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1
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.
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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and efficacy of these novels is drawn from archival sources which have been little used in literary studies (including unpublished materials), as well as contemporary periodicals.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.
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Tam, Ho-leung Adrian, and 譚灝樑. "Realism, death and the novel: policing and doctoring in the nineteenth century." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B41757828.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ingham, Michael Anthony. "Theatre of storytelling : the prose fiction stage adaptation as social allegory in contemporary British drama /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1998. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B20275961.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nash, Andrew. "Kailyard, Scottish literary criticism, and the fiction of J.M. Barrie." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15199.
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This thesis argues that the term Kailyard is not a body of literature or cultural discourse, but a critical concept which has helped to construct controlling parameters for the discussion of literature and culture in Scotland. By offering an in-depth reading of the fiction of J.M. Barrie - the writer who is most usually and misleadingly associated with the term - and by tracing the writing career of Ian Maclaren, I argue for the need to reject the term and the critical assumptions it breeds. The introduction maps the various ways Kailyard has been employed in literary and cultural debates and shows how it promotes a critical approach to Scottish culture which focuses on the way individual writers, texts and images represent Scotland. Chapter 1 considers why this critical concern arose by showing how images of national identity and national literary distinctiveness were validated as the meaning of Scotland throughout the nineteenth century. Chapters 2-5 seek to overturn various assumptions bred by the term Kailyard. Chapter 2 discusses the early fiction of J.M. Barrie in the context of late nineteenth-century regionalism, showing how his work does not aim to depict social reality but is deliberately artificial in design. Chapter 3 discusses late Victorian debates over realism in fiction and shows how Barrie and Maclaren appealed to the reading public because of their treatment of established Victorian ideas of sympathy and the sentimental. Chapter 4 discusses Barrie's four longer novels - the works most constrained by the Kailyard term - and chapter 5 reconsiders the relationship between Maclaren's work and debates over popular culture. Chapter 6 analyses the use of the term Kailyard in twentieth-century Scottish cultural criticism. Discussing the criticism of Hugh MacDiarmid, the writing of literary histories and studies of Scottish film, history and politics, I argue for the need to reject the Kailyard term as a critical concept in the discussion of Scottish culture.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Stelle, Ginger. "A swipe at the dragon of the commonplace : a re-evaluation of George MacDonald's fiction." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1974.
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This thesis offers a re-evaluation of the fiction of George MacDonald (1824-1905), both fantasy and non-fantasy. The general trend in MacDonald studies is to focus primarily on his works of fantasy, either ignoring the rest (which includes non-fantasy fiction, sermons, poetry, and criticism) or using them to illuminate the fantasies. The overall critical consensus is that these works, particularly MacDonald’s non-fantasy fiction, possess little inherent value. Though many critics acknowledge similarities between MacDonald’s fantasy fiction and his non-fantasy fiction, MacDonald has been the victim of a critical double standard that treats fantasy and realism as completely irreconcilable, and allows certain features to be acceptable, even desirable, in one form that are completely unacceptable in the other. The thesis begins by looking at MacDonald’s writings about the imagination and about literature, from which a clear theory of literature emerges, one with strong opinions about the function and purpose of literature, as well as about what makes good literature. By re-examining MacDonald’s fiction, its plots, characterization and narration, in the light of his own theories, the reasons underlying the artistic choices made throughout his fiction take on a more deliberate and calculated appearance. Furthermore, by placing MacDonald in his proper context, and looking at the diversity of generic options available to the Victorian writer, the critical double standard underlying much MacDonald scholarship, based on a strict fantasy/realism separation, crumbles. What emerges from this analysis is a different MacDonald—a careful craftsman who consciously and skillfully uses the tools of his trade to produce a unique and specific reading experience.
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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.
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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.
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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/.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Fan, Yiting. "Capital and the heroine : reconfiguring gender in the Victorian novel." HKBU Institutional Repository, 2011. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/1293.
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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.
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Poston, Craig A. (Craig Alan). "The Problematic British Romantic Hero(ine): the Giaour, Mathilda, and Evelina." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278684/.
