Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

Nineteenth-Century Literary Magazines As Short Story Anthologies, Kelsey J. Brazil

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

This project undertakes an inter-generic study of nineteenth-century literary magazines and classroom anthologies. Based on the workings of genre theory by Julia Kristeva, this inter-generic study argues that the form, ideologemic function, and intertextuality of the literary magazine and anthology are generically similar. This notion has the potential to greatly change the reading of periodical literature from a simple reflection of Victorian times or as a mere container of collected (but isolated) literary pieces into one of cohesive, multi-genre significance. The resulting argument is that a nineteenth-century literary magazine can be a reasonable substitute for a textbook anthology in the …

“More Than What [They] Made Us To Be”: From Passing To Perception In Victorian And Modern Vampire Media, Lauren Sieberg

English (MA) Theses

Throughout Victorian Gothic horror fiction, vampires function as deviant figures, maneuvering within social confines of passing until their status quo-threatening identity is exposed. Of the popular vampires from this period, most gradually fail to maintain status as social insiders—as demonstrated with Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula or Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, who possess the temporary capacity to pass until their hidden monstrosity is revealed over time. Even if Gothic monsters are confined to a limited space and time far from society, this is still not enough; in accordance with the Victorian culture of morality policing by dominant groups, the vampiric Other …

Angels Of Many Houses: Reconciling Domesticity In 19th-Century Victorian Literature, Amanda Vierra

College Honors Program

The rise of the Victorian middle class is known for solidifying a separation of gender roles, with women operating in the private, domestic sphere and men in the public sphere. This historical value placed on domesticity is reflected in the rise of domestic fiction, the dominant genre of Victorian literature, which commonly depicts young, middle-class women making their way in the world. The plot of these narratives revolves around women perfecting or contending with their place in the domestic sphere through courtship, marriage, and family. Scholars on domestic fiction have continued to argue over whether domestic fiction reflected the oppressive …

Dorian And The Double: Repressed Homosexual Desire In The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Alexandra Wohlford

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Written for Dr. Chris Foss’s English 478 Seminar on Oscar Wilde, “Dorian and the Double: Repressed Homosexual Desire in The Picture of Dorian Gray” examines one of Wilde’s most infamous and beloved works through the lens of both psychoanalytic and queer theory. Drawing on the Romantic and Gothic traditions’ concept of the “literary double,” this research paper explores the dynamic portrait of Dorian Gray as a double for multiple characters in the text, serving as a representation of their repressed homosexual desire. Namely, Basil Hallward and Dorian Gray himself emerge as the primary focus of this analysis. In addition, …

The Catholic Paradox Of Villette, Kevin R. Bie

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Villette, published in 1853, was Charlotte Brontë’s last novel. Brontë explores both narrative and religious complexities through her narrator, Lucy Snowe. Orphaned Lucy Snowe embarks on a new life in a predominantly Catholic country where her Protestant identity is challenged. Catholicism is presented as a temptation for Lucy. Brontë reveals Lucy’s story through her notable fictional autobiography structure, but Lucy Snowe complicates the relationship between narrator and reader. Lucy explicitly capitalizes on the structure of fictional autobiography, critiquing her narration and fostering a personal relationship with the reader.

This thesis analyzes the Catholic paradox in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette by …

George Macdonald's Phantastes As A Bildungsroman Of Spiritual Reality, Hannah O'Malley

Senior Theses

George MacDonald's 1858 novel Phantastes is one of the first fantasy novels written for adults, but it has received little attention in part because of its confusing structure. I argue that Phantastes is best understood as a Bildungsroman, a novel of formation. While the Bildungsroman is usually a realist novel of commercial society, Phantastes’ fantasy elements allow the protagonist to grow up into a spiritual reality that contrasts with many commercial values. MacDonald uses the fantasy genre to show his protagonist's inner development as he learns humility, gains feminine and childlike virtues, and leaves behind the old self

