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'Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Gazer'?: Beauty, Power, And Disability Examined Critically In Jane Eyre And Other Classic Literature, Abigail Powers

Honors Theses

This thesis shares how the desire to read classic texts like Jane Eyre more critically inspired the creation of a reading guide that walks through the process for those who are interested, but not necessarily trained, in analyzing classic literature, promoting active consumers and, ultimately, enriched lives.

Tess Of The D'Urbervilles -- A Pure Survivor An Analysis Of Thomas Hardy, Victorian Women, & Modern Media, Jesse C. Marin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Context is vital to understanding the circumstances and the society that produced Thomas Hardy’s novel. As such, I will be reviewing the era through canonically established authors, the literary trope that would condemn women and firmly entrench itself in England’s national identity, and political movements guided by the law of Victorian England. This will showcase the hurdles of basic women’s rights that would continue throughout the reign of Queen Victoria, as well as the dangers that would be faced in the public and domestic spheres, endangering a woman’s very life. When tied together W.T. Stead’s expose in the Pall Mall …

Buried Feelings, Standing Stones: Secularity, Animism, And Late-Victorian Pagan Revivalism, Jeff Swim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this project, I argue that during the late-Victorian period a revived form of paganism developed in response to an emerging kind of secularity. My first chapter engages post-secularism as a framework for understanding how paganism responds to this new sense of secularity, which I demonstrate formed alongside developments in geology, archaeology, and anthropology. In chapter two, I show how ideas of “primitivity” and “animism” put forth by John Lubbock and E. B. Tylor influence what Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater debate as “the pagan sentiment.” The rest of the project concerns forms of what I call “pagan affectations,” authorial …

Sexual Exploration Of The Pastoral: Analyzing Queer Desire In “Goblin Market” And In Memoriam, Amanda Rajnauth

Theses and Dissertations

The term “queer pastoral” was coined by Vin Nardizzi to refer to the use of the pastoral setting to normalize homosexuality. While the queer pastoral has primarily remained within Renaissance studies, I seek to expand the reach of this concept by applying it to Victorian literature. This thesis argues that Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam both use the pastoral as a space to explore queer desire.

The Evans Family: Familial Relationships In George Eliot's Life And Fiction, Hailey S. Fischer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Biographers of George Eliot, when writing about her childhood, have focused on her close and complicated relationships with two of the most important men in her life, her father Robert Evans and brother Isaac Evans. Less discussed are Eliot’s relationships with her immediate female family members, her mother Christiana Pearson Evans and her sister Christiana (Chrissey) Evans Clarke. This thesis reviews the predominant interpretations of Eliot’s relations with her father and brother. It also pulls together the known information about Christiana and Chrissey from several major biographies and adds new insights from Eliot's letters in combination with two of her …

The City Of Nightmares: Occultism, Ecstasy, And The Literature Of Late-Victorian London, Sophie Labenski

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

While the relationship between Gothic motifs and anxieties about transgressive sexuality at the end of the 19th century is well understood, most of the scholarship written on this topic takes the idea of the supernatural for granted, or sees it as a way of establishing the links between monstrosity and sexuality. In this essay

I turn to the work of Arthur Machen in order to recontextualize the supernatural aspects of the late-Victorian Gothic literature in regard to the forms of credulity that inform the occult. While texts like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde …

"Wearing A Mask To Each Other": Masculinity & The Public Eye In Victorian Sensation Fiction, Shannon Branfield

Theses and Dissertations--English

Sensation fiction, as a genre, offers a field to explore the ways in which ideologies of masculinity are negotiated, contested, and enforced. The Victorian man has no respite from social surveillance; the public is always watching, always evaluating the performance. As these sensation fiction novels build on each other, a portrait of male claustrophobia in response to unceasing surveillance is revealed. The pressure this constant scrutiny puts on Victorian men is immense and sensation novels derive many thrilling plot twists from the dramatic lengths men to which men must go to protect themselves from this gaze. These habits persist even …