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Romantic heroes are questers, according to Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye. Whether employing physical strength or relying on the power of the mind, the traditional Romantic hero invokes questing for some sense of self. Chapter 1 considers this hero-type, but is concerned with defining a non-questing British Romantic hero. The Romantic hero's identity is problematic and established through contrasting narrative versions of the hero. This paper's argument lies in the "inconclusiveness" of the Romantic experience perceived in writings throughout the Romantic period. Romantic inconclusiveness can be found not only in the structure and syntax of the works but in the person with whom the reader is meant to identify or sympathize, the hero(ine). Chapter 2 explores Byron's aesthetics of literature equivocation in The Giaour. This tale is a consciously imbricated text, and Byron's letters show a purposeful complication of the poet's authority concerning the origins of this Turkish Tale. The traditional "Byronic hero," a gloomy, guilt-ridden protagonist, is considered in Chapter 3. Byron's contemporary readers and reviewers were quick to pick up on this aspect of his verse tales, finding in the Giaour, Selim, Conrad, and Lara characteristics of Childe Harold. Yet, Byron's Turkish Tales also reveal a very different and more sentimental hero. Byron seems to play off the reader's expectations of the "Byronic hero" with an ambiguous hero whose character reflects the Romantic aesthetic of indeterminacy. Through the accretive structure of The Giaour, Byron creates a hero of competing component characteristics, a focus he also gives to his heroines. Chapters 4 and 5 address works that are traditionally considered eighteenth-century sentimental novels. Mathilda and Evelina, both epistolary works, present their heroines as worldly innocents who are beset by aggressive males. Yet their subtext suggests that these girls aggressively maneuver the men in their lives. Mathilda and Evelina create a tension between the expected and the radical to energize the reader's imagination.
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Bell, Alan Nigel. "The male novelist and the 'woman question' George Meredith's presentation of his Heroines in The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885)." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002245.
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Focusing on four early works, then three from his middle period and three from the 1890s, this dissertation explores Meredith’s role as a novelist in the unfolding of a social and literary paradox, namely, that with the death of George Eliot in 1880, the dominant writers of fiction were male, and this remained the case until the advent of Virginia Woolf, while at the same time the woman’s movement for emancipation in all spheres of life—domestic, commercial, professional and political—was gathering in strength and conviction. None of the late nineteenth-century male novelists—James, Hardy, Moore and Gissing, as well as Meredith—was ideologically committed to the feminist cause; in fact the very term ‘feminist’ did not begin to become current in England until the mid-1890s. But they were all interested in one aspect or another of the ‘Woman Question’, even if James was ambivalent about female emancipation, and Gissing, on the whole, was somewhat hostile. Of all these novelists, it was Meredith whose work, especially in its last two decades, most copiously reveals a profound sympathy for women and their struggles to realize their desires and ambitions, both inside and outside the home, in a patriarchal world. The dissertation therefore concentrates on his presentation of his heroines in their relationships with the men who, in one way or another, dominate them, and with whom they must negotiate, within the social and sexual conventions of the time, a modus vivendi—a procedure that will entail, especially in the later work, some transgression of those conventions. Chapter 1 sketches more than two centuries of development in female consciousness of severe social disadvantage, from literary observations in the mid-seventeenth century to the intensifying of political representations in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, and the rise of the woman’s movement in the course of the Victorian century. The chapter includes an account of the impact on Meredith of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), and an examination of some of his female friendships by way of illuminating the experiential component of his insights into the ‘Woman Question’ as reflected in his fiction and letters. His unhappy first marriage is reserved for consideration in Chapter 2, as background to the discussion of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). This early novel, Meredith’s first in the realist mode, is widely accepted as being of high quality, and is given extended treatment, together with briefer accounts of three other early works, The Shaving of Shagpat (1855), Evan Harrington (1861), and Rhoda Fleming (1865), and one from Meredith’s middle period, Beauchamp’s Career (1876). Two more novels of this period, The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885), are generally considered to be among his best works, and their heroines are given chapters to themselves (3 and 4). Chapter 5 provides further contextualization for the changing socio-political circumstances of the 1880s and 1890s, with particular reference to that heightening of feminist consciousness represented by the short-lived ‘New Woman’ phenomenon, to which Diana of the Crossways had been considered by some to be a contribution. Brief discussion of some other ‘New Woman’ novels of the 80s and 90s follows, giving literary context to the heroines of Meredith’s three late candidates in the genre, One of Our Conquerors (1891), Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894), and The Amazing Marriage (1895). The dissertation concludes with a glance at Meredith’s influence on a few early twentieth-century novelists.
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Bromling, Laura Cappello, and University of Lethbridge Faculty of Arts and Science. "From the pens of the contrivers : perspectives on fiction in the nineteenth-century novel." Thesis, Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Science, 2003, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/154.
