English Language and Literature Commons^™

Apocalypse Then And Now: Narrative Influence And Thematic Subversion Of Victorian Literature In Modern American War Narratives, Douglas James Scully

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that by looking at the lasting impact of Victorian war literature on a variety of modern media, one can see that an increased cultural awareness of trauma has led to less humane depictions of the traumatized. The multitude of Sherlock Holmes adaptations produced and set in various time periods and covering assorted wars serves as a strong example in my first chapter of how a Victorian-produced text can have a lingering impact, and the veteran Watson serves as a strong tool for adaptors to use when commenting on the shifting nature of war and the …

The Literary Fairy: Celtic Folklore’S Influence On Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Joshua Dobbs

Doctoral Dissertations

There is a dissonance between the folkloric fairies and those presented by pop-cultural institutions such as Disney which has effected modern literary criticism of nineteenth-century British literature. The Disnified fairy is feminine, small, capable of flight, often with insect-like wings, and equipped with a magic wand with which she does good deeds to help others. She is largely based on fairy tales and is the embodiment of the modern conceptualization of the fairy, but she bears little, if any, resemblance to the fearsome fairies of Celtic folklore. Although nineteenth-century literature is rife with folkloric fairy references, those references are frequently …

Supporting Characters: Prosthesis And Aesthetic Technologies Of Disability In The Victorian Novel, Rebecca L. Mccann

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the production of physical disability and the function of prosthesis in nineteenth-century British fiction. My intervention in disability studies readings of Victorian literature attends to the prosthetic object and prosthetic body not only as the dual products of medicine and art, but also as catalytic elements of fiction and culture. I read reciprocal developments in medical technology and disabled characterization in the Victorian novel to demonstrate how the artistic translation of the prosthetic object effected a set of criteria for defining people through both bodies and things and, in so doing, revealed the ways in which the …

The Science Of Art “Faithfully Presented”: Entropy In British Victorian Literature, Hannah Harris

Student Research Submissions

In the chemical world, entropy, or the randomness and chaos of a system, must continually increase; it is much more favorable for things to fall apart than to be put together. This scientific concept can also be rightly applied to the study of literature. While it is true books contain information put together into some sense of order from chaos, making them counterintuitive to entropy, I am convinced these works must still obey the laws of thermodynamics. There must be an increase in chaos somewhere, and if it is not within the words themselves, it must lie within the ideas …

Empire Of Horror: Race, Animality, And Monstrosity In The Victorian Gothic, Grace Monaghan

Honors Projects

This project examines Victorian England through the analysis of three Victorian gothic novels: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903/1912), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). The end of the nineteenth century and the final years of the Victorian era brought with them fears and uncertainties about England’s role in the world and its future, fears that the Victorian gothic sought to grapple with, but inevitably failed to contain. In examining this genre, I draw on “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (Chatterjee et al, 2020), which calls for the field of Victorian studies to center racial theory. As …

"I Want To Melt Into Her Body": Sexual Empowerment And A Feminist Recentering Of The Female Characters In Dracula By Bram Stoker, Carmilla By J. Sheridan Lefanu, And Villette By Charlotte Bronte, Carson Leigh Pender

Graduate Theses

Simone de Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex, “The normal sexual act [of intercourse] effectively makes woman dependent on the male and the species. It is he–as for most animals– who has the aggressive role and she who submits to his embrace. . . coitus cannot take place without male consent, and male satisfaction is its natural end result” (385). Essentially, de Beauvoir argues that the act of sex cannot exist without the presence of man, but particularly for heterosexual women, the act of sex is dependent on the presence of, responsibility of, and response of men. However, despite the …

From Byronic To Gothic Blood Sucker: Subversion Toward A Non-Gendered Identity, Hannah Hoover

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Analyzing Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and linking trends of the Byronic hero that have merged into a variety of genres reveal that the hero is a mode of subversive gender expression, which has evolved within the Gothic through feminine desire. Delving into Bram Stoker’s Dracula will provide unique insight into the audience’s desires/expressions of gender. Finding the transition point from the monster vampire of Dracula to Stephanie Meyer’s desirous, sparkling boy-next-door in Twilight will track the trajectory of gender and sexual norms through time. From the foundational adaptation of the Byronic hero in Wuthering Heights to the repressed vampiric desire …

