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Waters, M. D. "The garden in Victorian literature." Thesis, University of Kent, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.355151.
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Forsberg, Laura. "The Miniature and Victorian Literature." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:23845467.
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The Victorian period is famously characterized by its massiveness, with the vast extent of the British Empire, the enormous size of the nineteenth-century city and the massive scale of the three-volume novel. Yet the Victorians were fascinated with miniature objects, which seemed in their small scale to belong to another world. Each miniature object prompted a unique imaginative fantasy of intimacy (the miniature painting), control (the toy), wonder (the microscope and the fairy) or knowledge (the miniature book). In each case, the miniature posited the possibility of reality with a difference, posing the implicit question: What if? This dissertation traces the miniature across a range of disciplines, from aesthetics and art history to science and technology, and from children’s culture to book history. In so doing, it shows how the miniature points beyond the limits of scientific knowledge and technical capabilities to the outer limits of the visual and speculative imagination. In novels, the miniature introduces elements of fantasy into the framework of realism, puncturing the fabric of the narrative with the internal reveries and longings of often-silent women and children. Miniature objects thus function less as realist details than as challenges to realism. In charting the effect of the miniature, both as a portal into the Victorian imagination and as a challenge to narrative realism, this dissertation puts the techniques of material history to new use. It aims not to describe the world of the Victorians but to show how the Victorians imagined other worlds.English
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Prince, John S. "Utopia Victoriana : the utopian novel in late Victorian Britain, 1871-1905." Virtual Press, 2003. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1259302.
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This study focuses on three significant issues addressed by utopian literature of the late Victorian period: the class struggle and the resulting debate about capitalism and socialism, the nature and significance of language, and the influence of Darwin's theory of evolution on attitudes toward human existence. The utopian reaction to each of these three issues reflects the increasingly scientific investigation and analysis of specialized fields of knowledge that developed throughout the nineteenth century. Within the context of major scientific advancements in biology, geology, linguistics, and technology, utopian literature of the late-Victorian period, c. 1871-1905, responds primarily to two opposing nineteenth-century attitudes, the complacent optimism of laissez-faire individualism and the resigned pessimism of naturalistic determinism. Literary utopianism of the late nineteenth century is an attempt to resolve the philosophical and epistemological conflict between the impersonal and seemingly unalterable natural laws of science and the indomitable human will. I contend that the utopian novel re-emerges in the last third of the nineteenth century at the intersection of scientific discourse and literary discourse. I further argue that the late Victorian utopia marks a critical transition between the classic utopia the modern utopia.Department of English
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Finnigan, Marguerite C. "On value : Victorian political economy and the Victorian novel /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9405.
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Bayley, Melanie. "Mathematics and literature in Victorian England." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.527279.
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Ernst, Rachel A. "Mattering: Agentic Objects in Victorian Literature." Thesis, Boston College, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107953.
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Thesis advisor: Maia McAleaveyA time of rapid industrialization and burgeoning consumerism, the nineteenth century was full of things, a physical reality that is mirrored in the heavily material story worlds of Victorian literature. My dissertation investigates how objects do things in texts, exhibiting a mattered, agentic existence that decenters the human and proposes a materially-centered textual reality. In the writings of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and others, a particular set of objects-portraits, dresses, dolls, and letters-is characterized by their shared representation of the human body and the ways in which they act with, against, and independently of the characters they represent. These texts and objects emphasize the essential material components of textual realities and the ways in which objects have agency within the narrative to redefine the mattered framework of the text. The objects in this study operate on a spectrum of agency that emphasizes their role as active matter in their parent text. Going beyond the historical and cultural models that usually inform readings of things in Victorian literature, I investigate how these objects are active in upending the primacy of the human and constructing new assemblages of possibility and potentiality that cannot be accessed by the human alone. Each chapter traces the development of the agentic object in one or more texts as they reshape the structure of their fictional reality to allow objects to exist alongside with, rather than subservient to, their human creators and audiences. Acknowledging the ways in which things in texts have functioned historically and culturally in the nineteenth century, this dissertation examines how they operate textually, offering a differently centered narrative world that reimagines the role of objects as primary actors in constructing fictional realities
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English
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Meyer, Basil. "Consumptive death in Victorian literature, 1830-1880." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2001. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1654.