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This thesis investigates the way that moral and aesthetic concerns about the relationship between fiction and reality are manifested in the work of particular novelists writing at different periods in the nineteenth century, Chapter One examines an early-century subgenre of the novel that features deluded female readers who fail to differentiate between fantasy and reality, and who consequently attempt to live their lives according to foolish precepts learned from novels. The second chapter deals with the realist aesthetic of W. M. Thackeray; focusing on the techniques by which his fiction marks its own relationship both to less realistic fiction and to reality itself. The final chapter discusses Oscar Wilde's critical stance that art is meaningful and intellectually satisfying, while reality and realism are aesthetically worthless: it then goes on the explore how these ideas play out in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.iv, 120 leaves ; 28 cm.
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Watson, Anna Elizabeth. "Music lessons and the construction of womanhood in English fiction, 1870-1914." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/5479.
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This thesis explores the gendered symbolism of women's music lessons in English fiction, 1870-1914. I consider canonical and non-canonical fiction in the context of a wider discourse about music, gender and society. Traditionally, women's music lessons were a marker of upper- and middle-class respectability. Musical ‘accomplishment' was a means to differentiate women in the ‘marriage market', and the music lesson itself was seen to encode a dynamic of obedient submission to male authority as a ‘rehearsal' for married life. However, as the market for musical goods and services burgeoned, musical training also offered women the potential of an independent career. Close reading George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jessie Fothergill's The First Violin (1877), I discuss four young women who negotiate their marital and vocational choices through their interactions with powerful music teachers. Through the lens of the music lessons in Emma Marshall's Alma (1888) and Israel Zangwill's Merely Mary Ann (1893), I consider the issues of class, respectability and social emulation, paying particular attention to the relationship between aesthetic taste and moral values. I continue by considering George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) alongside Elizabeth Godfrey's Cornish Diamonds (1895), texts in which female pupils exhibit genuine power, eventually eclipsing both their music teachers and the artist-suitors for whom they once modelled. My final chapter discusses three texts which problematize the power of women's musical performance through depicting female music pupils as ‘New Women' in conflict with the people around them: Sarah Grand's The Beth Book (1895), D. H. Lawrence's The Trespasser (1912) and Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street (1913). I conclude by looking forward to representations of women's music lessons in the modernist period and beyond, with a reading of Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Wind Blows' (1920) as well as Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows (1956).
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Volz, Jessica A. "Vision, fiction and depiction : the forms and functions of visuality in the novels of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4438.
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There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.
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Tait, Lisa Olsen. "Mormon Culture Meets Popular Fiction: Susa Young Gates and the Cultural Work of Home Literature." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 1998. http://patriot.lib.byu.edu/u?/MTNZ,25499.
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Walker, Stanwood Sterling. "The classical-historical novel in nineteenth-century Britain." Access restricted to users with UT Austin EID, 2001. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3036607.
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Spencer, Sandra L. "The Angel in the House and The Woman in White: The Unfolding and Decoding of a Victorian Stereotype." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1991. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500620/.
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Abstract: Modern readers frequently perceive female characters in Victorian novels as insipid and inane, blaming the static portrayals on the angel in the house stereotype attributed to Coventry Patmore's poem of the same name. The stereotype does not accurately reflect the actual Victorian woman's life, however. Examining how the stereotype evolved and how the middle-class Mid-Victorian woman really lived provides insight into literary devices authors employed either to reinforce the angel ideal or to reconcile the ideal with the real. Wilkie Collins's portrayal of Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White features a dynamic female who has both androgynous characteristics and angel-in-the-house qualities, exemplifying one more paradox in a society riddled with contradictions.
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Al-Abdulrazaq, Mohammad Ahmed. "The role of strangers in Victorian novels: A psychoanalytical study of their repressions, functions and aspirations." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2014. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1400.
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The aim of this study is to examine the stranger characters in three Victorian Novels, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. The exploration of the characters is based on the analysis of their psyche to understand how they are utilized by the Victorian writers. The study highlights how the fictional strangers can assist in the course of the action of the novel and function as a stimulus by which the actions and thoughts develop plausibly and feasibly. Utilizing the views of Freud, Erikson and others the study will allow for an understanding of the Victorian cultural unconscious, which reflects the contemporary supremacy of men over women. The study will investigate the strangers’ consciousness and portray their psychological conflicts as a representative of the Victorian age and as a forecast of the contemporary individual’s identity crisis. The study concludes that the involvement of strangers gives coherence to the plot and helps readers to understand and learn from the story.
