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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Blame : Marriage, Folklore, And The Victorian Novel, Corrie Kiesel
Blame : Marriage, Folklore, And The Victorian Novel, Corrie Kiesel
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Blame: Marriage, Folklore, and the Victorian Novel contends that the intersection of folk and legal discourses of responsibility and culpability shapes the way the Victorian novel imagines blame. Recent studies have drawn attention to the importance of official legal discourses such as trial testimony and standards of evidence to the development of narrative form during the nineteenth century. However, by attending to folk modes for establishing blameworthiness in Victorian novels, I show that folk and legal standards of culpability are mutually constitutive. The legal system is designed to identify the culpable in a fixed process – codified in slow-changing statutes …
Invisible Links, Abject Chains: Habit In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Daniel R. Mangiavellano
Invisible Links, Abject Chains: Habit In Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Daniel R. Mangiavellano
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
“Invisible Links, Abject Chains: Habit in Nineteenth-Century British Literature” argues that habit is a central characteristic of both Romantic and Victorian theories of imagination, originality, literary production, and subjectivity. Certainly, nineteenth-century culture often treats habit with suspicion, invoking language of bondage, slavery, and dangerous unconscious imitation to apply to everything from reading habits to opium use. However, by tracing a discourse of habit from association theory to pragmatism and drawing from philosophical, educational, medical, and psychological texts, I foreground how Romantic and Victorian texts redeploy habit as a paradoxical form of imaginative agency. In nineteenth-century culture, habit makes possible what …
Alice's Shadow: Childhood And Agency In Lewis Carroll's Photography, Illustrations, And Alice Texts, R. Nichole Rougeau
Alice's Shadow: Childhood And Agency In Lewis Carroll's Photography, Illustrations, And Alice Texts, R. Nichole Rougeau
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The nineteenth century marks the emergence of a new literary market directed at the entertainment of children. However, a dichotomy exists concerning the image of childhood. Adults tended to idolize childhood in literature to reflect on their own lives ignoring the needs of children to possess an identity of their own. Essentially children are shadows of adults. Examinations of the shadows of childhood—children as shadows of adults, children shadowed by adults, the shadows as identifying children, and the shadows children themselves cast—lead to a discussion of agency over childhood. Lewis Carroll, entering this new literary market with his Alice series, …