Browsing by Subject "British literature"
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Item Agents of change : stewardship and the ethic of care in nineteenth-century British literary representations of social change(2015-08) Smith, Melissa Ann, Ph. D.; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Ferreira-Buckley, Linda; Moore, Lisa L; MacDuffie, Edward A; Christian, George SThe steward was a ubiquitous figure in England for the centuries during which the landed estate dominated both the geographical and political landscape and figured prominently in Victorian religious and economic discourses. However, the figure of the steward and the role and the ethic of stewardship have not been subjected to sustained critical scrutiny in literature studies. This study therefore adopts a social historical approach to explore the function of stewards and stewardship in representations of social change in nineteenth-century English fiction, including George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72; 1874), Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (1855), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) and Charlotte Brönte’s Villette (1853). Stewards managed the property of England’s major landholders and ensured the financial prosperity of their estates by carefully managing social relations. Their duties required them to connect, communicate, and reconcile the varied interests of different classes and groups and especially to synthesize profit and sympathy, economy and feeling. These duties made stewards ideally situated to observe, accommodate, resist, and participate in processes like enclosure, parliamentary reform, and industrialization that altered landscapes and changed people’s relationships to property. Based on this historical reality, this project proposes that stewardship represented to Victorians a non-possessive approach to property management that made stewards important figures through which to represent and imagine processes of transition that emphasized growth, development, and change based on de-centralized, inclusive principles, principles often conceptualized as acts of caring and the establishment of community. It therefore applies the framework of the ethic of care to explore how stewards represent the ways that Victorians dealt with concerns about changing definitions of and relationships to property that defined agency and power in the nineteenth century. Observing characters who act as stewards under the ethic of care rubric reveals maps of power in these novels that indicate that values like care and community could be instrumentalized to secure the authority and predominance of the socially powerful. The project also explores how novels and novelists mirrored both the functions and the moral ambivalence of the steward as they participated in aesthetic projects and acts of representation associated with affective community creation.Item Between Christ and Achilles : Christian humanism in crisis and a new heroic ideal in English fiction, 1713-1813(2021-05-07) Hall, Kirsten Anne; Barchas, Janine; Hedrick, Elizabeth A.; Bertelsen, Lance; Bowden, Martha; Marshall, AshleyThis dissertation is about the disintegration of Renaissance Christian humanism in the Enlightenment and the literary efforts to reunite those fragments. The tension between the classical philosophical tradition and Christian theology is an old problem, one that up until the Renaissance had found compromise in Christian humanism. Under the changing historical conditions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, it resurfaced as a new problem that old solutions could no longer manage. In England, the so-called “latitudinarians,” English theologians of the Restoration whose ideas were to mark the mainstream of Anglican thought well into the 1800s, were among the last torchbearers of Christian humanism and yet largely responsible for its decline. The latitudinarian emphasis on ethics over doctrine, in the wake of the civil strife of the seventeenth century, rendered the ethically-based systems of ancient writers newly tempting, opening the gates to the rising tide of freethinkers, atheists, and deists who in their efforts to free morality from the shackles of religion, turned to classical moral philosophy not as a complement to but as a replacement for Christian moral teachings. This conflict was memorably articulated by Richard Steele at the start of the century when he asked in The Christian Hero, “Why is it that the Heathen struts and the Christian sneaks in our Imaginations?” While Steele’s concern that his contemporaries had become too enthralled with the ancient world at the expense of Christianity is echoed throughout the period, what makes Steele’s essay especially noteworthy is the way he carves out a place for literature’s crucial role in this philosophical and religious crisis. Hs rallying cry for “Elegant Pens” to take up the cause of Christianity and win back not just the minds, but the hearts of its readers by offering attractive and powerful Christian “heroes” is one, I argue, that prompts the response of early novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and, later, Jane Austen.Item