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Victorian medical men, writers, relatives of the dying and consumptive sufferers themselves seized on the narrative potential of representations of the disease in a variety of ways. I argue that both medical and lay writers subscribed to a common set of beliefs about the disease and that medical knowledge, moreover, shared a common narrative way of knowing and understanding it. I analyse aspects of general clinical expository texts, including accompanying illustrations, showing how a narrative knowledge of death and the tubercular body was elaborated. Furthermore, I show how documents used in the compilation of medical statistics on the cause of death were fundamentally narrative through their reliance on case narratives. It is demonstrated that Dickens uses a seldom noticed consumptive death and decline to offset his heroine's development in Bleak House, in ways similar to those developed in Jane Eyre. Similarly, it is shown that Mrs Gaskell's use of a consumptive alcoholic 'fallen woman' unsettles her account of her heroine in Mary Barton. George Eliot's 'Janet's Repentance' is analysed, showing how the psychological struggle between an orientation towards life or death is played out across both alcoholism and consumption. I also examine how consumption presents a narrative opportunity whereby plots involving setbacks in love are resolved through women's consumptive deaths in popular fiction by Rhoda Broughton,Ladv Georgiana Fullerton and others. Through an examination of the Journal of Emily Shore and accounts of other actual deaths, I illustrate how experiences and accounts of consumptive deaths were structured and rendered intelligible through reliance on beliefs encountered in both fiction and medicine. In conclusion, the thesis alerts readers to the presence of signifiers of consumption in Victorian texts, showing how various narrative strategies are integral to any understanding of representations of its dying victims
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Boucher, Abigail Kate. "Representations of the aristocratic body in Victorian literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7059/.
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This thesis examines the representations of the aristocratic body in Victorian literature. This thesis argues that the authors often wrote, coded, and interpreted an aristocrat’s physical form as a paradoxical object which reflected many of the complex interclass issues and socio-economic transitions seen throughout the Victorian era. By exploring distinct, sequential genres and types of ‘popular’ fiction in this dissertation, I investigate a broad-spectrum literary treatment of aristocratic bodies as cultural paradoxes: for the same usage of the aristocratic body to crop up again and again in disparate, discrete, and hugely popular forms of literature speaks to the nineteenth-century resonance of the aristocratic body as a codeable symbol and textual object. I use what is termed ‘popular fiction’: fiction largely excluded from the canon, yet with a very large contemporary readership and authors or genres which continued to be widely read immediately following the publication of those individual texts. Popular fiction is, by its very nature, the type of literature that can most reasonably be considered to represent the general, broad-spectrum views of large populations, and in doing so these texts can be used to determine wide-scale desires, anxieties, and expectations surrounding the subjects they contain. Body theory and gaze theory serve as the overarching foundation for exploring the portraiture of aristocratic characters by authors from all classes, although individual chapters deal with their own theoretic approaches to the texts examined within them. Chapter 1 on silver fork fiction from the 1820s to the 1840s uses socio-economic theory, including Bourdieu’s idea of habitus to examine the genre’s treatment of aristocratic bodies as consumer goods and luxury products, which in turn reflected contemporary shifts in social and economic class hegemony. Chapter 2 on G.W.M. Reynolds’s radical 1840s to 1850s serial, The Mysteries of the Court of London, uses the medical humanities and masculinity theory to investigate the text’s endemic infertility in aristocratic men; Reynolds uses the biology of aristocratic male bodies as the locus for moralistic discussions about primogeniture and politics. Chapter 3 on the sensation fiction of Mrs Henry (Ellen Price) Wood utilises feminist theory to illustrate Wood’s portrayal of female aristocrats as bodiless, and yet continually gazed upon; Wood uses the aristocratic female body as a magnifying glass to depict the nineteenth-century female experience, in particular the paradoxes of adhering to private, domestic ideologies while at the same time fulfilling the requirements of the public gaze. Chapter 4 explores the influence of evolutionary theory upon two sister-genres of the fin de siècle Medieval Revival: Ruritanian fiction in Part 1 and a genre I have named the Evolutionary Feudal in Part 2. In Part 1, the aristocratic body is represented as outside of evolution; the genre provides escapism from Darwinism and fin de siècle anxieties of history and (d)evolution by whitewashing the feudal era and subscribing to Thomas Carlyle’s theories of divinely- or cosmically-appointed leaders. Part 2 focuses on texts which depict a post-apocalyptic world returning to a feudal Dark Age, and in which aristocratic bodies are seen evolving or devolving; rather than whitewashing history, the Evolutionary Feudal locates history’s darkest origins in the aristocratic body as a way of predicting possible futures and coping with the concerns of degeneration.
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Roberts, Caroline. "Harriet Martineau and Victorian ideologies." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.359951.
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Cusick, Edmund. "George MacDonald and Victorian fantasy." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.293456.
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Flavin, Michael A. "Gambling in the Victorian novel." Thesis, University of Kent, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.297398.
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Hio, Noriko. "The influence of Victorian literature upon Japanese literature of the Meiji Period." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.328709.
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Borhan, Burcu. "Gendered narratives in Victorian literature identity formation in empire-focused children's literature /." Fairfax, VA : George Mason University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1920/3246.
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Thesis (M.A,)--George Mason University, 2008.Vita: p. 101. Thesis director: Amelia Rutledge. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Aug. 27, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-100). Also issued in print.
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McLeod, Melissa. "Sounds of terror hearing ghosts in Victorian fiction /." unrestricted, 2007. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11282007-112908/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007.Title from file title page. Michael Galchinsky, committee chair; Calvin Thomas, Lee Anne Richardson, committee members. Electronic text (181 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Feb. 7, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 174-181).
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Dawson, Gowan. "Walter Pater, aestheticism and Victorian science." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.298947.
