Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Feminism and literature Great Britain History 19th century'
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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and efficacy of these novels is drawn from archival sources which have been little used in literary studies (including unpublished materials), as well as contemporary periodicals.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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Smith, Helen. "The Fire and the Ash." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2002. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1644.
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This thesis comprises two parts. Part One is a novel (The Fire and the Ash), set in the latter half of the nineteenth century. lt chronicles, for the most part, the marriage of a young Irish couple. Part Two is an essay entitled Victorian Women and the Law. This area of research was selected because the life span of the woman in my novel coincides almost precisely with the reign of Queen Victoria. The life of women in Victorian Britain is commonly known to have been difficult. The social dictates of the time required that they be groomed from early childhood for a life of servitude to father and, hopefully, later a husband. There was little room, apart for a small minority of exceptional women, for self-expression, other than through the domestic arts within the home.
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Williams, Siân Bethan. "Quixotes, dreamers and 'imaginists' : deluding the heroine in the novel from Richardson to Austen." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5307bedc-a6b9-42be-bdb6-534035c975e9.
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The following study is an examination of the deluded heroine in the novel between 1740 and 1820. Through close readings of fiction by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen, and discussion of relevant works by other authors of the period, the reasons for the prevalence of this figure are considered. The thesis proposes that this choice of protagonist enabled the exploration of a number of the issues that most concerned contemporary novelists. Principal amongst these was the question of identification between reader and literary protagonist. Throughout this period authors engaged in attempts to develop and control the audience's response. The desired end was the "improvement" of readers by the experience of the situations, mistakes and trials of the text's central characters. Increasingly though, the unpredictable and fluctuating nature of the readers' reactions was recognised. The result was a conflict between "text as instruction", the moral education that authors professed to offer, and "text as fiction", the attractions of story, adventure and imagination which were ostensibly valued only as they brought readers to works intended to improve them. The connection of the latter to romance was a further source of tension. The establishment of the novel as a model for life was premised on claims to probability, but aspects of the texts remained which worked against mimetic representation. These oppositions explain the contemporary popularity of the quixotic narrative, since the quixote both enacted the "madness" of excessive imaginative involvement with literature and could also be shown learning to make a "correct" choice of genre for reading. The strategies that can be observed within the quixote novel have a wider application when they are considered alongside the patterns of imitation, influence and parody which characterise the fiction of the period. In order to examine these features, the thesis includes an analysis of two important literary dialogues: those between Richardson and Lennox, and between Radcliffe and Austen. My focus on the heroine acknowledges the significance of gender in the period's fiction. Created by both female and male authors, such figures could be either exemplary models or quixotic warnings. They nevertheless share an experience of delusion followed by enlightenment constructed in order to benefit the "reading Misses" following their adventures. Unlike much recent criticism, however, my concern is more with the author as creative artist, text as literary process and reader as imaginative participant, than with historical or sociological contexts.
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Simmonds, Clive. "Publishing Swinburne : the poet, his publishers and critics." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. http://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/245120.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Pittock, Murray. "Decadence and the English tradition." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6fa01d5c-e900-4ee8-9fb6-a8c3645e0bdd.
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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.
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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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Anderson, Carol. "On the contrary : counter-narratives of British women travellers, 1832-1885." University of Western Australia. English and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2009. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2009.0058.
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This study examines five counter-narratives written by British women between 1832 and 1885 who wrote in a non-conformist or negative manner about their travel experiences in foreign countries. In considering a small number of women travellers who took an alternative approach to narrating their experiences, a key objective of this study is to consider the reasons for the way in which the women writing counter-narratives positioned their writing. After considering how the quasi-scientific concept of domestic womanhood attempted to restrict Victorian women in general, and in particular influenced how women travellers were viewed, an exploration of counter-narratives questions whether the sustained interest in more positive travel accounts reflects a simplified contemporary, if not feminist, reading of Victorian women. An examination follows of the influence of discourse criticism, alternative interpretations of geographical space, and the presence of intertextuality in travel writing. The chapters are then arranged chronologically, with each counter-narrative being analysed as emanating from the range of discourses that were in conflict during the period. The writers form a varied group, travelling and living in five different countries, with a range of contradictory voices. Susannah Moodie and Emily Innes are outspoken in their criticism of British government policy for Canada and the Malay States respectively; Isabella Fane in India and Emmeline Lott in Egypt are disdainful of foreign practices which were otherwise considered fascinating on account of their exoticism; Frances Elliot differentiates her writing by opposing the ubiquitous influence of guidebooks for European travel. Thus each account records an aspect of political or cultural opposition to established discourses circulating at the time, as the women challenge the 'grand narratives' of foreign travel in different ways. Because such accounts may be challenged by literature of the period, the study positions the women in the context of their contemporaries, and thus each chapter examines the counter-narrative alongside another account by a female writer who travelled or lived in a similar area during the same era. Moreover, before examining the range of discursive complexities and tensions that emerge in each case study, the writers are positioned in their geographical locations and historical moments so that the texts are read against the cultural background to which the women were originally responding. The marginalisation of such counter-narratives has led to gaps in our understanding of travel writing from the period: where accounts once coexisted they are separated, and positive accounts are privileged over negative ones. It is this discontinuity of knowledge that the study will address in order to create a truer picture of the diversity of travel writing at the time.