“Woman’S Legitimate Empire”: Fabricating Asianness In Gaskell’S North And South And Mary Elizabeth Braddon’S Lady Audley’S Secret, Hailey Lam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues that the fabrication of Asianness in Victorian literature is indebted to the subtle, yet frequent gestures, habits, and interactions that occur in the literary works of Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. By specifically focusing on Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), I explore a methodological approach for literary studies that is capacious enough to reckon with the material histories and materiality of race that pervade the cultural imagination of an eighteenth and nineteenth century England. Queer of color criticism by scholars like Sara Ahmed and meditations on aesthetics, race, and culture …

Jds 2021 Table Of Contents

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Title Pages, Vol. 23, 2021

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

“Is [He] A Man? If So, Is He Mad? And If Not, Is He A Devil?”: The Influence Of Culture Versus Experience On The Brontë Sisters’ Perception Of Mental Illness, Catrina May Mehltretter

Masters Theses

Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë each presented a different perspective on mental illness within their novels. The primary reason for this difference in perspective can be found in their different responses to their brother Branwell’s poor mental state. As Branwell’s health deteriorated mentally and physically, his sisters ended up becoming his primary caregivers, giving them a unique insight into mental illness that would have been unusual for the time period, given the tendency to send any mentally ill family members away to asylums. Still, this shared experience impacted each of the sisters differently, likely due to the different relationship each …

A Productive Failure: Existentialism In Fin De Siècle England, Maxwell Patchet

Dissertations (1934 -)

In this dissertation, I argue that Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday belong to a broader, transnational tradition of existential novelists. I discuss how recognizing their novels as existential explains why these authors exist in a liminal space in literary criticism, caught between Victorianism and modernism. My dissertation historicizes their existential contribution by placing it within the context of late-Victorian optimism. While their contemporaries celebrated Britain’s technological, imperial, and philosophical strides, Hardy, Conrad, and Chesterton wrote novels that warned against too firm a faith in the …

A Unit In Victorian Literature, Nina Barnes

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project will be the creation of a unit plan based on the analysis of Victorian Literature for a future high school language arts classroom. It will use Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as the main trade book that the unit will focus on. The unit will include the reading of the novel in its entirety, with the inclusion of outside sources that act as supplemental information such as videos and articles about the novel or the style of writing used in the Victorian era. The unit plan will consist of lessons for each day of the unit, with specific information …

Late-Victorian Novels, Microsociology, And Bad Dialogue, Amy Wong

Amy Wong

This essay argues that a separation between dialogue and talk has been enforced since the rejection of mimetic realism in the late nineteenth-century art of fiction debates. Both the institutionalization of formalist methods and poststructuralism since Derrida have resulted, moreover, in continued suspicion about ontological claims made about any category of "orality." Yet what has been lost in the name of poststructuralist sophistication is an appreciation of talk as an embodied, relational, and sociologically mediated form. This essay contends that revisiting dialogue with a view toward such elements—from gestures and other physiological productions to "invisible" social dynamics—unfolds ethical dimensions of …

English Prisoners In Their Unnatural Habitat: Conquering Nature In The Perils Of Certain English Prisoners By Wilkie Collins And Charles Dickens, Madeline Christensen

Student Works

Charles Dickens is most famous for writing about urban spaces and environments such as the city of London. However, as Joseph Carroll points out, there are numerous "prominent British depictions of wild nature" and these depictions of nature find their way into the "cultivated tracts of British domestic fiction" (305). It is this relationship, between the cultivated and uncultivated wilderness that Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins touch upon in their collaborative 1857 Christmas novella, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners, and Their Treasure in Women, Children, Silver, and Jewels. Collins and Dickens explore the relationship between humans and nature …

