Academic literature on the topic '1843-1916 – Criticism and interpretation; Thackeray'

This thesis is a study of rebellious child protagonists in Victorian bildungsroman. It discusses five novels ??? Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, What Maisie Knew, Vanity Fair and Kim ??? that feature ???radical child??? protagonists who use indirect methods of narrative control to resist conservative models of character development. It argues that these novels form a subset of subversive English bildungsromane, which threaten the genre???s traditionally liberal values. Theories of narrative desire, reader seduction and discursive manipulation are used to reveal how the radical child in the Victorian bildungsroman takes command of the reader???s sympathy and gains power over the realist text, despite its physical and social powerlessness. Especially important is the presence of a fantasy counterplot, which coexists with, and ultimately undermines, the bildungsroman???s realistic surface narrative of successful socialisation. The counterplot allows radical child protagonists to develop in a non-linear manner that contradicts bourgeois ideals of stable progress. Focusing instead on sites of rupture between the individual and society, subversive bildungsromane resist both the dialectical model of character, which aims to harmoniously unite the protagonist with the realist world, and the dialogic model of interaction, which requires the restriction of personal liberty for the common good. This rebellious child in the Victorian bildungsroman thus represents an assault on the genre???s democratic ideals. Rejecting compromise, the radical child replaces the bildungsroman???s central ethic of interpersonal responsibility with an individualistic ethic of domination. Indeed, the thesis argues that the appeal of such child protagonistslies in their rejection of the obligatory, but anticlimactic, exchange of freedom for security that underpins the realist bildungsroman???s social contract, a rejection attractive to the reader precisely because it is unrealisable in reality. Finally, the thesis compares this radical child with the Gothic monster. While the monster is punished for its subversion, the radical child???s counterplot enables it to enact most of its subversive desires unpunished. The conservative English bildungsroman thus becomes a more effective way of representing asocial energies than the more obviously radical Gothic genre, which openly displays its anti-democratic sentiments.

James's belief that "it is art that makes life" is essential to his own literary technique and to the reading experience within and in relation to his novels. The thesis seeks to posit the notion of reading as a fundamental concern in Henry James's fiction. Drawing largely on the phenomenological and anthropological approaches to the reading process of Wolfgang Iser, this thesis examines the Jamesian text as a performative event involving author, reader and character in creative and interpretative narrational struggles. Iser uses "play" as an integral term to describe the dynamic between author-reader-text which produces a literary work of art. In James's fiction the doubling of the author/reader and reader/character role within the text crucially structures a narrative form which is itself an inquiry into the human use of fiction. The Iserian conception of the act of reading as an engagement with the "gaps" within the play-space of the literary text can elucidate James's structural and thematic use of such sites of indeterminacy to foreground the enlivening necessity of an indeterminate "felt life" within human narrative structures. What Maisie Knew highlights the most important rule in the game -- the necessity for the reader to create meaning from the indeterminate aspects of the text. The shared exercise for author-reader-character is the attempt to access the child's unformulated inner reality to ascertain what Maisie knows. In the section on The Portrait of a Lady Iser's notion of reading as an ideational activity aids an inquiry into the human use of mental fictive picturing to compose reality. The Ambassadors demonstrates the "anthropological" need for the particular mode of consciousness brought about by the literary text when we engage in a world as real as but different to our own. Strether is the reader's ambassador in this world and his interpretative activity mirrors the reader's quest. In The Golden Bowl the bewildering multiplicity of readings made possible by the indeterminate aspects of the literary text instigates a contest for narrative forms in which the chosen fictions of the readers/characters must be actively willed into existence.

