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Master Of Your Domain: Descriptions Of Interior Space In The Works Of Charles Dickens And Elizabeth Gaskell As Social Justice Commentary, Ryan P. Bowers

English Theses

Abstract

One of the results of the industrialization of Victorian England was a further straining of the relationship between the rich and poor. This was evidenced by events such as the Preston Strike, a prolonged labor battle between the workers and the masters of the cotton mills. Charles Dickens’s periodical Household Words covered the strike on two occasions, with Dickens himself writing the second article on the event. An attempt to bridge this cultural divide between the classes was undertaken by Elizabeth Gaskell in North and South, a novel that first appeared in Household Words and by Dickens himself …

Hawthorne's Transcendental Ambivalence In Mosses From An Old Manse, Matthew S. Eisenman

English Theses

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collection of short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, serves as his contribution to the philosophical discussions on Transcendentalism in Concord, MA in the early 1840s. While Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the other individuals involved in the Transcendental club often seem to readily accept the positions presented in Emerson’s work, it is never so simple for Hawthorne. Repeatedly, Hawthorne’s stories demonstrate his difficulty in trying to identify his own opinion on the subject. Though Hawthorne seems to want to believe in the optimistic potential of the spiritual and intellectual ideal presented in Emersonian Transcendentalism, …