Late-Victorian Novels, Microsociology, And Bad Dialogue, Amy Wong

Literature, Languages, and the Humanities | Faculty Scholarship

This essay argues that a separation between dialogue and talk has been enforced since the rejection of mimetic realism in the late nineteenth-century art of fiction debates. Both the institutionalization of formalist methods and poststructuralism since Derrida have resulted, moreover, in continued suspicion about ontological claims made about any category of "orality." Yet what has been lost in the name of poststructuralist sophistication is an appreciation of talk as an embodied, relational, and sociologically mediated form. This essay contends that revisiting dialogue with a view toward such elements—from gestures and other physiological productions to "invisible" social dynamics—unfolds ethical dimensions of …

Phantom Limb: An Exploration Of Queer Manner In Nineteenth-Century Gothic Tales, Casey Michelle O'Reilly

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The term “phantom limb” is used to describe the phenomenal tingling sensation that occurs in the nerve endings of an amputated limb; though the limb is no longer physically attached to the body, the person experiences pain and physical sensation in the space the limb once occupied. Though the body part has been removed, it haunts both the body and the brain. It is through this metaphor that I am interested in investigating the connection between the disembodied and the embodied.

The disembodied connects to the embodied through the loss or lack of a bodily form; the embodied, therefore, links …

Victorian Media Studies, History, And Theory, Amy Wong

Literature, Languages, and the Humanities | Faculty Scholarship

This article gives an account of Victorian media studies as a sub‐field that emerged primarily from investigations of nineteenth‐century communication technologies and the century's accompanying preoccupations with transmission and the idea of in‐betweenness. Owing to unprecedented developments such as the rise of the universal postal system, telegraphy, phonography, photography, and mass print media, historicist inquiries have proven fruitful for the sub‐field. At the same time, continuities between how Victorians (such as the journalist and editor W. T. Stead) imagined communication's unifying reach across Britain and the globe and twentieth‐century media theory's critique of this same reach have ensured the sub‐field's …

Anatomy Of The Victorian Vampire: Bodily Imaginings In Four Pre-Stoker Texts, Jane Kubiesa

Journal of Dracula Studies

No abstract provided.

Understanding The Gray: Aging Women In Victorian Culture And Fiction, Hannah T. Ruehl

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation, Understanding the Gray:Aging Women in Victorian Culture and Fiction, explores the cultural construction of aging for middle-class Victorian women and how aging was experienced and then depicted within novels. Chiefly, I work from midcentury to the end of the century in order to understand the experience of aging and ways women were ascribed age due to their position in society as spinsters, mothers, and progressive women. I explore how the age of fictional women reflects and contributes to critical debates concerning how Victorian women were expected to behave. Debates over separate spheres, how women were perceived in …

The Contest Of Marriage: Domestic Authority In The Victorian Novel, Morgan Richardson

Theses and Dissertations--English

In “The Contest of Marriage: Domestic Authority in Victorian Literature”, I argue that depictions of engaged and newlywed couples in the Victorian novel consistently dismantle the concept of marriage, depicting the process of two individuals attempting to become one couple as a tenuous and even dangerous project to be undertaken during the nineteenth century. By looking at works where the decision to marry comes at the beginning of the novel rather than the conclusion, I examine the ways in which different novelists document and anatomize the consistent failures in the theoretical underpinnings of domesticity and conjugality. Given that gender, separate …

Intro To Intros: Victorian Literature In Brief, Leah Kind

Classics of British Literature

Often, teachers struggle with a way to introduce students to a large canon (such as Victorian Literature) without overwhelming them with a heavy reading load. Many teachers can also not expect that students will read outside of class, and cannot devote great swaths of time to in-class reading. This lesson seeks to introduce students to some exemplary representational examples of Victorian literature by reading a portion of the novel’s first chapter, and allowing them to discuss what they have seen, analyze, make predictions, and draw conclusions, based on their reading. This lesson is most suitable for students who have already …

Altered Perspective, Jaymee L. Wagner

The Kabod

This paper analyzes Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations by discussing how and why Pip’s perspective on social classes and individual morality changes as a result of the various characters and events he encounters throughout the novel.