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Roberts, Timothy Paul English UNSW. "Little terrors:the child???s threat to social order in the Victorian bildungsroman." Awarded by:University of New South Wales. English, 2005. http://handle.unsw.edu.au/1959.4/23930.
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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.
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Bentley, Colene. "Constituting political interest : community, citizenship, and the British novel, 1832-1867." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36875.
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This dissertation asserts a strong connection between democratic culture and the novel form in the period 1832--1867. As England debated constitutional reform and the extension of the franchise, novelists Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot endeavoured to define human communities on democratic terms. Drawing on work of contemporary political philosopher John Rawls to develop a methodology that considers constitutions and novelistic representations as analogous contexts for reasoning about shared political values and citizenship, this study provides readings of Bleak House, North and South, and Felix Holt that emphasize each novel's contribution to the period's ongoing deliberations about pluralism, justice, and the meaning of membership in democratic life. When read alongside Bentham's work on legislative reform, Bleak House offers a parallel model of social interaction that weighs the values of diversity of thought, security from coercion, and the nature of harmful actions. Felix Holt and North and South are novelistic contributions to defining and contesting the attributes of the new liberal citizen. Through their central characters, as well as in their respective novelistic practices, Eliot and Gaskell highlight the difficulty of uniting autonomous individuals with collective social groups, and this was as much a problem for literary practice in the period as it was for constitutional reform.
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Rogers, Robin Taylor. "Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware [electronic resource] : a study guide with annotated bibliography / by Robin Taylor Rogers." [Tampa, Fla. : s.n.], 2003. http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/SFE0000101.
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Pinson, Guillaume 1973. "Fiction du monde : analyse littéraire et médiatique de la mondanité, 1885-1914." Thesis, McGill University, 2005. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=102151.
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This work proposes a double analysis of the mundane society representations between 1885 and 1914, in the press and the novel. This analysis separates these two categories of media to insist on their particularities, and tries to think of them in terms of an interaction.A first part explores the organisation of the topics and the main genre of the mundane society in the press, applying the social discourse theory. The analysis is based on the perusal of a set of representative daily newspapers (Le Gaulois, Le Figaro) and of weekly and monthly publications (Le Grand monde, La Vie parisienne, Femina notably, as well as around thirty other titles). It shows that the mundane society in the newspaper is constrained by a poetics stemming from the characteristics of press writing: collective writing, periodicity of the publication, text length limitation and reference to reality. Some texts are tempted by fiction, even though they keep a reality-based referential, whereas other texts that are openly fictitious, fit the mundane fiction into the newspaper.
The second part is based on the general conclusion of the first part: the mundane society in the newspaper is a represented society, made of for a distant and anonymous public. With the advent of the medias in the 19th century, the mundane society has entered into the era of mediations and "industrial writing". Some writers, from Bourget to Proust, take these upheavals into account and present the mundane society as a metaphor of the mass media society. This is done following three main axes: the temptation of withdrawal of the fiction into a closed world (psychological and mundane movement impulsed by Goncourt with Cherie, prolonged by Bourget and Hervieux notably); the games of exchange between the novel and the newspaper (Maupassant, Toulet, Legrand, amongst others); and finally, the isolation of the mundane world and the aesthetic work on mediations (Rolland, Colette, Mirbeau, Lorrain et Gide notably). All these writings address the question of sociability at the era of the triumph of mediations: what room is left for the mundane society, for direct encounter, for exchange, in a world of mediation and mass media coverage? for immediate connections in a society of mediated ties? The epilogue proposes a journalistic reading of A la recherche du temps perdu, synthesis-work which inaugurates a modern and sociological perception: it is in the world of the imagined mundane society, distant and represented in the mass media, that the narrator draws the resources for his observation of the world.
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Jenkins, Jennifer Lei. "Failed mothers and fallen houses: Gothic domesticity in nineteenth-century American fiction." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186122.