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Ellison, Robert H. (Robert Howard). "Orality-Literacy Theory and the Victorian Sermon." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc279297/.
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In this study, I expand the scope of the scholarship that Walter Ong and others have done in orality-literacy relations to examine the often uneasy juxtaposition of the oral and written traditions in the literature of the Victorian pulpit. I begin by examining the intersections of the oral and written traditions found in both the theory and the practice of Victorian preaching. I discuss the prominent place of the sermon within both the print and oral cultures of Victorian Britain; argue that the sermon's status as both oration and essay places it in the genre of "oral literature"; and analyze the debate over the extent to which writing should be employed in the preparation and delivery of sermons.
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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.
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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.
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Keynes, Laura. "William Hazlitt : an aesthetics of embodiment." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669977.
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Moore, Lindsay Emory. "The Laureates’ Lens: Exposing the Development of Literary History and Literary Criticism From Beneath the Dunce Cap." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2015. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc822784/.
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In this project, I examine the impact of early literary criticism, early literary history, and the history of knowledge on the perception of the laureateship as it was formulated at specific moments in the eighteenth century. Instead of accepting the assessments of Pope and Johnson, I reconstruct the contemporary impact of laureate writings and the writing that fashioned the view of the laureates we have inherited. I use an array of primary documents (from letters and journal entries to poems and non-fiction prose) to analyze the way the laureateship as a literary identity was constructed in several key moments: the debate over hack literature in the pamphlet wars surrounding Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco (1673), the defense of Colley Cibber and his subsequent attempt to use his expertise of theater in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), the consolidation of hack literature and state-sponsored poetry with the crowning of Colley Cibber as the King of the Dunces in Pope’s The Dunciad in Four Books (1742), the fashioning of Thomas Gray and William Mason as laureate rejecters in Mason’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of William Whitehead (1788), Southey’s progressive work to abolish laureate task writing in his laureate odes 1813-1821, and, finally, in Wordsworth’s refusal to produce any laureate task writing during his tenure, 1843-1850. In each case, I explain how the construction of this office was central to the consolidation of literary history and to forging authorial identity in the same period. This differs from the conventional treatment of the laureates because I expose the history of the versions of literary history that have to date structured how scholars understand the laureate, and by doing so, reveal how the laureateship was used to create, legitimate and disseminate the model of literary history we still use today.
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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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Mercurio, Jeremiah Romano. "Fantasy as a mode in British and Irish literary decadence, 1885–1925." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1964.
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This Ph. D. thesis investigates the use of fantasy by British and Irish 'Decadent' authors and illustrators, including Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, 'Vernon Lee' (Violet Paget), Ernest Dowson, and Charles Ricketts. Furthermore, this study demonstrates why fantasy was an apposite form for literary Decadence, which is defined in this thesis as a supra-generic mode characterized by its anti-mimetic impulse, its view of language as autonomous and artificial, its frequent use of parody and pastiche, and its transgression of boundaries between art forms. Literary Decadence in the United Kingdom derives its view of autonomous language from Anglo-German Romantic philology and literature, consequently being distinguished from French Decadence by its resistance to realism and Naturalism, which assume language's power to signify the 'real world'. Understanding language to be inorganic, Decadent writers blithely countermand notions of linguistic fitness and employ devices such as catachresis, paradox, and tautology, which in turn emphasize the self-referentiality of Decadent texts. Fantasy furthers the Decadent argument about language because works of fantasy bear no specific relationship to 'reality'; they can express anything evocable within language, as J.R.R. Tolkien demonstrates with his example of "the green sun" (a phrase that can exist independent of the sun's actually being green). The thesis argues that fantasy's usefulness in underscoring arguments about linguistic autonomy explains its widespread presence in Decadent prose and visual art, especially in genres that had become associated with realism and Naturalism, such as the novel (Chapter 1), the short story (Chapter 3), drama (Chapter 4), and textual illustration (Chapter 2). The thesis also analyzes Decadents' use of a wholly non-realistic genre, the fairy tale (see Chapter 5), in order to delineate the consequences of their use of fantasy for the construction of character and gender within their texts.
