Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Refiguring George Macdonald: Science And The Realist Novel, Karl Hoenzsch

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This article analyzes George MacDonald’s realist novels. It looks at how David Elginbrod, Alec Forbes of Howglen, and Lilith engage with scientific discourse and epistemological concerns of the period. These scientific and epistemological dealings include a positive evaluation of evolution, a resistance to pseudoscience and Calvinism, an endorsement of non-dualism, and an analysis of scientific models and methods. The generic classification of Lilith as a realist novel with fantastical elements is discussed.

Middlemarch: Eliot's Spencerian Sociological Study Of Provincial Life, Kellie Marie Mckinney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through the novel Middlemarch, George Eliot fulfills the intention of her subtitle and uses sociological theories to conduct A Study of Provincial Life. Eliot's letters, journals, and various essays provide evidence of sociologist Herbert Spencer's influence on her own writings. Spencer's specific opinions and contributions not only strengthen the sociological message of Eliot's novel, but a handful of his ideals shape the narrative voice of her novel. Variations of Spencer's theories are seen in Eliot's "authorial narrator's" comments and observations of the Middlemarch couples. With her narrator, Eliot applies Spencer's theories on "belief" and on the correlation of …

G.A.M.E.: A Hypermedia Edition Of James Mcneill Whistler’S The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies, Amy Colombo

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation, G.A.M.E., refashions James McNeill Whistler’s book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, into a hypermediated facsimile text and archive. By remediating the text, the socio-historical context of the Victorian time period in which Whistler lived is reestablished, making his book more accessible to twenty-first century audiences. The era studied in this dissertation includes the expansion of the idea of celebrity, the power of the press, and the concept of art for art’s sake from 1863 through 1892. In order to showcase these concepts, archival materials, such as personal correspondence, newspaper clippings, and published pamphlets, from this period were …

Protofeminist Women In Bronte’S Jane Eyre And Braddon’S Lady Audley’S Secret, Allison Wong

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Was Jonathan Harker Wearing A Red Hood?, A. Nicole Ferrell

English 502: Research Methods

An icon of Gothic literature and forerunner of vampire lore, Dracula is credited as being inspired by Stoker’s nightmare after eating a particularly rich crab dinner. It’s also evident that he was influenced by other British invasion tales, LeFanu’s tale “Carmilla,” and The Woman in White. However, no work is evident as of yet about the possibility of Dracula being influenced by fairy tales, specifically “Little Red Riding Hood” in structure, themes, and characters.

This essay will be considering Dracula’s background, why Stoker wrote it and its Victorian influences. Then I will examine Bettelheim’s fairy tale structure as …

Works In Progress: Child Characters In Victorian And Postcolonial Fiction, 1814 - 2006, Kiran Mascarenhas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I analyze the relationship between national and individual development in Victorian and postcolonial novels set in India. My central argument is that the investment in the idea of progress that characterizes colonial narratives of childhood gives way in postcolonial fiction to a suspicion of dominant understandings of progress, and that this difference is manifest in the identity formation of the child character as well as in the form of the novel.

In the Victorian colonial narratives discussed in this study, the bildung of the child involves the overcoming of the child's conflicted cultural identity. The children of …

Collapsing The Secret Self: Thackeray's The History Of Pendennis As A Performative Parody, Rachel Freire

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

By collapsing the distinctions between private and public as he presents individual interiority as yet another performance, Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis undercuts disciplinary individualism, so that performances are not the product of social regulation but rather are as genuine as any presumed private thoughts or feelings. Pendennis actively performs the dissolution of interiority, as it thematically and stylistically enacts the awkwardness of genuine affectation as a routine and unavoidable reality of modern life. Reveling in the discomfort that accompanies the absence of secrecy, Thackeray parodies the privileging of secrecy and one’s interior self that pervades the Bildung genre he …

The Deception Of Perception: Browning, Childe Roland, And Supersensory Belief, Catherine Blass

All Theses

Browning's fascination with the senses and the mind as determiners of reality floods his work. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,' in particular, offers a more complicated, sincere exploration of this topic that had become central to Victorian debate. As Browning acknowledges repeatedly through his poetry, the debate between sensory data (empiricism) and supersensory belief (idealism) could not be understood in clear-cut categories. In much of his poetry, however, he grounds these questions in deceptively simple discussions of mesmerism or the Victorian philosophy of the mind. Although those two topics may seem disparate to twenty-first century readers, Victorian belief …

Jailbreakers, Villains, And Vampires: Representations Of Criminality In Early-Victorian Popular Texts, Elizabeth Fay Stearns

