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Vulnerable Resistance In Victorian Women’S Writing, Stephanie A. Harper

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores how socially vulnerable characters, often dismissed as lacking access to agency, create space for resistance in nineteenth-century women’s writing. Central questions the dissertation addresses are, “Why is resistance by vulnerable characters not read?” and “How are women writers encoding resistance?” Working within a comprehensive historical picture of the challenges and concerns women writers of the nineteenth century had to contend with, and informed by feminist scholarship on women writers of the nineteenth century, the dissertation looks at vulnerable characters within Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and Olive …