Orts 77, 2022, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

The last two and half years have seen big changes in how we connect and interact with each other, and this is especially the case for a Society like ours, where many are also geographically separated. While covid is still with us, hopefully things are slowly returning to the “new normal,” however, some of the changes that have occurred will have lasting significance, particularly the accelerated use of technology and move online. There is definitely still a place for face to face meetings, but Societies like ours also need to adapt, and a recurring theme in this newsletter is change. …

“All Wrong In Point Of Political Economy”: Attempting To Salvage The Oikos From The Polis In Bleak House, Leah Casey

Independent Student Projects and Publications

This paper proposes that Dickens’s Bleak House is symptomatic of a so-called social realm, in which neither oikos nor polis exists as a distinct, autonomous entity; therefore, neither can offer sanctuary or adequately discharge the historical role of the household – maintaining life. In this zone of indistinction, the symbolic structures of London’s law have become the city’s physical structures, leading to symptoms like Jo the outlaw, whose illness and death is attributed to the failure of both the polis and the oikos – the city’s legal housekeeping and the law-as-house, respectively ­– to maintain life. London’s law has become …

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Girlhood In The Creation, Content, And Consumption Of Victorian Children’S Literature, Betsy Barthelemy

English Honors Projects

The Golden Age of (British) Children’s Literature was famous not only for the proliferation of fiction it hosted, but also for how much of that work featured young heroine protagonists. Starting with the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and examining two other fantasy works compared with three realistic children's novels from this half-century period, this project elucidates the differences between these genres and examines how authors used the characteristics of each to empower their heroines. It argues that these fictitious heroines influenced real-world readers to create progressive futures by providing examples of rebellious girl characters finding happy endings.

Egyptian Stasis And Imperial Quick-Time: Recursive Xenophobia Cloaked In Mysticism, Laura S. Deluca

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I will be examining temporality in British texts about Egypt across time. In order to achieve this, I analyze the play Antony and Cleopatra (1606) by William Shakespeare, and put it in conversation with Pharos, the Egyptian (1899) by Guy Newell Boothby. I will also be discussing Alexandria (2009) by Lindsey Davis, as a demonstration that the pattern in my findings is enduring. I will be dissecting the portrayal of Egyptian temporality, which I have found to be conveyed as a stasis, as contrasted by the quick-time of dominating imperial powers. These sources will allow me to compare depictions of …

Landscape, Gender, And The Politics Of Belonging In Thomas Hardy’S The Woodlanders And Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Sarah Dickerson

Master’s Theses

In my thesis, I analyze Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), exploring the way that Hardy’s depictions of both landscape and gender are interwoven to illuminate the larger issue of belonging as a central concern for his characters. I argue that in these two novels, we can analyze how one’s belonging to a physical environment and performative gender role directly relate to characters’ tragedy or success in the narratives. Characters who challenge normalized gender roles and characters whose place attachment manifests in natural rather than social spaces, endure worse tragedies than their gendered insider and …

Taming The Beast: Heathcliff As Dog In Wuthering Heights, Anna Cittadino

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the human/animal distinction in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, focusing specifically on the animal within Heathcliff, and the way this animal undermines his ability to be human as a result of the violence and abandonment he endured in childhood.

Anne Brontë The Universalist: Religion And Patriarchal Subversion In The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall And Agnes Grey, Ardyn Tennyson

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Anne Brontë (1820-1849) was an English novelist and religious poet, the youngest of the literary Brontë siblings. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë wrote some of the most esteemed novels of the Victorian canon. Children of an Anglican minister, the Brontës were accustomed to clerical life and the conventions of nineteenth-century religious observance. Anne’s faith, however, was unique and radical, an unorthodox form of Christianity called Universalism, which held that all human beings would be saved, not just those chosen by God. This thesis examines her two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in the context of …

The Romance Of Terror: Stevenson's Dynamiter And Verne's Submariner, David Robb

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses Robert Louis Stevenson's co-authored novel The Dynamiters (More New Arabian Nights, 1885) in the context of late Victorian bombing campaigns and use of dynamite by Irish Fenians and anarchists, exploring the generic differences between Stevenson's use of romance and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), with extensive comparison between Stevenson's dynamiter Zero and Jules Verne's Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869-1870).