This thesis examines the structures guiding and informing reading intrinsic to James's "late" style. It seeks to explore James's analogy between reading as an ethical activity and his own and his characters' acts of storytelling. It looks first at the necessities of reading as they are presented through the character of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, to find that reading for James is itself a form of storytelling. James's concept of "revision," which replaces the concept of "re-writing," unites the activities of reading and storytelling because both activities, to be free, must be guided by the contingencies of experience. James's emphasis on the determinations of experience, which yields changing apprehensions of the same material, at once makes reading a test of the reader's resources in dealing with unexpected and complex situations, and storytelling an act of improvisation if it is to be faithful to the demands of its subject. The second half of the thesis examines Maggie Verver's command of storytelling in The Golden Bowl. It finds that ethical storytellers must have the same faith in their subject matter as ethical readers must have in the texts they engage. Finally, the thesis unites the study of reading with storytelling by examining the ways in which stories are exemplary performances whose the most significant subject is the audience. It is the forms of judgement that a work of art elicits which are essential to establishing alternative conceptions of the good and new modes of valuation in a community.

This study addresses the ideological properties of the two main modal strains in fictional representation of romance and realism in order to provide an antidote to the currently extremely negative view of the representational function of fiction. In the course of the discussion, three received positions in traditional literary criticism are challenged. Firstly, the view of literary form as ideology-free is undermined by demonstrating the ideological properties of the two modes. Secondly, the realism/romance binary opposition regarding the mode of fictional representation is critiqued by both uncovering the misconception of the former's competence for transparent representation and evincing the two modes' ideologically interactive relation. Lastly, the categorization of Henry James as an aesthete is problematized by historicizing and socializing his three texts.

This thesis examines the meanings and uses of the impression in the essays and late novels of Henry James. While James found fault with impressionism in French painting and literature, he repeatedly called the novel an ‘impression of life’, and used the term to figure important moments of perception and action for his protagonists. This thesis offers the first full-length study of the impression on its own terms, rather than through the lens of a wider artistic or philosophical movement, the most obvious example being impressionism. It locates James’s impression within an intertextual history comprising British empiricist philosophy (Locke and Hume), empiricist psychology (William James), British aestheticism (Pater and Wilde), and, looking forwards, twentieth-century theories of the performative (Austin, Derrida, de Man, Butler). It offers a series of close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872-88), his prefaces to the New York edition (1907-09), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). This exploration does not produce any unified definition of the impression in the work of James. It finds, rather, that the impression crystallizes one of James’s main themes, the struggle between art and life, a consequence of the competing empiricist and aesthetic tendencies that the thesis distinguishes within accounts of the impression available to James. The thesis goes on to show that impressions in James may be made as well as received, and so introduces a further distinction, between ‘performative’ and ‘cognitive’ impressions. It argues that what James does with these competing impressions – empiricist and aesthetic, cognitive and performative – is to make them the narrative focus of his late novels and their drama of consciousness.

This thesis is an examination of Henry James and James McNeill Whistler as cultural analysts of modernity. Using the theoretical work of Peter Burger, Jurgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno as a frame, I analyse James's and Whistler's theoretical and artistic responses to modernity and the problematic status of autonomous art and the modernist artist in late nineteenth century industrial capitalism. In so doing, I place both figures in their social and historical context and show how their work not only reflects but itself participates in the complex social and cultural transformations of late nineteenth century society. While Henry James has continued to attract critical attention from many quarters, those who have studied him in the larger context of nineteenth-century avant-garde culture are still relatively few. Of those contextual studies, none has examined James's career and work in the light of parallel developments in avant-garde visual art during this important and complex period. James McNeill Whistler, like Henry James an American expatriate working in late nineteenth century London, has been the subject of many studies describing his formal achievement; however, he has not yet attracted the attention of critics interested in theories of modernist representation, gender and sexuality. Because modernisation was a phenomenon which had an impact on all aspects of late nineteenth century culture, as both James and Whistler themselves acknowledge, my interdisciplinary, contextualist approach to cultural production can illuminate aspects of cultural theory and practice which might remain hidden in analyses contained within disciplinary boundaries. The present thesis is not primarily a work of art-historical scholarship nor is it an in-depth textual analysis of the Jamesian canon; it is an analysis of the ways in which two individuals deal with the conditions of their artistic practice. My thesis is original in its bringing together of two important figures - a writer and a visual artist - whose theory and practice reveals the complexity of early modern art's dialectical relationship with modernity. In so doing, I offer a critical reevaluation of the work of Henry James and James McNeill Whistler in light of its engagement with the discourses of modernity and modernism.