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Schaffer, Shari Dean. "Victorian Maternity and Edna Pontellier's Awakening." W&M ScholarWorks, 1986. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539625355.
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Pina, Gerardo. "The rhetoric of the Fantastic in late-Victorian literature." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.490670.
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This thesis offers a study of a particular period (1884-1899) in Britain in which Fantastic literature revealed itself as a convergence point of multiple anxieties of late nineteenth-century society. Fantastic literature is a genre often mistaken for Gothic, Fantasy or the like, that in fact has its own particular' rhetoric and literary conventions. In this study I present some of the most important social and literary elements of the context in which Fantastic literature emerged in Britain - the conventions of Gothic literature, a short history of Spiritualism, the scientific organizations devoted to the study of paranormal phenomena, such as the Society for Psychical Research, and a brief summary of the social evolutionist ideas of Thomas Huxley and H.G. Wells. By examining the context and some representative works of Fantastic literature, like R.L. Stevenson's 'Olalla' (1884), Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Parasite' (1895), Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) and H.G. Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), we get a better idea of essential characteristics of Fantastic literature, that is, of the elements within these stories that reflect some important issues of late Victorian society. One can see that the rhetoric of the Fantastic sheds light on phenomena linked with uncertainty and fear in late nineteenth-century society, such as occultism, supernatural sightings, haunted houses and spiritualism. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Fantastic literature has survived alongside Fantasy literature (J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings), magical realism (Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children or Garda Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude) and children's literature (J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter) preserving its own identity and rhetoric. Italo Calvina's The Rampant Baron, J.L. Borges's 'The Aleph' and Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle indicate that Fantastic literature still has its place in literature because it expresses a particular kind of ideas that cannot find expression in other genres. This is an analysis of those ideas through the study of some of the first Fantastic literary works written in Britain.
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Tyler, Daniel. "Victorian Hopes : Future-directed attitudes in Nineteenth-Century literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.522807.
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Clare, Aingeal Mary Aisling. ""Wonderland's wanderland" : James Joyce's debt to Victorian nonsense literature." Thesis, University of York, 2011. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14220/.
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This thesis examines the literary relationship between James Joyce and Victorian nonsense, particularly Lewis Carroll. Tracing the defining characteristics of literary nonsense beyond the Victorian period, it aims to assess what we mean by 'literary nonsense', and to evaluate the terms of Joyce's nonsense inheritance. The thesis is divided into four chapters: Chapter One: "'A letters from a person to a place about a thing": The Nonsense Letter.' This chapter looks at central nonsense themes of miscommunication, the (mis)construction of meaning, textual play, and the inadequacies and absurdities of epistolary conventions. My research draws on personal letters from Joyce, Carroll, and Edward Lear, as well as examining the relationship between fictional letters and their host texts, and delivering a detailed analysis of the Finnegans Wake letter in its various guises. Chapter Two: "'Mocked majesty": Games and Authority.' This chapter explores the various forms of authority in nonsense, from autocratic monarchs to omniscient authors, and from the parental or pedagogic authority of adults over children to the rigid and unspoken rules of children's games and discourses. The various species of games we find in the work of both Carroll and Joyce are analysed, from the tightly ordered playworlds of chess, cards, and games with logic and language, to the rough-and-tumble hijinks of the Finnegans Wake children's twilight street games. Chapter Three: '''Jest jibberweek's joke": Comic Nonsense.' This chapter begins by exploring the Kantian model of incongruous humour we find in the nonsense double act, examining how both Joyce and Carroll emphasise and exploit the double nature of the joke, using it to generate the vaudevillean dialogues and comic contrasts between the many 'collateral and incompatible' pseudocouples who populate the nonsense terrain. It goes on to address the dark underbelly of the comic, identifying a Hobbesian meanness at the heart of nonsense humour. A treatise on the bad pun concludes the. chapter, moving from Carroll's portmanteau words to the pun-infatuated jokescape of Finnegans Wake. Chapter Four: 'Nonsense and the Fall.' This chapter offers a unique reading of literary nonsense asa philosophical answer to the FalL Nonsense texts betray an almost morbid obsession with falling; literal and symbolic falls are a central theme of both the Wake and the Alice books, and falls into language, madness, chaos, and forbidden knowledge are staples of the nonsense condition. Ontological crisis and semantic collapse are among this chapter's themes, as it investigates why it is a general and necessary condition of literary nonsense to be always hovering on the edge of the abyss, and forever toying with its own destruction.
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Jajszczok, Justyna. "The parasite and parasitism in victorian science and literature." Doctoral thesis, Katowice : Uniwersytet Śląski, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12128/676.
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Celem rozprawy Pasożyt i pasożytnictwo w wiktoriańskiej nauce i literaturze jest ukazanie,
w jaki sposób nauka (rozumiana tu jako nauka biologiczna) i literatura (w rozumieniu prozy)
okresu wiktoriańskiego wzajemnie na siebie wpływały. Te powiązania są analizowane na
przykładzie pasożyta i pasożytnictwa, które to zjawiska rozpatrywane są na czterech
płaszczyznach: biologicznej, ekologicznej, zwyczajowej i literackiej. Zawarte w rozprawie
teksty literackie i naukowe traktowane są równorzędnie: jako fikcyjne i niefikcyjne
opowieści (stories).
