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Hauntings In The Church: Counterfeit Christianity Through The Fin De Siècle Gothic Novel, Melissa Ann West

Masters Theses

The lengthy Victorian period, extending from 1832 until 1901, was a time of cultural turmoil. New scientific discoveries were being made daily, and Christianity was forced to deal with issues of Darwinism, occultism, and growing disbelief in God. By the start of the fin de siècle, God was an impartial deity sitting on His almighty throne, and man was nothing more than a highly evolved animal. The church, both Catholic and Anglican, did not exist to lead man toward salvation, but existed because of a dated adherence to cultural tradition.

No one genre captured the religious upheavals of the age …

"Life Wants Padding": Food, Eating, And Bodies In George Eliot's Novels, Tess Rebecca Stockslager

Masters Theses

This thesis uses six of the novels of George Eliot (those that take place entirely in rural England), works from the field of psychology, the concepts of realism and sympathy, and a metaphor of liquidity from Thomas Carlyle to explore several ways that body fat shapes identity and mediates relationships with others. Boundaries are the guiding concept: the chapters move from a demonstration of how boundaries between the self and others are created (padding), through a discussion of how sympathy can enable those boundaries to be broken (stuffing), to two case studies of characters whose boundaries of selfhood are in …