the tradition of French salonnières from the seventeenth century to the present, while the French women Flora Tristan and Marie Dronsart align themselves with English travel writers, particularly Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Through a careful construction of these foremothers, which often differed from other representations of them, they criticise gender politics in their own country and endeavour to normalise their own activities as intellectuals and writers, in the case of Tristan as a socialist and feminist activist. This strategy is complemented by 'othering' with regard to nation, class and political convictions which confers on the women an authoritative authorial voice and / or allows them to support their argument. They endorse ideologies of gender, nation and class at the same time as they reject some aspects of them. This study reveals new aspects of nineteenth-century discussions of the so-called 'woman question' through a broader approach which encompasses not only the parameters of gender, class and political orientation but also cross-cultural experience.
30
Friedlander, Keith. "Born In a Crowd: Subjecthood Across Authorial Modes In the Nineteenth-Century Writer's Market." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/35054.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation examines representations of authorship and subjecthood in the Romantic period as products of market position and publishing mode. In doing so, it views the traditional concept of Romantic individualism commonly associated with the solitary poet as a strategy developed to help the author navigate a complex writer’s market. Rather than focusing upon individualism as the defining authorial model for this period, however, my project presents it as one example of a diverse range of representational strategies employed by different authors operating from different positions within the market. To this end, this study compares the authorial model of the independent poet with authors engaged in a variety of other modes of publishing, including hack essayists, serialized poets, periodical editors, and celebrity authors.
By examining authors operating across different publishing modes, I demonstrate that each one’s concept of public identity is shaped principally by his or her particular market position, as defined by working relationships with peers, involvement in the particulars of publishing, exchanges with the critical press, and engagement with readers. These authors include William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charles Lamb, and Francis Jeffrey. By juxtaposing their different models of authorship, this study seeks to bridge the longstanding discourse regarding the social isolation of the Romantic poet with more contemporary streams of scholarship into the material realities of the nineteenth-century publishing industry. Drawing upon the social philosophy of the Frankfurt School and Eric Gans’ theory of Generative Anthropology, I examine how different strategies of representation were developed to preserve personal meaning and sustain public attention. By comparing responses to the rise of the writer’s market and the ubiquity of print culture, this dissertation argues that Romantic period authors demonstrate a distinctly modern understanding of public identity as a product of mediation in mass media culture.
31
Götting, Elena Rebekka. "Challenging maleness : the new woman's attempts to reconstruct the binary code." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6612.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the construction of masculinity in novels written by New Women authors between the years 1881-1899. The fin de siècle was a period during which gender roles were renegotiated with fervour by both male and female authors, but it was the so-called New Woman in particular who was trying to transform the Victorian notion of femininity to incorporate the demands of the burgeoning women's movement. This thesis argues that in their fiction, New Women authors often tried to achieve this transformation by creating male characters who were designed to justify and to mitigate the New Woman protagonist's departure from traditional structures of heterosexual relationships. The methodology underlying this thesis is the notion that men and women were perceived as binary opposites during the Victorian period. I refer to this as the binary code of the sexes. This code assumes that men and women naturally possess diametrically opposed character attributes, and also that “masculine” attributes are perforce better than “feminine” ones. In the body of this work, I argue that New Women authors attempted to contest both of these assumptions by creating, on the one hand, traditional male characters whose masculinity is corrupted in crucial and recurring ways, and on the other, impaired male characters who cannot assume the traditional role of man. The comparison of the New Woman protagonist with the corrupt traditional man elevates her feminine attributes, while the impaired man's dependency legitimises her acquisition of what were otherwise considered “masculine” attributes and privileges, thereby contesting the notion that men and women possess sex-specific attributes at all. The second part of my thesis examines contrasting examples, in which this way of characterising masculinity – as traditional or impaired – is questioned and manipulated. It examines the limitations of the New Women authors' specific approach to reconstructing the binary code.
32
Posner, Nina. "Against the Pursuit of 'Life's Delirium': Modern Queer Readings of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" and Fanny Fern's "Ruth Hall"." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2017. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/898.
Full text
33
Barnhill, Gretchen Huey, and University of Lethbridge Faculty of Arts and Science. "Fallen angels : female wrongdoing in Victorian novels." Thesis, Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Science, 2005, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/241.