Rozdział I ukazuje, jak zależności pomiędzy nauką a literaturą można interpretować
za pomocą ekologicznych interakcji, od neutralizmu do mutualizmu, na przykładach dzieł
kilku wiktoriańskich pisarzy (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Karol Dickens, H. G. Wells) oraz
naukowców (Karol Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, George Lyell, Robert Chambers, E. Ray
Lankester). Mutualizm jest tu wykorzystany do analizy analogii pomiędzy powieścią
Miasteczko Middlemarch George Eliot a pismami G. H. Lewesa, w których pewne pojęcia
używane przez jednego z autorów są pożyczane, adaptowane i zmieniane przez drugiego, by
później pojawić się na nowo w twórczości pierwszego twórcy.
Opierając się na idei mutualizmu naukowo-literackiego, Rozdział II ukazuje
paradoksy związane z pasożytami, zaczynając od skomplikowanej etymologii samego słowa
„pasożyt”. W pierwotnym greckim znaczeniu termin ten (parasitos) łączył w sobie
znaczenia, które dziś pojawiają się na płaszczyźnie biologicznej, ekologicznej i
zwyczajowej, co zaprezentowane jest w rozdziale na przykładach naukowych opisów
różnych gatunków pasożytów oraz literackich postaci Chrześcijańskich Zwierząt
Mięsożernych (Christian Carnivora) pojawiających się w Miasteczku Middlemarch, a także
członków rodziny Dedlock i Harolda Skimpole’a z Samotni Karola Dickensa.
Celem Rozdziałów III i IV jest zaprezentowanie dwóch historii pochodzenia
pasożytów; jako wywodzących się z wnętrza ciała żywiciela oraz jako pochodzących z
zewnątrz. W Rozdziale III ukazane są wczesne teorie europejskich naukowców (przede
wszystkim teoria samorództwa) oraz popularne wierzenia ludzi spoza kręgów zachodnich,
według których pasożyty generowane były wewnątrz swoich żywicieli i co za tym idzie,
uznawane były albo za objawy braku wewnętrznej równowagi żywiciela, albo jako
przyczyny tej nierównowagi. Koncepcji tej użyto w tym rozdziale do zinterpretowania
dwóch powieści: miejska biedota z Dickensowskiej Samotni odczytana zostaje tu jako
wytworzona z rozkładającej się materii londyńskich slumsów, natomiast panowie Bulstrode
i Raffles z Miasteczka Middlemarch – jako przychodzący z zewnątrz obcy burzący
równowagę lokalnej społeczności.
Alternatywna teoria pochodzenia pasożytów jest tematem Rozdziału IV, który
wprowadza pojęcie literatury infekcji – jako podgatunku literatury inwazji (invasion
literature). Czerpiąc zarówno z bakteriologii jak i medycyny tropikalnej, literatura ta
prezentuje wizje, w których wrażliwa tkanka imperium brytyjskiego zostaje zaatakowana
przez zjadliwe, egzotyczne czynniki patogenne. Jako przykład literatury infekcji, której
antagoniści interpretowani są jako nosiciel i patogen użyta jest tu powieść Znak czterech
Arthura Conan Doyle’a.
Innym przykładem literatury infekcji jest analizowana w Rozdziale V powieść
Richarda Marsha Skarabeusz Izydy (The Beetle), która ukazuje atak pojedynczego, ale
niezwykle wirulentnego, egipskiego najeźdźcy. Rozdział zawiera dwie opowieści o infekcji;
jedną zgodną z dziewiętnastowiecznymi normami i stereotypami, i drugą kwestionującą te
normy. W dalszej części rozdziału zawarte są przykłady na analogiczne zachowania, które
przejawiają zarówno antagonista z powieści, jak i pasożyty obserwowane w naturze. Aby
wyjaśnić te analogie, wprowadzono tu wywodzące się z nauk ewolucyjnych pojęcie
konwergencji, tj. procesu, w którym odrębne gatunki biologiczne wykształcają analogiczne
cechy funkcjonalne.
Ostatni rozdział rozwija ideę konwergencji w literaturze i nauce na podstawie dwóch
koncepcji wywodzących się z prozy wiktoriańskiej, które później odnajdują się w studiach
parazytologicznych. Naukowa hipoteza Czerwonej Królowej odczytana jest jako nowa
wersja idei, które pierwotnie znalazły się w Po drugiej stronie lustra Lewisa Carrolla,
natomiast przykłady zawarte w teorii unikania pasożytów (Parasite Avoidance Theory)
Valerie Curtis są odnajdywane w następujących wiktoriańskich powieściach: Samotni,
Miasteczku Middlemarch, Znaku czterech i Skarabeuszu Izydy.
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McKechnie, Claire Charlotte. "Human and the animal in Victorian gothic scientific literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/5571.