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This study examines the relation between gender and genre in four novels that chart the development of American domestic life from the Colonial to the Gilded Age. In these novels, the presence in the house of women--mothers, daughters, sisters, servants, slaves--often threatens the fathers' dynastic ambitions and subverts the formal intentions of the narrative. These women represent familiar but strange forces of the uncanny which lurk beneath the apparently placid surface of domestic narrative. In "house" novels by Hawthorne, Stowe, Alcott, and James, interactions of the uncanny feminine with dynastic concerns threaten not only the novel's social message of destiny and dynasty, but the traditional form of the novel itself. In The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne constructs a narrative in which patrician fathers and domestic daughters struggle for control of the House and its story. Slavery disrupts domestic life in Uncle Tom's Cabin, inverting and thereby perverting traditional notions of home and family and producing monstrous mothers and failed households. Alcott details the abuses and dangers of reified gender roles in family life, while depicting a young woman's attempt to reconstruct domesticity as a female community in Work. Finally, James displaces domestic concerns entirely from The Other House, portraying instead the violent nature of feminine desire unrestrained by tradition, community, or family. Story and telling work at cross-purposes in these novels, creating a tension between Romantic structures and realistic narrative strategies. These authors depart from the tropes of their times, using gothic devices to reveal monstrous mothers, uncanny children, and failed or fallen houses within the apparently conservative domestic novel. Such gothic devices transcend literary historians' distinctions of romance and sentimental fiction as respectively male and female stories and reveal the fundamentally subversive nature of domestic fiction. For these writers, the uncanny presence of the feminine produces a counternarrative of gender, class, and race, redefines the cultural boundaries of home and family, and exposes the fictive nature of social constructions of gender and domesticity.
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Rivest, Mélanie. "Nouveau théatre et nouveau roman : la quête d'un art perdu." Thesis, McGill University, 2004. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=79975.
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The histories of the Theater and of the Novel have rarely been linked to one another. Nevertheless, studying the evolution of the two arts as of the seventeenth century, allows us to pinpoint and define the sources of contamination. It is more precisely in the nineteenth century that the history of both the Theater and the Novel became envenomed, going from fresh influences to disloyal relations during which time the Theater faded by admitting romanesque realism to take the stage. By denying its capacity to reveal the "real", the Theater failed its possibilities and let its art be disinterested from the theatricality showing all that should have been evoked. Men of theater participated at recapturing the theatrical art so to regain confidence on stage and near 1950, an avant-garde movement flourished to favor a renewal of vitality for the theater with a new language which utilizes all of what the scene could provoke. This "New Theater" is soon followed by a similar romanesque enterprise, the "New Novel", a group of novelists also wishing to acknowledge the right to explore a new style of writing.
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Mathews, Peter David 1975. "Strategies of realism : realist fiction and postmodern theory." Monash University, Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, 2001. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8656.
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Masters, Benjamin Scott. "The ethics of excess : style and morality in British fiction since the 1960s." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648740.
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Strecker, Geralyn. "Reading prostitution in American fiction, 1893-1917." Virtual Press, 2001. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1213148.
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Many American novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discuss prostitution. Some works like Reginald Wright Kauffman's The House of Bondage, (1910) exaggerate the threat of "white slavery," but others like David Graham Phillips's Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917) more honestly depict the harsh conditions which caused many women to prostitute themselves for survival. Contemporary critical interpretations of novels addressed in this dissertation began before major shifts in women's roles in the workplace, before trends towards family planning, before women could respectably live on their own, and especially before women won the right to vote. Yet, a century of progress later, this vestigal criticism still influences our study of these texts.Relying on primary source materials such as prostitute autobiographies and vice commission reports, I compare fictional representations of prostitution to historical data, focusing on the prostitute's voice and her position in society. I examine actual prostitutes' life stories to dispel the misconception that prostitution was always a lower-class business. My chapters are ordered in regards to the prominence of the prostitute characters' voices: in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) the heroine seldom speaks for herself; in two Socialist novels--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) and Estelle Baker's The Rose Door (1911)--prostitutes debate low wages, political corruption, and organized vice; and in Phillips's Susan Lenox, the title character is almost always allowed to speak for herself, and readers can see what she is thinking as well as doing. As my chapters progress, I demonstrate how the fictions become more like the prostitutes' own autobiographies, with self-reliant women telling their stories without shame or remorse. My conclusion, "Revamping `Fallen Women' Pedagogy for Teaching American Literature," suggests how social history and textual scholarship of specific "fallen women" novels should affect our teaching of these texts.Department of English
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Chan, Wing-chun Julia, and 陳永晉. "Towards an aesthetics of cliché: cultural recycling and contemporary fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2009. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B42182311.
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Moore, Natasha Lee. "The unpoetical age : modern life and the mid-Victorian long poem." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610158.