Full textAbstract:
In the Victorian novel, gender-based social norms dictated appropriate behaviour. Female wrongdoing was not only judged according to the law, but also according to the idealized conception of womanhood. It was this implicit cultural measure, and how far the woman contravened the feminine norms of society, that defined her criminal act rather than the act itself or the injury her act inflicted. When a woman deviated from the Victorian construction of the ideal woman, she was stigmatized and labelled. The fallen woman was viewed as a moral menance, a contagion. Foreign women who committed crimes were judged for their 'lack of Englishness.' Insanity evolved into not only a medical explanation for bizarre behaviour, but also a legal explanation for criminal behaviour. Finally, the habitual woman criminal and the infanticidal mother were seen as unnatural. Regardless of the crime committed, female criminals were ostracized and removed from 'respectable' English society.vii, 163 leaves ; 29 cm.
34
King, Karen A. "Church, chapel and clergy in Margaret Oliphant's Chronicles of Carlingford." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2002. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/736.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the fictional works of Magaret Oliphant’s Chronicles of Carlingford in order to explain her understanding of the significance of Church and Chapel communities and their clergymen within an insular and atypical provincial community in mid-nineteenth century England. By drawing on a variety of examples in the novels and in real life, the thesis argues that Oliphant was a serious commentator on religious matters and controversies and not just a teller of tales. The thesis will address the significance of Oliphant’s engagement with a range of religious and social matters concerning the Church of England with a qualified reference to Nonconformity, given that Oliphant’s depiction of this group was limited to Congregationalists and did not portray other Nonconformist groups of their religious issues
35
Shannon, Josephine E. "From discourse to the couch : the obscured self in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary narrative." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=34533.
Full textAbstract:
Although the letter purports to represent fact, it cannot avoid having a partly or potentially fictive status, turning as it does on the complex interplay between the real and the imagined. Consequently, the main critical approach of this paper is to consider the interactions between conflicting modes of expression in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistolary fiction. The rhetorical and conceptual contrarieties that I examine are broadly characterized by the contradiction between the implied spontaneity of the familiar letter and the inevitable artifice of its form. Working with familiar letters by four writers between the years 1740 and 1825, I specifically address various narrative patterns by which each turns to the act of communication to draw upon the experience of an isolated self. Against a background which explores the main developments in epistolary fiction and a historical progression of the uses and significance of letter-writing, I investigate epistolary texts by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Byron, John Keats, and William Hazlitt. In turning to letters by each author, I explore the literary, theoretical and especially the psychological implications of the tenuous divisions between fact and fiction. In particular, my analysis stresses that letter-writing is an authorial act in which writing about the self can be understood as a literary form of self-portraiture or creative expression.I examine this claim---and the metaphors defining it---in two ways. First, by focusing on selected letters, I foreground each writer's language as an agent of internal conflict. In so doing, I am able to formulate distinctive questions regarding the potential of epistolary narratives to transform emotional or psychological schisms into fictions which become explicitly creative texts. Secondly, I analyze the changing nature of the fictions which emerge through this process. My findings conclude that authors' letters must be read, at least very often, as a constituent part of their literary work and as interpretive models of a shifting dynamic of psychological expression.
36
Reilly, Olivia. "An epicure in sound : Samuel Taylor Coleridge and music." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.719835.