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This doctoral thesis examines the role of animals in nineteenth-century science and Victorian Gothic fiction of the latter half of the century. It is interdisciplinary in its exploration of the interrelationship between science writings and literary prose and it seeks to place the Gothic animal body in its cultural and historical setting. This study is interested in the ways in which Gothic literature tests the limits of the human by using scientific ideas about disease, evolution, species confusion, and disability. In analysing the animal trope in Gothic scientific fiction, this thesis conceptualises the ways in which the Gothic mode functions in relation to, while setting itself apart from, contemporary scientific theories about humankind‘s place in the natural world. Chapter 1, 'Man‘s Best Fiend: Evolution, Rabies, and the Gothic Dog‘, focuses on the dog as an animal whose ability to carry and communicate deadly diseases to humans exemplified the breakdown of the animal-human boundary. I read late-nineteenth-century vampire and werewolf narratives as literary manifestations of social hysteria associated with dogs and rabies. In Chapter 2, 'Shaping Evolution: Amphibious Gothic in Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s The Coming Race and William Hope Hodgson‘s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, I examine the role of the frog in Victorian science as the background to Gothic fiction‘s portrayal of the Gothic body as an amphibious being. The next chapter explores the spider‘s function in Victorian natural history as the background to its role as a protean and unstable Gothic trope in fiction. Chapter four, 'Geological Underworlds: Mythologizing the Beast in Victorian Palaeontology‘, looks at ways in which the dinosaur in science influenced the literary imaginations of Gothic writers Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker. Under the title "Monsters Manufactured!": Humanised Animals, Freak Culture, and the Victorian Gothic‘, the final chapter concludes the study with a discussion of freak culture, making key links between unusually-shaped people in society and human/animal hybrids in the Gothic fiction of H. G. Wells, Richard Marsh, and Wilkie Collins.
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Sparks, Tabitha. "Family practices : medicine, gender, and literature in Victorian culture /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9319.
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Moore, Douglas R. "Appropriating justice : Victorian literature and nineteenth-century law reform /." Available to subscribers only, 2007. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1483471651&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1509&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 2007."Department of English." Keywords: Bulwer-Lytton, Collins, Wilkie, Trollope, Anthony, Browning, Robert, Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron, Justice, Victorian, Law reform, Nineteenth century Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-281). Also available online.
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Moore, Tara. "Victorian Christmas books a seasonal reading phenomenon /." Access to citation, abstract and download form provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company; downloadable PDF file 0.59 Mb., 194 p, 2006. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3221087.
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Murfin, Audrey Dean. "Stories without end a reexamination of Victorian suspense /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2008.
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Binstock, L. R. "A study of music in Victorian prose." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.371597.
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Pedlar, Valerie. "The representation of madness in Victorian fiction." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 1993. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.357403.
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Henson, Louise. "Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Victorian science." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.323196.
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Riley, Susan. "A speaking monument : the Victorian sequence poem." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.309948.
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Stroker, Anthony Noel. "The Victorian aesthetic of Gerard Manley Hopkins." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 1994. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.262331.
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Stewart, Clare. "Fighting spirit : Victorian women's ghost stories." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2000. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1610/.
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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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Dotson, Emily A. "Strong Angels of Comfort: Middle Class Managing Daughters in Victorian Literature." UKnowledge, 2014. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/13.
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This dissertation joins a vibrant conversation in the social sciences about the challenging nature of care labor as well as feminist discussions about the role of the daughter in Victorian culture.
It explores the literary presence of the middle class managing daughter in the Victorian home.
Collectively, the novels in this study articulate social anxieties about the unclear and unstable role of daughters in the family, the physically and emotionally challenging work they, and all women, do, and the struggle for daughters to find a place in a family hierarchy, which is often structured not by effort or affection, but by proscribed traditional roles, which do not easily adapt to managing daughters, even if they are the ones holding the family together.
The managing daughter is a problem not accounted for in any conventional domestic structure or ideology so there is no role, no clear set of responsibilities and no boundaries that could, and arguably should, define her obligations, offer her opportunities for empowerment, or set necessary limits on the broad cultural mandate she has to comfort and care others.
The extremes she is often pushed to reveals the stresses and hidden conflicts for authority and autonomy inherent in domestic labor without the iconic angel in the house rhetoric that so often masks the difficulties of domestic life for women. She gains no authority or stability no matter how loving or even how necessary she is to a family because there simply is no position in the parental family structure for her.
The managing daughter thus reveals a deep crack in the structure of the traditional Victorian family by showing that it often cannot accommodate, protect, or validate a loving non-traditional family member because it values traditional hierarchies over emotion or effort.
Yet, in doing so, it also suggests that if it is position not passion that matters, then as long as a woman assumes the right position in the family then deep emotional connections to others are not necessary for her to care competently for others.
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Webb, Jessica. "What lies beneath : orthodoxy and the occult in Victorian literature." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2010. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/55460/.