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Ludtke, Laura Elizabeth. "The lightscape of literary London, 1880-1950." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:99e199bf-6a17-4635-bfbf-0f38a02c6319.
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From the first electric lights in London along Pall Mall, and in the Holborn Viaduct in 1878 to the nationalisation of National Grid in 1947, the narrative of the simple ascendency of a new technology over its outdated predecessor is essential to the way we have imagined electric light in London at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, the interplay between gas and electric light - two co-existing and competing illuminary technologies - created a particular and peculiar landscape of light, a 'lightscape', setting London apart from its contemporaries throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this narrative forms the basis of many assertions made in critical discussions of artificial illumination and technology in the late-twentieth century; however, this was not how electric light was understood at the time nor does it capture how electric light both captivated and eluded the imagination of contemporary Londoners. The influence of the electric light in the representations of London is certainly a literary question, as many of those writing during this period of electrification are particularly attentive to the city's rich and diverse lightscape. Though this has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, electric lights are the nexus of several important and ongoing discourses in the study of Victorian, Post-Victorian, Modernist, and twentieth-century literature. This thesis will address how the literary influence of the electric light and its relationship with its illuminary predecessors transcends the widespread electrification of London to engage with an imaginary London, providing not only a connection with our past experiences and conceptions of the city, modernity, and technology but also an understanding of what Frank Mort describes as the 'long cultural reach of the nineteenth century into the post-war period'.
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Ulrich, Melanie Renee. "Victoria's feminist Legacy: how nineteenth-century women imagined the queen." Thesis, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/1745.
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Du, Plessis Sandra Elizabeth. "Exploding the lie : 'angelic womanhood' in selected works by Harriet Martineau, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot." Diss., 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/18635.
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Each of these novelists, in her own way, presents a critique of the idealised
woman of the nineteenth-century. My aim in this dissertation is to reveal the
degree to which each is successful in her mission to 'explode the lie' of angelic
womanhood, and, in so doing, free her long-incarcerated Victorian sisters.
It took great courage and fortitude to utter at times a lone dissenting voice; and
female writers of the present owe a great debt of gratitude to their pioneering
Victorian counterparts, who cleared the way for them to take up the banner and
continue the march towards female liberation from a stifling ideology.English Studies
M.A. (English)
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O'Leary, Daniel Ralph J. "Raciological thought in Victorian culture : a study in imperial dissemination." Thesis, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/10835.
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My thesis revives the term raciology to describe collectively the literature which emanated
out of philological ethnology, that is, out of the studies of man inspired by the rapid advances in
linguistic science in the early nineteeenth century. Raciological Thought in Victorian Culture is
divided into two parts: it examines the development and dissemination of nineteenth-century
raciological knowledge in the works of celebrated philologists and anthropologists; and then
investigates typical features of raciological discourse in Victorian and Victorian Canadian culture.
It views this regional British literature as a field for the political and educational deployment of
British raciological conceptions, and comments on some of the implications of the circulation of
raciological doctrine.
My argument begins with discussion of the often overlooked celebrity and authority of
philologists in Victorian culture, tracing the derivation from philology of raciological typologies
which established the raciological associations of terms like "Britons," "Anglo-Saxons," and
"Teutons" during the early and middle-Victorian periods. An important aspect of the thesis is a re-evaluation
of the influence of Friedrich Max Muller, the most influential comparative philologist
and mythologist in the Victorian world. I argue that his use of etymological study for archaeological
data greatly contributed to the rapid dissemination of raciological thought among the educated and
educating classes. The first part of the thesis concludes with discussion of issues which animated
raciological discourse.