Full text
37
Davids, Courtney Laurey. "From Chawton to Oakland : configuring the nineteenth-century domestic in Catherine Hubback's writing." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/86585.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis engages the ideological ambivalence about the nineteenth-century middle-class domestic that emerged at mid-century by focusing on the non-canonical British and Californian writing of a fairly unknown but prolific author, Catherine Hubback, Jane Austen’s niece. It explores the tension between ideology and practice in Hubback’s writing, and argues that her work simultaneously challenges and endorses the ideal of domesticity. To the extent that it challenges this ideal, Hubback’s fiction, in its representation of domestic practice, negotiates class and gender ideologies that play out in the middle-class home. The thesis also traces how her endorsement of middle-class domesticity became more pronounced in the story and letters she wrote after her emigration to California, taking the form of overt criticism of American femininity and domesticity. Hubback’s concern with women’s position in relation to law and marriage is read within the context of developments in the genre of domestic fiction. My close reading of four novels – The Younger Sister, May and December: A Tale of Wedded Life, The Wife’s Sister; or, The Forbidden Marriage and Malvern; or, The Three Marriages – examines Hubback’s representation of marital and domestic configurations that are consistently viewed in relation to the social and legal position of women. The novels explore alternative options for women’s lives illustrated by their negotiation of the constraints of middle-class womanhood on their own terms; in marriage, or by choosing not to marry. Similarly, my discussion of Victorian masculinity in Hubback’s fiction focuses on the concern with moral and industrious middle-class manhood that establishes middle-class values as the definition of proper Englishness. As part of this discussion, I demonstrate how Hubback’s fiction reworks middle-class masculinity in order to establish a model for marriage that ensures domestic stability and ultimately the order of the English nation. In the final chapter of this thesis, I continue my exploration of Englishness and domestic ideology by reading Hubback’s short story and letters from California. In contrast to the ideological ambivalence registered in the novels, these texts more overtly subscribe to middle-class English values. My reading of Hubback’s work for this thesis thus aims to contribute to an understanding of the complex interrelation between ideology, domestic practice and literature in the nineteenth-century.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis ondersoek die ideologiese ambivalensie aangaande die negentiende eeuse middelklashuishouding wat teen die middel van die eeu te voorskyn getree het deur te fokus op die nie-kanonieke Britse en Kaliforniese skryfwerk van ʼn redelik onbekende,dog produktiewe,skrywer, Catherine Hubback, Jane Austen se niggie. Dit ondersoek die verhouding tussen ideologie en praktyk in Hubback se skryfwerk en voer aan dat haar werk die ideaal van huishoudelikheid gelyktydig uitdaag en goedkeur.In soverre dit hierdie ideal uitdaag, baan Hubback se fiksie, deur middle van die voorstelling van huishoudelike praktyke,ʼn weg deur die klas-en geslagsideologieë wat in die middelklaswoning afspeel.Die tesis ondersoek ook hoe haar ondersteuning van middelklashuishoudelikheid meer prominent geword het in die verhale en briewe wat sy na haar emigrasie na Kalifornieë geskryf het, en wat die vorm aangeneem het van openlike kritiek teenoor Amerikaanse vroulikheid en huishoudelikheid. Hubback se belangstelling in die posisie van vroue ten opsigte van die wet en die huwelik word gesien in die konteks van ontwikkelinge in die genre van huishoudelikefiksie. My bestudering van vier romans – The Younger Sister, May and December: A Tale of Wedded Life, The Wife’s Sister; or, The Forbidden Marriage en Malvern; or, The Three Marriages – ondersoek Hubback se voorstelling van konfigurasies in die huwelik en in die huishouding wat deurgaans beskou word ten opsigte van die sosiale en wetlike posisie van vroue. Die romans ondersoek alternatiewe opsies vir vroue se lewens wat geïllustreer word deur die wyse waarop hulle hul weg baan deur die beperkings wat op hulle geplaas is as vroue van die middelklas; in die huwelik, of deur te verkies om nie te trou nie.My bespreking van Viktoriaanse manlikheid in Hubback se fiksie focus ook op die belangstelling in morele en hardwerkende middelklasmanlikheid wat middelklaswaardes as die definisie van ware Engelsheid bepaal. As deel van hierdie bespreking demonstreer ek hoe Hubback se fiksie middelklasmanlikheid hersien om ʼn model vir die huwelik te skep wat huishoudelike stabiliteit en uiteindelik ook die orde van die Engelse nasie verseker. In die laaste hoofstuk van die tesis sit ek my ondersoek van Engelsheid en die huishoudelike ideologie voort deur Hubback se kortverhaal en briewe van Kalifornieë te lees. In teenstelling met die ideologiese ambivalensie wat in die romans geregistreer word, onderskryf hierdie tekste meer openlik die waardes van die Engelse middelklas. My lees van Hubback se werk vir hierdie tesis poog dus om by te dra tot ʼn begrip van die komplekse onderlinge verhouding tussen ideologie, huishoudelike praktyk en die letterkunde in die negentiende eeu.