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This thesis explores the relationship between orthodox Christianity, quasi-religious movements, pseudo-science and the supernatural in both a pre- and post-Darwinian world, tracing it through fiction and non-fiction, and in novels, novellas and short stories by canonical authors Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, by the lesser known writers Catherine Crowe, and Arthur Machen, and in the non-Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Across this variety of literary forms, these very different authors all engage with the supernatural, with quasi religious creeds and with pseudo-science. Chapter One focuses on the presence of the supernatural and the spirit world in Edward Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni (1846), and The Haunted and the Haunters; or the House and the Brain (1859), Catherine Crowe's The Night-Side of Nature (1848), and Charles Dickens' Christmas stories. Chapter two explores George Eliot's use of superstition and medieval and Jewish mysticism in The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Daniel Deronda (1876), before considering Thomas Hardy's Anglo-centric approach to similar issues in The Return of the Native (1878), and "The Withered Arm" (1888). Chapter three discusses the late nineteenth century interest in spiritualism, Egyptology, and ancient religion as represented in Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1894) and Arthur Conan Doyle's "The King of Thoth" (1890) and "Lot No. 249" (1894). Overall, the thesis is concerned with the way "rational" Victorian society is constantly undermined by its engagement with the supernatural: the nineteenth century desire for empirical evidence of life after death proves, paradoxically, Victorian irrationality.
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Ioannou, Maria. "Beautiful stranger : the function of the coquette in Victorian literature." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/72193.
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Theories of beauty normally engage with beauty in the abstract, or with reactions to beauty - beauty’s effect on others. This thesis considers how coquettish female beauty has been embodied in Victorian literature by the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and to a lesser extent women’s periodical literature. It argues that the figure of the coquette addresses antithetical discourses on the Victorian woman and assimilates them in such a way as to express a subversive beauty discourse, in which beauty consolidates differing female experiences and formulates the search for identity as a collective female effort. The coquette is linked with controversial women’s issues such as marriage failure, domestic abuse and female eroticism; the ambivalence of her relationship with the text’s heroine shows the scope and limits of female autonomy. The dialectic between rejection and acceptance in which the coquette participates in specific narrative strategies shows women engaged with women’s problems, their erotic potential, and their relationship(s) to each other. The thesis also reflects on feminist literary theory, especially current ideas on female writing, broadly defined as a search for female belonging. Recent criticism holds that the Victorian coquette operates either to show that eroticism was part of the Victorian woman’s identity, or as a passive surface upon which certain aspects of the protagonist are illuminated. This thesis argues that this is only part of the story; additionally, the issue of eroticism is installed within a framework of women’s social, political, and legal concerns, and the coquette can be read as an active site in which aspects of both the coquette and the protagonist are combined to form an innovative way of seeing the Victorian woman.
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Wright, Benjamin Jude. ""Of That Transfigured World" : Realism and Fantasy in Victorian Literature." Scholar Commons, 2013. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4617.
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"Of That Transfigured World" identifies a generally unremarked upon mode of nineteenth-century literature that intermingles realism and fantasy in order to address epistemological problems. I contend that works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde maintain a realist core overlaid by fantastic elements that come from the language used to characterize the core narrative or from metatexts or paratexts (such as stories that characters tell). The fantastic in this way becomes a mode of interpretation in texts concerned with the problems of representation and the ability of literature to produce knowledge. Paradoxically, each of these authors relies on the fantastic in order to reach the kinds of meaning nineteenth-century realism strives for.
My critical framework is derived from the two interrelated discourses of sacred space theology and cultural geography, focusing primarily on the terms topos and chora which I figure as parallel to realism and fantasy. These terms, gleaned from Aristotle and Plato, function to express two interweaving concepts of space that together construct our sense of place. Topos, as defined by Belden C. Lane, refers to "a mere location, a measurable, quantifiable point, neutral and indifferent" whereas chora refers to place as "an energizing force, suggestive to the imagination, drawing intimate connections to everything else in our lives." In the narratives I examine, meaning is constructed via the fantastic interpretations (chora) of realistically portrayed events (topos). The writers I engage with use this dynamic to strategically address pressing epistemological concerns relating to the purpose of art and its relationship to truth.
My dissertation examines the works of Dickens, the Brontës, Pater, and Wilde through the lens of this conceptual framework, focusing on how the language that each of these writers uses overlays chora on top of topos. In essence each of these writers uses imaginative language to transfigure the worlds they describe for specific purposes. For Dickens these fantastic hermeneutics allow him to transfigure world into one where the "familiar" becomes "romantic," where moral connections are clear, and which encourages the moral imagination necessary for empathy to take root. Charlotte and Emily Brontës's transfigurations highlight the subjectivity inherent in representation. For Pater, that transfigured world is aesthetic experience and the way our understanding of the "actual world" of topos is shaped by it. Oscar Wilde's transfigured world is by far the most radical, for in the end that transfigured world ceases to be artificial, as Wilde disrupts the separation between reality and artifice.