“Not As She Is” But As She Is Expected To Be: Representations, Limitations, And Implications Of The “Woman” And Womanhood In Selected Victorian Literature And Contemporary Chick Lit., Amanda Ellen Bridgers

MA in English Theses

In this thesis, I address the influences of the Separate Spheres ideology on representations of women in both Victorian women’s literature and modern Chick Lit. I analyze three primary images of women – the Angel of the House, the Governess, and the New Woman, the relationships between these images and the Spheres ideology, and how modern images have been influenced by the social impacts of the gendered expectations within the ideology. Within each investigation, I include a discussion on works of literature including Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain, Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes, Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola …

I Hate It, But I Can't Stop: The Romanticization Of Intimate Partner Abuse In Young Adult Retellings Of Wuthering Heights, Brianna R. Zgodinski

ETD Archive

In recent years, there has been a trend in young adult adaptations of Wuthering Heights to amend the plot so that Catherine Earnshaw chooses to have a romantic relationship with Heathcliff, when in Bronte’s novel she decides against it. In the following study, I trace the factors that contribute to Catherine’s rejection of Heathcliff as a romantic partner in the original text. Many critics have argued that her motives are primarily Machiavellian since she chooses a suitor with more wealth and familial connections than Heathcliff. These are indeed factors; however, by engaging with contemporary research on adolescent development, I show …

Moving Words/Motion Pictures: Proto-Cinematic Narrative In Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Kara Marie Manning

Dissertations

In the broadest sense, this project is about nineteenth-century narrative texts and optical toys, or those devices that were originally created to demonstrate scientific knowledge related to vision but that would also become popular for home and public consumption. I argue that nineteenth-century British writers borrowed and adapted the visual effects of such toys, making fiction as participatory as the toys themselves in the development of image culture and the viewing practices that would become necessary for the production and dissemination of cinema in the early twentieth century. Narrative fiction, then, should be considered along with the other precursors of …

Orts 75, 2015, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

Over the past year, I and a couple of other postgraduate/early career researchers who share my interest in fantasy studies have launched an initiative called Reading the Fantastic (www.readingthe- fantastic.tumblr.com) at the University of Leeds (UK); our focus is the exploration of fantasy, fairy tale and folk tale texts as spaces of multi-cultural and intercultural connection. Initially involving a guest speaker talk and regular reading group sessions collecting fantasy and fairy tale texts from a wide range of cultures, our activities have expanded (thanks to various funding grants). In addition to adding a regular seminar series to our reading group …

The Beauty And The Barrister: Gender Roles, Madness, And The Basis For Identity In Lady Audley's Secret, Corey Hayes

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis examines the concept of identity in the novel Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. In the mid to late Victorian period, self-definition was strongly tied to gender roles. Men were expected to be mentally active, physical strong, and morally guiding leaders of society, and women were to be their passive, pious, domestically minded followers. These expectations for behavior were so strong that those breaking them were in danger of being considered insane. In Braddon’s novel, the behavior of most characters does not align with the expectations for their gender. The exception is Lady Audley, the apparently ideal …

Handling A Social Threat : The Fate Of Women Beyond Victorian Societal Definition., Alexandra Clifton

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Orts 74, 2013, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

The George MacDonald Society will be hosting a conference from lunchtime Wednesday 13 August to Friday 15 August 2014 at C.S. Lewis' own College, Magdalen, in Oxford. The provisional title is Re-­‐ Imagining the Inklings: the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy, and will be chaired by Professor Stephen Prickett our Chairman.