38
Lokash, Jennifer Faith. "In sickness and in health : romantic art therapy and the return to nature." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=82920.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis explores the network of relationships among health and healing, the natural environment, and poetry during the Romantic period in Britain, and thus offers a new perspective on the Romantic relation to Nature. The context for this study is both the long and varied history that links literature to ideas of health and disease, and the intersection of the late 18th- and early 19th-century discourses of holistic science and healing that emphasize the synergy between self and world and recognize that our living environments can be either hostile or congenial to body and spirit. For many Romantic poets, illness was a painful reality that became vital to their thoughts about poetry and creativity in general. Through Wordsworth's partnership with Coleridge, a vocabulary of health and disease emerges in relation to poetic production and reception that has influenced critics of the period. It constructs the "natural" as a source of health, and establishes Wordsworth and his poetic celebrations of the therapeutic potential of nature as the often problematic legacy both for Coleridge and for second generation poets like Byron and Shelley. While composing Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto III, Byron tests Wordsworth's notion that immersion in the natural world can be spiritually therapeutic from the point of view of poetic production. The intensity of Byron's bodily existence, however, prevents him from fully experiencing the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of Wordsworthian nature. As his attempts to disengage the spirit from the body by meditating on nature actually have the reverse effect of bringing him more in touch with his physical identity, he must reject Wordsworth's methodology as a possible vehicle for healing. In refiguring Wordsworth's ideas about "taste," Shelley conceives of his poetry as healthy food for thought. His frequently used metaphors of "literature as food" have their source in his attitudes towards intake first exp
39
Moore, Richard. "Christianity and paganism in Victorian fiction." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683121.
Full text
40
Davies, Dominic. "Imperial infrastructure and spatial resistance in colonial literature (1880-1930)." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:369d5ffb-fea5-44ae-9b15-4087a28ead0a.
Full textAbstract:
Between 1880 and 1930, the British Empire's vast infrastructural developments facilitated the incorporation of large parts of the globe into what Immanuel Wallerstein and others have called the capitalist 'world-system'. Colonial literature written throughout this period, in recording this vast expansion, repeatedly cites imperial infrastructures to make sense of the various geographies in which it is set. Physical embodiments of empire proliferate in this writing. Railways and trains, telegraph wires and telegrams, roads and bridges, steamships and shipping lines, canals and other forms of irrigation, cantonments, the colonial bungalow and other kinds of colonial urban architecture - all of these infrastructural lines break up the landscape and give shape to the literature's depiction and production of colonial space. In order to analyse these physical embodiments of empire in colonial literature, this thesis develops a methodological reading practice called infrastructural reading. Rooted in a dualistic, yet connected use of the word 'infrastructure', this reading strategy works as a critical tool for analysing a mutually sustaining relationship embedded within these literary narratives. It focuses on the infrastructures in the text, both physical and symbolic, in order to excavate the infrastructures of the text, be they geographic, social or economic - namely, the material conditions of the world-system that underpinned Britain's imperial expansion. This methodology is applied to a number of colonial authors including H. Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner, William Plomer and John Buchan in South Africa and Flora Annie Steel, E.M. Forster, Edmund Candler and Edward Thompson in India. The results show that the infrastructural networks that circulate through colonial fiction are almost always related to some form of anti-imperial resistance, manifestations that include ideological anxieties, limitations and silences, as well as more direct objections to and acts of violent defiance against imperial control and capitalist accumulation. In so doing, the thesis demonstrates how this literary-cultural terrain and the resistance embedded within it has been shaped by, and has in turn shaped, the infrastructure of the capitalist world-system.
41
Wilsey, Shannon K. "Interpretations of Medievalism in the 19th Century: Keats, Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2010. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/20.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis describes how different 19th century poets and artists depicted elements of the medieval in their artwork as a means to contradict the rapid progress and metropolitan build-up of the Industrial Revolution. The poets discussed are John Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson; the painters include William Holman Hunt and John William Waterhouse. Examples of the poems and corresponding Pre-Raphaelite depictions include The Eve of Saint Agnes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci and The Lady of Shalott.