From Governess To Wife: How Women On The Fringe Of Society Upset And Restore Victorian Homes, Elsa C. Torgersen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In middle-class Victorian homes, wives were responsible for the care of the home, the raising of children, and the maintenance and upward mobility of her family’s social standing. She was the heart of the home and her purity and commitment to the home would not only affect her family, but also society. Yet the women who were qualified according to societal standards were a small group, carefully chosen to maintain the standards of society. In the novels Bleak House and Jane Eyre, the authors push back against strict societal expectations. They ask the audience to consider if women should …

The Effects Of Victorian Circulating Libraries On The Conventions Of Society, Kaitlyn M. Clary

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

As an era that is oftentimes categorized as one of the most prudish in British history, it is commonplace to see the Victorian Period as a time that imposed strict moral codes onto people of all classes, genders, and ages. Although the 18th century proved to be quite lenient with the manner in which social behavior was controlled, the 19th century proved to be an era of tension between the social order and individual desire, particularly for the middle and upper classes. With the aid of the Industrial Revolution, many governments found it essential to utilize the newly innovated printing …

“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I discuss Algernon Swinburne’s and Dora Greenwell’s engagement with the myth of Proserpine through an analysis of the motif of the garden, which takes central stage in both accounts. The examination will illustrate how the authors’ outlined images of the garden challenge the dominant representation of the motif within Western literary tradition, offering a re-interpretation of the myth as social commentary.

Dickens’S Changing Perspective Towards Capitalism And The Bourgeoisie, Christina Oliveira

Honors Program Theses

Most scholars agree that author and social activist Charles Dickens (1812-1870) made keen observations on human behavior and societal problems through his works. However, scholars are divided over whether to categorize Dickens and his work as radically reformist or pro-bourgeoisie. Through an analysis of three of Dickens’s texts, A Christmas Carol (1843), Bleak House (1852), and Great Expectations (1861), this thesis demonstrates that Dickens’s works carry contradictory ideologies. As time passes, Dickens becomes disillusioned with capitalism but continues to promote capitalist and bourgeois values and ideologies. The trajectory of Dickens’s views shows the difficulties in imagining different realities outside of …

Origin Of Doubts: The Victorian Quest For Proof And Radical Manifestations Of Spirit, Holly O'Byrne

English Honors Theses

Victorians critics have deemed the nineteenth century in England “a crisis of faith.” In the face of dissatisfaction with the Church of England, people rejected organized religion and turned to alternative spirituality like Natural Supernaturalism and Corporeal Spiritualism. The motivation for this paper began with the questions: why were people leaving the church and what were they finding in these other spiritual practices? I argue that the question of belief, for Victorians, became a question of proof. Darwin’s 1859 publication On the Origin of Species presented a theory about the world through a scientific argument containing a hypothesis, evidence, and …

A Ray Of Moonlight Falls: Casting Light On Oscar Wilde's Dissident Decadence, Hannah Rose Sacks

English Honors Theses

This thesis follows the work of Oscar Wilde, tracking his poetic prose in conjunction with his dissidence against societal expectations in the late Victorian era. Works analyzed include The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome, The Happy Prince, De Profundis, and others.

The George Eliot Archive: Current Reception & Comparison Of Dh Projects 2020, Mackenzie Burch, Beverley Rilett

UCARE Research Products

• Current legal gray area for digital collections: An exception for public libraries and archives as educational tools exists for copyright infringement, but digital archives are not currently protected by this exception unless they can prove that the content is transformative.

• Benefits of archiving scholarship together: Grouping like scholarship together regardless of genre or authorship allows for unique cross-purpose or interdisciplinary connections to be drawn from the collection.

• Humanists of today must devote time and resources to the educational tools and platforms of tomorrow: Without the successful building and completion of means to ensure digital archives can be …

Failures Of Grace: Limits Of Tragedy In The Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, Anick S. Rolland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Failures of Grace argues that nineteenth-century novelists challenge the hegemonies of literary form and the value of personal suffering through what I call the trans-genre tragic novel. This new form is emblematic of a period in which values hang in the balance and places traditional values at odds with themselves by combining the low form of the novel with the highest mimetic mode in the Western tradition: tragedy. It simultaneously proposes the most vulnerable members of society as tragic heroes in contrast to the noble figures who previously were presumed to define the genre.