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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.
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'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.
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Blatchford, Mathew. "The old New Wave : a study of the 'New Wave' in British science fiction during the 1960s and early 1970s, with special reference to the works of Brian W. Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Harry Harrison and Michael Moorcock." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/22150.
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Bibliography: pages 174-184.This thesis examines the 'New Wave' in British science fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s. The use of the terms 'science fiction' and 'New Wave' in the thesis are defined through a use of elements of the ideological theories of Louis Althusser. The New Wave is seen as a change in the ideological framework of the science fiction establishment. For oonvenience, the progress of the New Wave is divided into three stages, each covered by a chapter. Works by the four most prominent writers in the movement are discussed.
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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.
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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.
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Johnson, Nancy E. (Nancy Edna) 1956. "The "equivocal spirit" of law : property, agency and the contract in the English Jacobin novel." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=29054.
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In the 1790s, the English Jacobin novelists became vital participants in the fiery debates over natural and civil rights. Energized by the success of the American Revolution and inspired by the calls for l'egalite, la liberte, la surete, and la propriete in France, the Jacobin authors contributed their narratives to the British campaigns for reform of parliament and extension of the franchise. In this dissertation, I argue that the Jacobin novel furnishes crucial insights into the development of a theory of juridical rights in the late eighteenth century. Working in the early modern traditions of contract theory, writers such as Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin embraced the concept of inalienable natural rights. In their novels, they identified the critical role property played in determining the individual's relationship to the law, and they celebrated the emergence of a new kind of citizen distinguished by economic independence, inalienable rights and political agency. But they also offered an important critique of contractarian thought. The Jacobins' narratives revealed the exclusion of certain segments of the population from participation in government formed by contract. Their analyses of the origins of political authority and the constitution of the legal subject render the Jacobin novel a critical component of the history of juridical rights.
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Fung, Kit-ting, and 馮潔婷. "Decolonizing fictions: the subversion of 19thcentury realist fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2001. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31953001.
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Johnson, Alfred B. "Net work : social networks, disruptive agency, and innovation in Howells, Fitzgerald, Heller, Pynchon, and Gibson." Virtual Press, 2006. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1343471.
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This study uses concepts from network science to analyze the agency of outsider characters who cause change or disruption without necessarily securing economic or political power for themselves. Network science as theorized by thinkers like Duncan Watts (Six Degrees, 2003) and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (Linked, 2002) explains social networks in terms of social structures: clusters of people, bridges between them, pathways through them. Michel Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1971) suggests that new notions must enter public or personal awareness on "surfaces of emergence"—institutions like families and social groups. Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1974) looks at inventive ways that users repurpose products, both industrial and cultural, and so become "secondary producers." To analyze the influential-outsider agency of the fictional characters featured in this study, I theorize the clusters, bridges, and pathways of network science as surfaces of emergence on which "secondary productions" can appear and then spread through a social network.The introductory chapter explores and explains the general application of network science to literary criticism. In subsequent chapters, I use a networks-based approach to examine the agency of William Dean Howells's Tom Corey (The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1884), F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby, 1925), Joseph Heller's Milo Minderbinder (Catch-22, 1961), Thomas Pynchon's Pierce Inverarity (The Crying of Lot 49, 1965), and William Gibson's Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognition, 2003). These characters do unusual things with and from the subject positions in which they find themselves, and—whether or not they are or remain marginalized characters in their social systems—they are innovative and influential in ways that other characters do not understand or anticipate. All five novels depict the diffusion of innovative ideas and practices as a process of unplanned, non-coercive social negotiation, where innovation can originate with any person or group of people in the social network and is dependent on the complex interaction of liminal notions and mainstream thinking. The networking approach to these novels clarifies the ways that their authors have imagined social networks to function and the particular interactions they have imagined to lead to change or disruption.Department of English
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Abu-Manneh, Bashir. "Fiction of the New statesman, 1913-1939." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2002. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a2444f4a-ee6b-4063-afbf-26348bd22356.