42
Mighall, Robert. "The brigand in the laboratory : a study of the discursive exchange between Gothic fiction and nineteenth-century medico-legal science." Thesis, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.683119.
Full text
43
Walker, Gore Clare Helen. "Plotting disability : physical difference, characterisation, and the form of the novel, 1837-1907." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709332.
Full text
44
Jackson, Lisa Hartsell. "Wandering Women: Sexual and Social Stigma in the Mid-Victorian Novel." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2572/.
Full textAbstract:
The changing role of women was arguably the most fundamental area of concern and crisis in the Victorian era. Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the evolving role of women, particularly in regard to the development of the New Woman. I propose that there is an intermediary character type that exists between Coventry Patmore's "angel of the house" and the New Woman of the fin de siecle. I call this character the Wandering Woman. This new archetypal character adheres to the following list of characteristics: she is a literal or figurative orphan, is genteelly poor or of the working class, is pursued by a rogue who offers financial security in return for sexual favors; this sexual liaison, unsanctified by marriage, causes her to be stigmatized in the eyes of society; and her stigmatization results in expulsion from society and enforced wandering through a literal or figurative wilderness. There are three variations of this archetype: the child-woman as represented by the titular heroine of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Little Nell of Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop; the sexual deviant as represented by Miss Wade of Dickens' Little Dorrit; and the fallen woman as represented by the titular heroine of Thomas Hardy' Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hetty Sorrel of George Eliot's Adam Bede, and Lady Dedlock of Dickens' Bleak House. Although the Wandering Woman's journey may resemble a variation of the bildungsroman tradition, it is not, because unlike male characters in this genre, women have limited opportunities. Wandering Women always carry a stigma because of their "illicit" sexual relationship, are isolated because of this, and never experience a sense of fun or adventure during their journey. The Wandering Woman suffers permanent damage to her reputation, as well as to her emotional welfare, because she has been unable to conform to archaic, unrealistic modes of behavior. Her story is not, then, a type of coming of age story, but is, rather, the story of the end of an age.
45
Louw, Denise Elizabeth Laurence. "A literary study of paranormal experience in Tennyson's poetry." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002292.
Full textAbstract:
My thesis is that many of Tennyson's apparently paranormal experiences are explicable in terms of temporal lobe epilepsy; and that a study of the occurrence, in the work of art, of phenomena associated with these experiences, may be useful in elucidating the workings of the aesthetic imagination. A body of knowledge relevant to paranormal experience in Tennyson's life and work, assembled from both literary and biographical sources, is applied to a Subjective Paranormal Experience Questionnaire, compiled by Professor V.M. Neppe, in order to establish the range of the poet's apparently "psychic" experiences. The information is then analysed in terms of the symptomatology of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), and the problems of differential diagnosis are considered. It is shown, by means of close and comparative analyses of a number of poems, that recurring clusters of images in Tennyson's poetry may have their genesis in TLE. These images are investigated in terms of modern research into altered states of consciousness. They are found to be consistent with a "model" of the three stages of trance experience constructed by Professor A.D. Lewis-Williams to account for shamanistic rock art in the San, Coso and Upper Paleolithic contexts. My study of the relevant phenomena in the work of a nineteenth century English poet would seem to offer cross-cultural verification of the applicability of the model to a range of altered-state contexts. This study goes on to investigate some of the psychological processes which may influence the way in which pathology is manifested in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. But, throughout the investigation, the possible effects of literary precursors and of other art forms are acknowledged. The subjective paranormal phenomena in Tennyson's poems are compared not only with some modern neuropsychiatric cases, but also with those of several nineteenth-century writers who seem to have had similar experiences . These include Dostoevsky and Edward Lear, who are known to have been epileptics, and Edgar Allan Poe. Similarity between some aspects of Tennyson's work and that of various Romantic poets, notably Shelley, is stressed; and it is tentatively suggested that it might be possible to extrapolate from my findings in this study to a more general theory of the "Romantic" imagination.
46
Johnston, Susan 1964. "Calling the question : women and domestic experience in British political fictions, 1787-1869." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=39928.