The second part follows the dissemination of Victorian raciological thought to Canada, and
illustrates its effects in an imperial context. It demonstrates the use of raciology in establishing
Canada's legitimacy as a British nation, and documents the place of raciology in establishing the
authenticity of Canadian continuity with a British culture running into deep antiquity. After
discussing neglected raciological aspects of several important Victorian Canadian source works, it
goes on to outline the importance of raciological mythology to the preservation of the Dominion
from American annexation and Fenian incursion. My epilogue briefly documents the decline of
raciological thought in Britain after the 1890s.
By investigating numerous neglected Victorian sources, Raciological Thought in Victorian
Culture establishes raciology as an important element in Victorian political-and, in particular,
nationalist-thinking.
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Wakefield, Sarah Rebecca. "Folklore-naming and folklore-narrating in British women's fiction, 1750-1880." Thesis, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3086727.
Full text
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"Intertextual variations: a contrastive study of Ellis Cornelia Knight, Angela Carter, Marina Warner and Paula Rego." 2002. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5896035.
Full textAbstract:
by Wong Man-ki.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 157-163).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Abstract --- p.i
論文提要 --- p.iii
Acknowledgements --- p.v
"Introduction ""Intertextuality"": Definitions and Issues" --- p.1
Chapter Chapter1 --- Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-Century Novels: Samuel Johnson's Rasselas and Ellis Cornelia Knight's Dinarbas --- p.34
Chapter Chapter2 --- Postmodern Intertextuality (I): The Subversive Rewriting Project in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber --- p.61
Chapter Chapter3 --- Postmodern Intertextuality (II): Toward a Broader Scope ´ؤ Multiple Art Forms in Marina Warner's The Mermaids in the Basement and Paula Rego's Nursery Rhymes --- p.100
Selected Bibliography --- p.157
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Evans, Katherine. "The Alice books - an imaginative testimony to a child's experiences of socio-cultural norms of the late Victorian age." Thesis, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/2598.
Full textAbstract:
Introduction: Alice in Wonderland is perhaps the most renowned fantasy book for children. Over and above this though, it has relevance for adults. People too often dismiss it as purely escapist reading, a means to escape from the monotony of everyday realism by delving into the realms of fantasy. Many critics propose that it operates on more than one level and I would have to agree - it is a pioneer of children's literature as well as a product and critique of the Victorian age. It is a story that has captured the world's imagination, with vivid characters and exciting adventures. The sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, although not as well known, equally offers an insight into the late nineteenth-century. I intend to explore the many layers found in these stories, and hope to expose them as being more than mere narratives, but as pieces of literature that thrive because they are so cleverly constructed Perhaps also their success lies in that they deal with the universal theme (for children and adults alike) of making sense of the seemingly nonsensical aspects of life and society. The stories, as well as the strange characters and happenings, are reminiscent of the Absurdist genre in drama, in which the objective is to turn the world upside down, so to speak, in order to understand people and society. My dissertation will begin by exploring the literary trends of children's books prior to 1865, in other words, before Alice in Wonderland was published. I intend to present an overview of Victorian and pre-Victorian children's fiction, tracing the development of the story for teaching and religious instruction, up until the time when the story was liberated to be simply the vehicle for pleasurable recreational purposes. Thus my opening chapter is an exploration of the didactic children's literature that dominated the early nineteenth century, examining the educationalists that helped expand the genre of children's literature. Next, I will include a brief biography of Lewis Carroll. It is important to my overall theme in that a biography sums up, in one human centre, the forces at play in Victorian sensibility. As a modern audience, we seem to seize upon the idea of his 'character', desperately attempting to understand what motivated him to write such tour de force stories. The interest for me at this point is to examine how academics have portrayed Carroll's 'character'. The motive behind this section is to beg the question of whether his complex personality affects our reading of the texts, or whether they can be seen as entirely separate from a life to which some scandal has been attributed. In the remainder of my dissertation, I shall focus on how the texts are a reflection of a typical Victorian child's experiences, and discuss how Alice 'grows' as a character, and what she reveals about her society in the process of discovering how she should define herself. Alice is the vehicle for Carroll's subversive commentary about his society, and her experiences in Wonderland and Looking-Glass land are often rooted in the undermining of conventional behaviour and traditions. Lastly, I will examine Carroll's stylistic organization of the narratives, paying particular attention to his treatment of time, dreams and language in the texts. I will discuss what his intentions are in creating 'nonsense that makes sense', as well as what this 'nonsense' discloses about the society he lived in and the values he seems to object to.Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.