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This thesis is the first systematic study of short stories published in the New Statesman [NS] weekly magazine from its foundation in 1913 to 1939. The main question it seeks to address is what type of fiction did a mainstream socialist publication like the NS publish then? By chronologically charting dominant literary figures and themes, the thesis aims to discern significant cultural tendencies and editorial principles of selection. Following Raymond Williams' 'cultural materialism', fiction is read in its relation to social history, as a 'representation of history'. Chapter 1 deals with the foundation of the journal and its first year of publication, mapping out the contradictions between Fabian collectivist ideology and ethical socialism, urban realism and literary Georgianism, country and city. A focus on urban problems of poverty unemployment, philanthropy, and machinofacture is at the heart of the NS's literary concern, in 1913. Chapter 2 focuses on stories published during World War I, and goes up to 1926. It argues that the reality of the War was falsified as a time of rest and relaxation, in line with the journal's political policy of supporting the war effort. The immediate post-war period is read as a time of disappointment and intensified social conflict and struggle. The General Strike of 1926 is a turning point in interwar history. It also ushers in a period of unprecedented cultural activity in the NS. As Chapters 4 and 5 show, the post-Strike period is characterised by the consolidation of the working-class fiction of socialist R. M. Fox; by the rise of the countryside realism of H. E. Bates; and by the rise of the colonial fiction of E. R. Morrough on Egypt (which is examined in the context of Leslie Mitchell's, E. M. Forster's, and William Plomer's responses to empire). Significant contributions by women writers (such as Faith Compton Mackenzie) about travel, duty, and oppression are also made in the late 20s, early 30s. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the magnificent place that Russian fiction occupies in the 30s through the work of Michael Zoshchenko. Though written during the free and experimental 20s, his satiric fiction is published as a sample of Soviet literature of the 30s, thus consolidating the Stalinist line dictated by the political editor, Kingsley Martin, that 'self-criticism' is a central part of Soviet politics and society. Chapter 7 is a tribute to the NS's contribution to reconstructing British realism away from both Victorian moralism and European naturalism. The stories of Bates, V. S. Pritchett, and Peter Chamberlain are dominant, conveying different ways of negotiating the pressures of documentary realism and the political developments of the 30s. Also discussed is the unique modernist contribution of neglected Stella Benson, which presents a strong challenge to the usual representationalism of NS fiction. The concluding chapter reads NS fiction in the whole period between 1913 and 1939 as the cultural expression of the new petty bourgeoisie, especially its progressive, politically and socially engaged side. With its focus on ordinariness and lived experience, and its formal experimentation and innovation, NS fiction exemplifies artistic commitment par excellence, a conscious cultural alignment with the actuality and potentiality of the new petty bourgeoisie.
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Turner, Irene. "Farce on the borderline with special reference to plays by OscarWilde, Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1987. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31949204.
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Hill, Colin. "The modern-realist movement in English-Canadian fiction, 1919-1950." Thesis, McGill University, 2003. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19471.
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This dissertation offers the first comprehensive examination of realism in English-Canadian fiction of the early twentieth century. It argues for the existence of a "modern-realist" movement that is Canada's unique and unacknowledged contribution to the collection of international movements that makes up literary modernism. This argument involves a detailed analysis of the aesthetics, aims, preoccupations, and techniques of the modern realists, a reexamination of the oeuvres of the movement's most prominent writers, and a critical reevaluation of the "modernity" of Canada's three most significant realist sub-genres—prairie realism, urban realism, and social realism. This study also provides a literary-historical overview of the movement as a whole, which begins with the inauguration of the Canadian Bookman in 1919, and concludes with the emergence of a contemporary Canadian fiction in the 1950s. The conclusions arrived at in this work are based upon a reading of dozens of novels and works of short fiction, many of them unpublished and/or critically neglected and forgotten. The findings in this study are also based on original research into archival materials from seven institutions across Canada.
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Kisawadkorn, Kriengsak. "American Grotesque from Nineteenth Century to Modernism: the Latter's Acceptance of the Exceptional." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278030/.
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This dissertation explores a history of the grotesque and its meaning in art and literature along with those of its related term, the arabesque, since their co-existence, specifically in literature, is later treated by a well-known nineteenth-century American writer in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque- Theories or views of the grotesque (used in literature), both in Europe and America, belong to twelve theorists of different eras, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present period, especially Modernism (approximately from 1910 to 1945)--Rabelais, Hegel, Scott, Wright, Hugo, Symonds, Ruskin, Santayana, Kayser, Bakhtin, (William Van) O'Connor, and Spiegel. My study examines the grotesque in American literature, as treated by both nineteenth-century writers--Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and, significantly, by modernist writers--Anderson, West, and Steinbeck in Northern (or non-Southern) literature; Faulkner, McCullers, and (Flannery) O'Connor in Southern literature. I survey several novels and short stories of these American writers for their grotesqueries in characterization and episodes. The grotesque, as treated by these earlier American writers is often despised, feared, or mistrusted by other characters, but is the opposite in modernist fiction.