English - Dissertations

In Jailbreakers, Villains, and Vampires: Representations of Criminality in Early-Victorian Popular Texts, I analyze moments of discursive dissonance that emerge through the juxtaposition of early-Victorian theories of criminality and representations of criminals in popular culture. In the 1830s and 1840s in England, methods for managing criminals underwent a series of revisions that corresponded to shifts in prevailing theories about the nature and course of criminal behavior. Assumptions that criminality was volitional, or that it originated in an individual's deficient self-discipline, gradually shifted into perceptions that criminality was pathological, and that malefactors were naturally brutish and incorrigible. Predominant conceptions of …

Symbolic Capital And The Performativity Of Authorship: The Construction And Commodification Of The Nineteenth-Century Authorial Celebrity, Whitney Helms

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Victorian and Antebellum writers were the first literary figures to construct and perform their authorship within the sphere of celebrity. Unlike their Romantic predecessors who endured fame as an unexpected consequence of their popularity, the Victorians and their contemporaries understood celebrity as a condition of authorship. This dissertation takes as its subject the origins and development of symbolic power for authors as it was expressed in the trappings of celebrity and mass culture and argues that authorship became no longer strictly a profession of writing, but rather a performative endeavor that could be presented through diverse commercial markets. Investigating the …

Employment Relations And The Failure Of Sympathy In Hardy’S Desperate Remedies And The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Lauren Hoffer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Epitome And Portrait Of Modern Society: Ouida As Social Barometer Of The Victorian Era, Lorraine Michelle Dubuisson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Victorian Era was one of great social flux; tremendous advances in science and technology called into question deeply held religious beliefs while the changing legal status of women threatened to undermine traditional views of gender roles. Industrialization and the driving economic force of capitalism led to rapid urbanization as well as contributing to shifting class boundaries. In addition, the purpose and responsibilities of the Artist/Poet and, indeed, of art itself were closely scrutinized and hotly contested. Most frequently, historians and scholars of literature have looked to authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson …

Dickensian Characters In J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, Alison Mckeever

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

J.K. Rowling includes many Dickensian-esque characters in her Harry Potter series. This thesis compares the characters seen in Rowling's series with many of Charles Dickens's characters, specifically those seen in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Bleak House. Rowling's work is similar to Dickens's novels in many ways. The most interesting connection between the two is how they treat the characters on the periphery of the societies they have created, most notably their orphans, servants, and women.

Orphans are their most obvious comparison. Each author based their texts on the story of an orphan. However, there is more to their orphan …

Samuel Butler's Life And Habit And The Way Of All Flesh: Traumatic Evolution, Danielle Nielsen

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

Samuel Butler’s seminal evolutionary text Life and Habit (1878) and semiautobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903) instill in modern readers a sense of the social discord of the late-Victorian period. The more well-known novel advocates a break with Victorian morality as professed through the Anglican Church and explores the inability to exercise the free will Butler believed people experienced because of the repressive religious culture and, more interestingly, genetically inherited habits and dispositions. The novel also illustrates Butler’s belief in the need to break away from one’s past and family to obtain personal happiness. A joint reading of …

Turning `The Angel Of The House' Out Of The House: Privacy In The Nineteenth Century Sensation Novel, Ashley Crider

All Theses

This thesis explores nineteenth-century transatlantic sensation fiction. My examination of George Lippard's The Quaker City: Or the Monks of Monk HallThe Quaker City: Or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret investigates the construction of the Angel of the House in both the domestic and public spheres. I pay particular attention to `feminine' spaces such as the boudoir, and how the sensation novel represents physical space and commodity culture to comment on female sexual agency and how nineteenth century classes constructed womanhood. In addition to Braddon and Lippard, my thesis explores such American texts …

Realism And The Irish Victorian Novel, Lorcan Sirr

Other Resources

SAMENVATTING Deze thesis onderzoekt de aard van Realisme in negentiende-eeuwse Ierse fictie. De nadruk ligt hierbij op het testen van de algemeen aanvaarde vooronderstelling dat Realisme opvallend afwezig was in de Ierse werken van die periode. De negentiende eeuw kende een grote toename in geletterdheid doorheen alle klassen en vormde op die manier een ideaal beginpunt voor het ontstaan van een nieuwe markt, zowel voor auteurs als uitgevers. Vooral in het Engeland van die periode werd dit duidelijk. Er speelde zich ook verschuivingen in stijl en literaire smaken af waarbij Realisme zichzelf als het meest populaire vooropstelde. De Ierse schrijvers …

Opium Use In Victorian England: The Works Of Gaskell, Eliot, And Dickens, Jessica Rae Henderson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

England’s opium trade with China in the nineteenth century, often conjures up images of a powerful nation, for financial gain and heedless of the damage caused, nefariously thrusting addictive drugs on an unwitting Chinese people and unwilling Chinese government. But this image hides the English side of the story, i.e. England’s own problem with opium. The English imported thousands of pounds for domestic use each year in the 19^th century, and until the late 1860s its sale was completely unrestricted. It was used as a veritable cure-all for various diseases, as well as a relief for any kind of …