"Of That Transfigured World" argues for a closer understanding of the hermeneutic and epistemological workings of several major British authors. My dissertation offers a paradigm through which to view these writers that connects them to the on-going Victorian discourses of realism while also pointing to the critical sophistication of their positions in seeking to relate truth to art. My identification of the tensions between what I term topos and chora in these works illuminates the relationship between the creation of meaning and the hermeneutics used to direct the reader to that particular meaning. It further points to the important, yet sometimes troubling, role that imagination plays in the epistemologies at the center of that crowning Victorian achievement, the Realist novel.
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Sutherland, Helen Margaret. "The function of fantasy in Victorian literature, art and architecture." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1999. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5183/.
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In this thesis I examine the ways in which the Victorians used fantasy in literature, art, and architecture to explore the main areas of debate and key issues which were giving rise to anxiety in their society, in some cases upholding the status quo, but in others questioning accepted social mores. In particular, I consider the ways in which fantasy was used to examine what happens in a society when its traditional religious beliefs are challenged, either by commercialism as an economic creed, or by the acquisition of new knowledge, be this in the realm of science (theories of evolution) or the humanities (the new biblical criticism from Germany). Following on from this, I look at the possible alternatives to traditional religious belief which fantasy seemed able to offer to an age which appeared to need spirituality without dogma. I argue that one of the strategies most commonly adopted by the Victorians in the creation of fantasy is the disruption of time, and I consider the part played in literature and art by medievalism, and in architecture by the Gothic style and the Gothic Revival movement. This is followed by an examination of the role of Classicism in architecture, and ancient mythologies, such as Greek, Hebraic, or Babylonian, in literature and art. Finally, I consider the use of geological time as a point of departure in creating scientific fantasies. Given the very close links between the arts until the advent of aesthetic criticism at the end of the nineteenth century, I have drawn freely upon the visual and the literary arts. The main emphasis is, however, on literature and painting, with architecture playing a lesser, though still important, part in this thesis.
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Byrne, Katherine. "Consuming flesh, producing fictions : representations of tuberculosis in Victorian literature." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.426862.
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Bardi, Abby. "The gypsy as trope in victorian and modern British literature." College Park, Md.: University of Maryland, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/7703.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2007.Thesis research directed by: Dept. of English. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Sweeney, Christine. "Gendered glances the male gaze(s) in Victorian English literature /." Connect to Electronic Thesis (CONTENTdm), 2009. http://worldcat.org/oclc/457041316/viewonline.
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Hanlon, Kerry Elizabeth. "Antigone's wake : the legacy of live burial in Victorian literature /." For electronic version search Digital dissertations database. Restricted to UC campuses. Access is free to UC campus dissertations, 2004. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.
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Curran, Timothy M. "The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism in Romantic and Victorian Literature." Scholar Commons, 2018. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7491.
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The Medievalizing Process: Religious Medievalism in Romantic and Victorian Literature posits religious medievalism as one among many critical paradigms through which we might better understand literary efforts to bring notions of sanctity back into the modern world. As a cultural and artistic practice, medievalism processes the loss of medieval forms of understanding in the modern imagination and resuscitates these lost forms in new and imaginative ways to serve the purposes of the present. My dissertation proposes religious medievalism as a critical method that decodes modern texts’ lamentations over a perceived loss of the sacred. My project locates textual moments in select works of John Keats, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde that reveal concern over the consequences of modern dualism. It examines the ways in which these texts participate in a process of rejoining to enchant a rationalistic epistemology that stymies transcendental unity. I identify the body of Christ, the central organizing principle of medieval devotion, as the cynosure of nineteenth-century religious medievalism. This body offers a non-dualistic alternative that retroactively undermines and heals Cartesian divisions of mind and body and Kantian distinctions between noumenal and knowable realities. Inscribing the dynamic contours of the medieval religious body into a text’s linguistic structure, a method I call the “medievalizing process,” underscores the spiritual dimensions of its reform efforts and throws into relief a distinctly religious, collective agenda that undergirds many nineteenth-century texts.
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Guarino, Samantha. "Mirroring masculinity violence in the Victorian double /." Click here for download, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1818251481&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3260&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Matthews, Jodie. "Reading the Victorian Gypsy." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2008. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/54684/.
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Nineteenth-century texts that focus on Gypsies construct a figure who ought to be locatable in a racial hierarchy, in a class system, and along gender lines. When read psychoanalytically, however, the texts reveal signs of having repressed uncertainty about where such boundaries may be drawn and what they signify. The figure of the Gypsy, existing literally and metaphorically on the verges of society, disrupts the stable locations of identity fenced off by discourse even as texts hope to offer the Gypsy as an example of how one may categorise others. Chapter One studies the figure of the Gypsy in the work of Walter Scott (1771–1832) and its relationship to that of a later writer, George Borrow (1803–1881). Chapter Two concentrates on the work of the Romany Ryes, examining the discursive implications of their impulse to conserve Gypsy culture in the face of its perceived annihilation. Chapter Three explores the construction of the Gypsy between engraved image and written text in the 'Illustrated London News', reading the ways in which the two forms work together on the page. Chapter Four looks at George Eliot's 'The Spanish Gypsy' (1868) and 'Daniel Deronda' (1876) to examine the differences in the representation of a male Jew and female Gypsy in her work. The final chapter discusses the pervasive stereotype of Gypsies kidnapping children in the context of children's literature. The readings performed throughout the thesis are underpinned by a deconstructive psychoanalysis (drawing on Jacques Derrida's rethinking of the work of Sigmund Freud), which not only lends the project a methodology but demands an exploration of the ethics and responsibilities of reading and writing now, in the past, and for the future The texts are thus under analysis and are seen to preserve traces of the nineteenth-century discourses in which they are woven (and which they also weave). Such conservation also always institutes a difference, however, and the attempted repression, silencing, banishment and fetishization of all the uncontained features of the figure of the Gypsy do not mean that the text has the Gypsy under control all of these things come back to haunt it.