Fear And Loathing In Nineteenth-Century England: Monsters, Freaks, And Deformities And Their Influence On Romantic And Victorian Society, Valerie Falk

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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The Monkey In The Looking Glass: Fairies, Folklore And Evolutionary Theory In The Search For Britain's Imperial Self, Tessa Katherine Jacobs

Scripps Senior Theses

In his groundbreaking work of postcolonial theory, Orientalism, Edward Said puts forth the idea that imperial Europe asserted an identity by constructing the character of its colonized subjects. Said writes that his book tries to “show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). The object of this thesis is a related project, for it too is a search for imperial Britain’s surrogate or underground self. Yet rather than positioning this search within the British colonies, this thesis takes as its context a …

Orts 73, 2012, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

Orts will soon join North Wind’s Online Digital Archive, thanks to the ongoing efforts of John Pennington, who teaches at Saint Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin. Dr. Pennington, one of the editors of North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies, previously oversaw the digitization of the academic journal. Jaena Manson, an editorial intern at the journal, is assisting in the process, a considerable task given that the archive will encompass the newsletter’s entire history, from the first issue published over thirty years ago in 1981 to the present edition. As with North Wind, the Orts archive will be …

Orts 72, 2011, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

MacDonald on BBC Television

George MacDonald received welcome publicity on BBC Television’s popular Sunday afternoon religious programme Songs of Praise on 16th January this year when I was interviewed about his life and work in a programme broadcast from Arundel in West Sussex. Songs of Praise, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, is centred around hymns chosen by local people and sung in a cathedral or large church, but also includes interviews with local people and others about matters of interest.

Orts 71, 2010, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

Annual General Meeting The next Annual General Meeting of the Society will be held on Saturday 6th November 2010 at 10 Appian Court, Parnell Road, London E3 2RS at 2pm. Space is limited, so if you intend coming please contact Roger Bardet on + 44 (0)20 8980 0083 or at [email protected]. The purpose of the meeting is to receive accounts and a report of the Society’s activities, to elect officers and committee for 2011 and to discuss the Society’s future programme. The nearest underground is either Mile End or Bow Road. Members wishing to explore the neighbourhood ahead of time …

The Power Of Pain Gender, Sadism, And Masochism In The Works Of Wilkie Collins, Helen Doyle

Undergraduate Review

In his novels No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866), Wilkie Collins explores the social role of women in Victorian England, a patriarchal society that forced women either to submit to the control of a man or rebel at the expense of their own health and sanity. Even though some of his characters eventually marry, thus conforming to social expectations for women, I argue that his portrayal of female characters was subversive. In quests for control over their own lives, Magdalen Vanstone and Lydia Gwilt turn to masochism and sadism, practices which eventually lead to identity loss and self-destruction. Collins suggests …

Uncertain Identity: Medical Practitioners In Doctor Thorne And Middlemarch, Denis Illige-Saucier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The medical practitioners who play leading roles in the novels Middlemarch by George Eliot and Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope are examples of a new breed of professional medical men that emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century in England. The new class of general practitioners held licenses from the old hierarchical system of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, but they were the driving force in favor of reform and professionalization in medicine. The 1858 Medical Act was an important step on the path toward a new conception of the medical practitioner, and the development of that new medical identity …

Orts 70, 2007, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

In the summer of 2005, just as we were commemorating the centenary of George MacDonald's death, I received a surprise telephone call from Kate Davies. She was helping two aunts to move out of their large house in Sanderstead, Surrey and into sheltered accommodation and had discovered a large collection of George MacDonald books, many of them first editions and many signed by the author, that had belonged to her aunts' grandfather, William Carey Davies, a Croydon man (south of London) who had been George's private secretary in his later years. Her aunts' father, George MacDonald Davies, had had a …

Orts 69, 2006, The George Macdonald Society

Orts: The George MacDonald Society Newsletter

The MacDonalds moved to Manchester in 1853 and later moved into 3, Camp terrace, Lower Broughton, 'a nice house, large, and in some respects handsome' for £35 a year. Greville was born during this period, and MacDonald attended the inaugural lecture of the Working Men's College given by his friend F.D. Maurice. MacDonald's first book Within and Without was published during his Manchester years.