Full textAbstract:
This work challenges common arguments as to the division of the political from other fictional genres and, in treatments of nineteenth-century fiction and culture, the private from the public sphere. Through an examination of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Gaskell, I uncover a common concern with the preconditions of liberal selfhood which posits the household as the space in which the political rights-bearer, defined by interiority and mental qualities, comes to be. This rights-bearer is not, as has been argued, defined by purely formal and abstract procedural reason, but in terms of a capacity for reason which includes the capacity for emotion. This work therefore shows domestic space to be the foundation of, rather than the occluded counterpart to, the liberal polity, and argues that an account of the household, in which the liberal self is disclosed, is likewise at the centre of Victorian political fiction.
47
Bann, Jennifer Patricia. "Spirit writing : the influence of spiritualism on the Victorian ghost story." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/373.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis investigates the connection between the spiritualist movement and the literary ghost story, both of which came to prominence and mass popularity during the second half of the nineteenth century. While existing critical literature has viewed both phenomena as symptomatic of a wider Victorian fascination with the supernatural and the nature and possibility of an afterlife, little attention has been paid to the relationship between the two movements. By examining spiritualist literature alongside the work of both canonical and lesser-known writers, I attempt to address this area. My thesis argues for an understanding of the post-1850 ghost story as a dramatic representation of a new conception of the dead largely created by spiritualism, and reads the appearance, actions, behaviour and narratives of literary ghosts as an ongoing reflection and discussion of this idea.
48
Fan, Yiting. "Capital and the heroine : reconfiguring gender in the Victorian novel." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2011. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1293.
Full text
49
Ramday, Morna B. "Man up : a study of gendered expectations of masculinity at the 'fin de siècle'." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5551.
Full textAbstract:
The main themes of this thesis are masculinities, fluctuations in socially constructed gender roles at the fin de siècle and how a number of cathartic issues influenced these. The strongest of these issues was the New Woman Question which, while demanding developments for women, threatened the stability of Victorian gender norms. This forced both sexes to rethink and renegotiate their positions within society. Women sought options that would free them from the vagaries of the marriage market and looked to move into a more public sphere. Many saw this as a threat to the patriarchal status quo and the debates that ensued were many and vociferous. In response to this, men had to look within and question various modes of masculinity and manliness that they had previously taken for granted and that they now viewed as under threat. The fin de siècle was a time of major gender upheaval which, I propose, is reflected in its literature. I intend to explore the anxieties of both genders by examination of the selected texts which cover pertinent aspects of the similarities and contrasts in the way male and female authors negotiate masculinities in relation to social and gendered spaces. In this way, I hope to investigate the underlying themes which inform the novels. I aim to research reasons for disparity in approaches to gender issues, to highlight the importance of masculinities in relation to gendered positions in fin-de-siècle discourses and to show why relations between the sexes had to evolve.
50
Simmonds, Clive. "Publishing Swinburne : the poet, his publishers and critics." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. http://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/245120.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the publishing history of Algernon Charles Swinburne during his lifetime (1837-1909). The first chapter presents a detailed narrative from his first book in 1860 to the mid 1870s: it includes the scandal of 'Poems and Ballads' in 1866; his subsequent relations with the somewhat dubious John Camden Hotten; and then his search to find another publisher who was to be Andrew Chatto, with whom Swinburne published for the rest of his life. It is followed by a chapter which looks at the tidal wave of criticism generated by Poems and Ballads but which continued long after, and shows how Swinburne responded. The third and central chapter turns to consider the periodical press, important throughout his career not just for reviewing but also as a very significant medium for publishing poetry. Chapter 4 on marketing looks closely at the business of producing and of selling Swinburne’s output. Finally Chapter 5 deals with some aspects of his career after the move to Putney, and shows that while Theodore Watts, his friend and in effect his agent, was making conscious efforts to reshape the poet, some of Swinburne’s interests were moving with the tide of public taste; how this was demonstrated in particular by his volume of Selections and how his poetic oeuvre was finally consolidated in the Collected Edition at the end of his life. The thesis shows that popular interest was mainly on his earlier poetry, and suggests his high contemporary reputation (which was not fully reflected in sales) was maintained by the periodical press.