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Powell, Sally. "Cadaverous narratives : the displaced corpse in Victorian fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.368656.
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McIntire, Janet E. "H. Rider Haggard and the Victorian occult." Full text available online (restricted access), 2000. http://images.lib.monash.edu.au/ts/theses/McIntire.pdf.
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Allsop, Jessica Lauren. "Curious objects and Victorian collectors : men, markets, museums." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/14976.
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This thesis examines the portrayal of gentleman collectors in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literature, arguing that they often find themselves challenged and destabilised by their collections. The collecting depicted contrasts revealingly with the Enlightenment practices of classification, taxonomy, and commodification, associated with the growth of both the public museum and the market economy. The dominance of such practices was bound up with the way they promoted subject-object relations that defined and empowered masculine identity. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer note that “[i]n the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty” (3). That being so, this study explores how the drive to classify and commodify the material world found oppositional, fictional form in gothicly inflected texts depicting a fascinating but frightening world of unknowable, alien objects and abject, emasculated subjects. The study draws upon Fred Botting’s contention that gothic extremes are a reaction to the “framework” of “reductive and normalising limits of bourgeois morality and modes of production” (89). Examining novels and short stories by Richard Marsh, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee, George Gissing, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Mary Cholmondeley, and Mary Ward, the thesis shows how gothicised instances of unproductive-masochism, pathological collecting, thwarted professionals, and emasculated heirs broke down the “framework” within which men and material culture were understood to interact productively and safely. Individual chapters dealing respectively with acquisition, possession, dissemination and inheritance, respond to the recent “material turn” in the humanities, bringing together literary criticism and historically grounded scholarship to reveal the collector and the collection as the locus 3 for concerns with masculinity and materiality that preoccupied a turn-of-the-century mindset.
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Badinjki, Taher. "The fallen woman in the Victorian novel." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1985. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4241/.
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This study examines the rise or the fallen woman in the Victorian novel and her progress in the course of the century from a shadowy figure playing a minor role to a major character who stands at the center of attention. From a helpless victim condemned to an early death she becomes a heroine who lives and triumphantly prevails. The dissertation follows the chronological sequence of the novels looked at, and every chapter concentrates on a decade or so at a time.
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Vejvoda, Kathleen M. "The dialectic of idolatry : Roman Catholicism and the Victorian Heroine /." Digital version accessible at:, 2000. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/main.
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Prince, Kathryn. "Educating an audience: Shakespeare in the Victorian periodicals." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/29251.
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Based on extensive archival research, this thesis offers an entirely new perspective on popular Shakespeare reception by recuperating articles published in Victorian periodicals. Shakespeare had already reached the apex of British culture in the previous century, becoming the national poet of intellectuals and gentlemen, but during the Victorian era he was embraced by groups outside the corridors of power. If Shakespeare was sometimes employed as an instrument of enculturation, imposed on these groups, he was also used by them to resist this cultural hegemony. As a comprehensive record of how Shakespeare was represented to a wide variety of readers, the periodicals are invaluable.
Research has already demonstrated the varied representations of Shakespeare available to the Victorians through performance, criticism, and creative works employing Shakespeare as a point of departure, as well as his prevalence in formal education and examinations. A missing element of this Victorian picture, the periodicals, has been virtually ignored by Shakespeare studies. Articles published in periodicals intended for well-defined readerships including the working classes (chapter one), children (two), women (three), and theatregoers (four and five) are records of alternative Shakespeares reshaped for particular demographic groups. As the pressure to sell copies was renewed with each issue, the periodicals were acutely responsive to the interests of their readers, and Shakespeare's prevalence in such diverse publications is powerful evidence of both the scope and the variety of his popular appeal. In the Girl's Own Paper, for instance, Portia became a vehicle for discussing women's rights, while some working-class periodicals borrowed from Coriolanus and Richard III to sharpen their readers' views on class relations, and the proponents of a national theatre transformed Shakespeare into the saviour of English drama. Measured in terms of utility, a favourite word among Victorian thinkers, Shakespeare became a valuable, contested commodity for Victorian readers and spectators. In turn, the Victorians prevented Shakespeare from fading into the forgotten past by continuing to discover new ways of making him relevant.