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Guthrie, Neil. "A thousand wrecks! : rakes' progresses in some eighteenth century English novels." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b08473d6-9cae-4a14-b7a7-3e40cf7bb283.
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This thesis examines the figure of the rake as portrayed in the eighteenth-century English novel, a character strangely neglected in critical studies. The first chapter examines 'libertine' writers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, notably Bernard de Mandeville; and the dilemma faced by educators of the day over the benefits of virtue on the one hand, and of worldly wisdom on the other. While Mandeville and other lesser defenders of the rake were very much a scandalous minority early in the eighteenth century, it appears that by about mid century a more moderate strain of libertinism received wider, but by no means universal acceptance (Johnson, Chesterfield, Smith, Hume). The second chapter seeks to define the classic conception of the rake as a young upper-class prodigal, and the standard anti-libertine view that gentleman rakes, by their neglect of social and political duties, were a serious threat to established social and political order. The chapter concludes with various examples of the standard rake in minor eighteenth-century novels that both defend and vilify him. Chapters III to V concentrate on each of the three principal novelists of mid century (Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett), and their par- ticular uses of and moral conclusions about the conventional rake. The sixth chapter suggests some conclusions to be drawn, mainly from the previous three chapters, and especially the ways in which Fielding, Richardson and Smollett com- ment on the rakes in each other's fiction; and examines the continued use of the rake topos right to the end of the century and at least into the early nineteenth, in differing types of fiction (novels of manners, of Sentiment and of radical ideas, the Gothic novel).
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Skyes, Gillian E. "The new woman in the new world : fin-de-siècle writing and feminism in Australia." Phd thesis, Faculty of Arts, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/16473.
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Lee, Jason Eng Hun. "'All is not Well in the world' : critical cosmopolitanism in twenty-first century fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/197089.
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This thesis considers how contemporary American and British novels at the turn of the century attempt to conceptualize global human, political, economic and ecological risks through different levels of global connectedness. Taking a theoretical approach, the thesis offers up the notion of critical cosmopolitanism as a form of literary critique that might help to connect the field of literature to current sociological debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Critical cosmopolitanism is summarized here as follows: a predisposition towards cosmopolitan ideals but also a self-reflexive awareness of its perceived ideological and narrative shortcomings; a desire to conceive of a planetary self-conscious by maneuvering across and between spatial containers like the nation-state; an attempt to map disjunctive flows of global capital onto various narrative ‘worlds’; a type of narrative reflexivity that is transferred onto the reader.
The thesis comprises of two parts. Part 1 considers how the war on terror discourse problematizes novelists’ attempts to imagine planetary connectedness, and their struggles to imbue their readers with a self-reflexivity as an act of critical cosmopolitanism. Chapter 1 discusses the representational challenges that 9/11 presents to the novelist in terms of historicity, and outlines some of the prevailing metanarratives/counternarratives that are projected by them. Chapter 2 considers how alterity is used to critique or negotiate representations of the terrorist persona in novels by Don DeLillo, John Updike and Mohsin Hamid. Pointing to flaws in their narrative forms, these novelists enable their reader to transcend certain ideological boundaries which are denied to their own protagonists. Chapter 3 considers the interrelationship between terror and the spectacle in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer and Ian McEwan, looking at how 9/11’s images are able to project itself across the world but still reduce viewers’ capacity for imagining global connectedness.
Part 2 explores how novelists use a range of postmodern strategies to represent the various connections/dislocations made possible by global capital and how it problematize perceptions of human relationships across the world. Global capital is presented as a fluid dynamic that enables greater connectivity across the globe, but it also poses difficulties in one’s ability to realize a genuine cosmopolitanism against the all-incorporating power of the market. Chapter 4 deals with a variety of attempts in novels by William Gibson and Don DeLillo to cognitively map the relations of capital and consumer culture, and to make these complex global systems more intelligible to the reader. Chapter 5 discusses novels by David Mitchell and Rana Dasgupta that experiment with heterotopic, multi-layered narrative platforms to represent interconnecting but geographically separate ‘worlds’, and their ability to project cosmopolitan ideals across these textual horizons of space and time.published_or_final_version
English
Doctoral
Doctor of Philosophy