Through close readings of works by …

Psychographic Persona Development In The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Melody Day

Undergraduate Honors Theses

When interviewed about his Victorian Gothic masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde once observed that “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me: Dorian is what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps” (Oscar Wilde). These three characters represent widely different types of people; in light of Wilde’s words, then, what does it truly mean to be Basil, Lord Henry, or Dorian Gray? In other words, what interests, opinions, and values held by these characters determine how each of them differ from one another? In my cross-discipline …

British Poetry Of The Long Nineteenth Century, Beverley Rilett

Zea E-Books Collection

A Selection for College Students, including Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge.

Includes biographical sketches.

doi 10.32873/unl.dc.zea.1096

Cultivating A New Educator: Teacher And Students Sharing Growth, Megan Campbell

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This is Megan Campell-Looney's final portfolio for her M.A. in English (with a specialization in teaching). It includes a reflective narrative and four revised pieces: "A Murderous Moral Tale: Depictions of the Ideal Victorian in Wilkie Collins' Jezebel's Daughter," "Critical Thinking and Counseling Through the Power of Literature," Developing an American Identity: Syllabus and Assignment Plan," and "Evolving and Adapting Rhetoric and Theory: Indigenous Theory Writing Back." The portfolio focuses on research and study that developed Looney's classroom pedagogy and philosophy. Students and educators both must write back to gain the agency needed for growth.

Predicting The Future For A Victorian World: A Digital Exploration Of “Domestic Studies In The Year 2000 A.D.”, Kimberly Plater

Modernist Short Story Project

While “Domestic Studies in the Year 2000 A. D.” may be E. S. P. Haynes’s only piece of fiction, it captures two of his main ideologies in two very short stories. The stories adopt a dystopian view toward the future, looking ahead 87 years with two scenarios depicting average life in the year 2000. Both stories tackle decidedly controversial topics for the early twentieth century: individual freedoms and gender roles. The story found an appropriate home in the progressive periodical The New Freewoman, which heavily promoted the advancement of women, taking progressive stances on equality and feminism. Part one …

"The More They’Re Beaten The Better They Be": Gendered Violence And Abuse In Victorian Laws And Literature, Danielle T. Dominguez

CMC Senior Theses

During the Victorian age, the law and society were in conversation with each other, and the law reflected Victorian gender norms. Nineteenth-century gender attitudes intersected with the law, medical discourse, and social customs in a multitude of ways. Abuse and gender violence occurred beneath the veneer of Victorian respectability. The models of nineteenth-century social conduct were highly gendered and placed men and women in separate social spheres. As this research indicates, the lived practices of Victorians, across social and economic strata, deviated from these accepted models of behavior. This thesis explores the ways that accepted and unaccepted standards of female …

Reading Charlotte Bronte Reading, Madhumita Gupta

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay considers the significance of undirected childhood reading on an author’s mind and the reason some authors reference specific real books in their fiction. I argue that independent reading (as against schooling or formal education), and the direct and indirect references to certain books in Jane Eyre^[1] were deliberate, well-thought-out inclusions for specific purposes at different points in the story. When a title pointedly says Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, it is probable that a significant part of the author’s life has seeped into her creation which makes it essential to consider the relevant parts of her life to …

Theatrical Weddings And Pious Frauds: Performance And Law In Victorian Marriage Plots, Adrianne A. Wojcik

Dissertations (1934 -)

This study investigates how key Victorian novelists, such as Anne and Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, emphasize performativity in their critiques of marriage. Given the performative nature of wedding ceremonies, this project focuses on wedding descriptions in select novels by the aforementioned authors. Such a focus highlights an interesting dilemma. Although we often think of Victorian novels as overwhelmingly concerned with marriage, the few wedding descriptions found in Victorian fiction are aborted, unusually short or announced after the fact. Those Victorian novelists who do feature weddings often describe them …

Parallels Of Morality: Wilde And Nietzsche’S Challenge To Social Obligation, Amzie A. Dunekacke

Honors Theses

This thesis explores Irish author Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in relation to a selection of texts by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. To demonstrate the similarities between Wilde and Nietzsche’s challenges to European morality, this work considers these themes, which are present in the ideologies of both Wilde and Nietzsche: the body and sensual pleasure, social construction, and the hypocrisy of altruism. Both radical thinkers castigate Platonic notions of the body as ignoble and weak, and they mock European propriety’s shyness of the body. In addition, Wilde and Nietzsche offer similar criticisms of social laws, adopting a …

Empire Of The Imagination: Imperialism And The Child Reader Of Victorian And Neo-Victorian Children's Literature, Megan Hicks