The Joys Of Earth: Evolutionary Kinship In Victorian Atheist And Agnostic Authors, Keri R. Stevenson

Theses and Dissertations--English

Darwin’s evolutionary theory provided, for some atheist and agnostic authors in Victorian England, a theory of kinship and community, of investment in the world, that had been missing before. Without a “creation” story that could match the Biblical version, those who stood outside the dominant Christian paradigm rarely had the words or concepts to construct their own visions of how humans fit into the existence of other species, into landscapes, and into a world that, if unfallen, seemed resistant to other explanations. Those who did construct alternate mythologies usually reared them on a Christian base.

Into the Victorian loss of …

Fashioning Mobility: Navigating Space In Victorian Fiction, Mary C. Jones

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation examines how heroines in nineteenth-century British Literature manipulate conventional objects of feminine culture in ways which depart from uses associated with Victorian marriage plots. Rather than use fashionable objects to gain male attention or secure positions as wives or mothers, female characters deploy self-fashioning tactics to travel under the guise of unthreatening femininity, while skirting past thresholds of domestic space. Whereas recent Victorian literary and cultural criticism identifies female pleasure in the form of consumption and homosocial/erotic desire, my readings of Victorian fiction, from doll stories to the novels of Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Marie Corelli, consider …

William Maginn And The Denial Of Authorship: The Text Of The Colby Lecture At The Annual Meeting Of The Research Society For Victorian Periodicals, University Of Delaware, 2014, David E. Latane

English Publications

This the text of a plenary lecture given in 2014 after being named co-winner of the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. It traces the transformation of a theoretically inclined book project centered on William Maginn to the first full-length biography of Maginn.

George Eliot's Counterpublics, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

This talk works through some of the different ways that George Eliot complicates dominant Victorian conceptions of community and belonging through her varied narrative representations of intimacy and affect. I will begin with a brief discussion of how intimacy and affect operate in relation to nineteenth-century realism; then I will explore some of the ways in which the Victorian ideal of an imagined sympathetic community works as an aspirational Victorian narrative of intimate belonging, and how in Eliot’s hands this ideal community works as a potential counter-narrative of intimacy, making space for less-conventional intimacies, like the one she shared with …

Clockwork Heroines: Female Characters In Steampunk Literature, Cassie N. Bergman

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Steampunk is a progressive literary genre that evokes, imitates, and re-imagines the nineteenth century and favors the Industrial Revolution ideals of science and technology. In a historical framework, it mixes nineteenth-century conventions and retrofuturistic machinery with science fiction and fantasy elements. Steampunk authors are able to radically redefine socio-cultural implications that affect both past and contemporary societies. The following study explores the multitude of characteristics that define Steampunk literature as an interdisciplinary study. Chapter 1 explores the definitions and literary genres that construct Steampunk and includes a brief literary history of Steampunk works. Chapter 2 focuses on Cherie Priest’s novel …

Victorian Influence On Beauty And The Beast, Elizabeth Stone

4710 English Undergraduate Research: Children’s Literature

This essay examines a unique publication of the well-known Beauty and the Beast fairy tale. W.B. Conkey Company’s adaptation of Beauty and the Beast demonstrates the influence of Victorian culture on children’s literature (1897). An in-depth analysis of the cultural and historical context of the publication uncovers new meaning in the lost text. This three-part analysis discusses norms of Victorian courtship, explains Victorian literary elements, and applies these cultural contexts to textual analysis. This lens highlights W.B. Conkey Company’s tailored message to a young Victorian audience.

"Where Angels Fear To Tread": Tracing The Journey Of The Female Poet In Aurora Leigh, Dorcas Y. Lam

Senior Honors Theses

Through Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning explores the role of female poets as agents of social change in the Victorian society. During the Victorian period, the role of women was largely confined to the domestic setting. While women were allowed to write, female writers were limited to the realm of novels, which was perceived by the Victorian society to be the less distinguished genre. In writing Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning challenged this gender stereotype by producing a "novel-poem" that unites the feminine voice with masculine authority and superiority. Like Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, in her fictional role as a …