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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Literary Fairy: Celtic Folklore’S Influence On Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Joshua Dobbs
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
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 …
Railways And Regret: Revising Mobility Myths In Victorian Literature And Culture, 1857-1891, Kathryn Winslow Powell
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, …
“We Know What We Are, But Know Not What We May Be”: Victorian Adaptations Of The Shakespearean Gaze, Joanna Elizabeth Ruth Zimmerman
“We Know What We Are, But Know Not What We May Be”: Victorian Adaptations Of The Shakespearean Gaze, Joanna Elizabeth Ruth Zimmerman
Masters Theses
In considering Victorian adaptations of William Shakespeare, critics have long studied literary references to him as a sign of his popularity as a cultural figurehead. This thesis argues that Shakespeare played a larger role in Victorian writing as a symbol for social change. Through historical research and close readings of the texts, it becomes apparent that in adapting Shakespeare, Victorian authors purposefully wove him into writings that were intended to bring attention to social problems. Shakespeare originally brought focus to certain types of characters, such as women, servants, Jews, and other victims in his work by directing the gaze and …