Master’s Theses

My thesis explores the depiction of the British Empire in Victorian and Neo-Victorian children’s fiction. Though scholars may expect to find simplistic imperial triumphalism in texts written in the late Victorian period and incisive critiques of empire in contemporary texts, my work demonstrates that the ideology of empire is much more contradictory, unstable, and incohesive than one might assume. By looking at the instability of imperial ideology through the lens of children’s fiction, I examine the ways in which that ideology is contested in the text rather than a stable site of ideological transference from adult to child. Thus, my …

Novel Buildings: Architectural And Narrative Form In Victorian Fiction, Ashley R. Nadeau

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, “Novel Buildings: Architectural and Narrative Form in Victorian Fiction,” offers an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between the economic and social histories of built space and the Victorian literary imagination. At its most fundamental level, it claims that the spaces we inhabit shape the stories we tell. Reading Victorian literature through the architectural archive of the period, it argues that the nineteenth century’s rapidly evolving built environment resulted in a new set of narrative possibilities and laid the foundations for authorial innovations in genre, style, and form. Organized taxonomically around four architectural types reinvented in the nineteenth century—courthouses, …

Railways And Regret: Revising Mobility Myths In Victorian Literature And Culture, 1857-1891, Kathryn Winslow Powell

Doctoral Dissertations

Since 1979 when Wolfgang Schivelbusch applied Marx’s phrase “annihilation of time and space” to the nineteenth-century railways, the idea that locomotives revolutionized mobility and restructured life has undergirded historical analysis. Recent scholarship challenges this long-standing assumption, countering that transportation networks expanded through evolutionary change and that cultural adaptation occurred by resisting the imposing forces of modernity. My study joins this critical departure but proposes a new conceptual model defined by regret and revision. This dissertation argues that fiction written between 1857-1891 illustrates railway growth as a recursive and participatory process. I show through the writing of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Riddell, …

"The Sudden Thrill Of That Change": Framing George Eliot's Social Vision, Cyrus Seaberry Frost

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although scholarly commentary of the last decade has engaged more intensively than ever with the content of George Eliot's ideas concerning nineteenth-century British culture, the devices and techniques Eliot employs in the transmission of those ideas remain less explored. Consequently, room exists for a study as attentive to the formal characteristics of Eliot's messages as recent scholars have been to the content of those messages. This dissertation seeks to elucidate the ways in which specific formal techniques that characterize Eliot's fictional work evince her engagement with the thinking of social theorists, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach. The project contends that Eliot internalizes …

Bad Girls In Corsets: Women And The Transgressive Body In The Nineteenth Century, Colleen Warwick Green

Open Access Dissertations

Women, and their bodies, posed an increasing anxiety for Victorian society. Culturally and outwardly, the Victorian era strove to maintain a level of decorum that, increasingly, the nineteenth-century woman were, rebelling against. The urge for women to break through social barriers and constraints binding them to the century created a divergence in thought from the traditional mores of the past, in turn affecting the ways in which womens’ bodies were portrayed, displayed and manipulated by the authors and artists of the century.

As women entered actively entered into spaces once closed to them, they furthered the rift of uncertainty and …

In Search Of Health, Freedom & Identity: An Analysis Of Isabella Bird's And Margaret Fountaine's Renovation Of Self Through Travel & Travel Writing, Mikki L. Stacey

Student Publications

“An Analysis of Isabella Bird’s and Margaret Fountaine’s Renovation of Self through Travel & Travel Writing” tracks three interdependent facets of identity that become apparent in the travel literature of Victorian ladies Isabella Lucy Bird and Margaret Fountaine. These facets are:

• the socialized self (the identity developed as a result of the society in which one grows up)
• the renovated self (the identity developed through interacting with and adapting to other cultures )
• and the edited self (the identity one creates when she writes about her experiences—for my thesis specifically, the identity the author creates to reconcile her socialized and …

"Your Reclamation”: The Gothic Child And Moral Restoration In Charles Dickens’S A Christmas Carol, Ashten Roberts

Master's Theses

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), an example of Victorian Gothic literature, portrays spirits escorting Ebenezer Scrooge on a journey through time in order to transform him from a miser to a benefactor. Dickens’s text has received much critical attention, and while most critics agree that the novella includes various elements of the gothic, few draw attention to the possibility of the child characters as gothic elements. I argue that Carol’s child characters can be read in terms of what Margarita Georgieva calls “the gothic child.” According to Georgieva, the gothic child can be an adult’s memory from childhood …