Beyond sexual satisfaction : pleasure and autonomy in women’s inter-war novels in England and Ireland(2011-05) Bacon, Catherine M.; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cullingford, Elizabeth; Carter, Mia; Eastman, Caroline; Garrity, JaneMy dissertation offers a new look at how women authors used popular genres to negotiate their economic, artistic, and sexual autonomy, as well as their national and imperial identities, in the context of the changes brought by modernity. As medical science and popular media attempted to delineate women’s sexual natures, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby, Kate O’Brien, and Molly Keane created narratives which challenged not only psychoanalytic proscriptions about the need for sexual satisfaction, but traditional ideas about women’s inherent modesty. They absorbed, revised, and occasionally rejected outright the discourses of sexology in order to advocate a more diffuse sensuality; for these writers, adventure, travel, independence, creativity, and love between women provided satisfactions as rich as those ascribed to normative heterosexuality. I identify a history of queer sexuality in both Irish and English contexts, one which does not conform to emergent lesbian identity while still exceeding the limits of heteronormativity.Item From Winckelmann to Wilde : masculinity and the historical poetics of nineteenth-century British Hellenism(2018-05) Spitzer-Hanks, Dorrel Thomas, III; Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, 1957-; Hoad, Neville Wallace, 1966-; Baker, Samuel; King, Josh; MacKay, CarolThis dissertation is a survey of nineteenth-century British Hellenism in texts authored between 1768 and 1895 by elite, bourgeois, and working-class people both female and male. Beginning in 18th-century Germany, the dissertation tracks the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann on nineteenth-century British Hellenism, asserting that there is a characteristic cluster of representational attributes visible in British Hellenist texts that display a shared ideological emphasis. Winckelmann, who rose from humble beginnings to become the Vatican’s prefect of antiquities, bequeathed a systematic art-historical approach to classical Greek art that became an idealist discourse of British Greekness through the influence of the annual lectures given by Sir Joshua Reynolds, founding president of the Royal Academy of Art, to students between 1768 and 1792. Posthumously the ‘Grand Style’ aesthetics Reynolds promulgated became highly politicized, its influence clear in the debates surrounding the parliamentary purchase of the Parthenon Marbles from Lord Elgin in 1816, in the poetry, prose, art and architecture of the 1820s and 1830s, in specific exhibits at the Great Exhibition of 1851, in the anthropological debates touched off by Darwin’s Origins of Species after 1859, and in Oscar Wilde’s fin-de-siécle advocacy of Dress Reform and his reformed, Reynoldsian aesthetic idealism. Particularly during Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials, the political valence of nineteenth-century British Hellenism is inescapable, being explicitly enunciated in Wilde’s famous “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name” speech, but I argue throughout that nineteenth-century British Hellenism tends to create ‘enfigurations’ of subjectivity that constrain those who adopt them through insistent reference to an ideal subjectivity that is embodied in white, abled, elite, heterosexual male bodies resembling those found in classical Greek art. Thus I show that while the political valence of nineteenth-century British Hellenism could be contested, the terms of the debate remained fixed around an unmarked yet hypervisible central term, which fixity acted to foreclose radical political change throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly in the 1890s, when British sexological debates made the figure of the modern male homosexual visible at the same time that campaigns for tolerance of homosexuality were energetically quashedItem Minor modern landscapes : British travel narratives and imperialism, 1890-1930(2016-06-14) Hyslop, Brianna Elizabeth; Carter, Mia; Hoad, Neville; Baker, Sam; Harlow, Barbara; El-Ariss, TarekThis dissertation explores late nineteenth and early twentieth century British travel narratives through an examination of the colliding enterprises, conflicting narratives, and strange affects of British travel at the turn of the century. Through a close analysis of travel narratives by Gertrude Bell, Vita Sackville-West, and E. M. Forster—and their strange forms—I argue that what is often considered a “minor” genre is significant in that it contains and should be recognized for providing an archive of perspectives and memories. Each of these travelers and writers encounter, participate in, and confront various forms of imperialist policy and practice in the regions of Mesopotamia, Persia, Syria, and Northern Egypt. They draw upon discourses of cultivation to consider diplomatic development, imaginary landscapes, and the historical procession of civilizations. Through close readings that highlight the ambivalence and multi-tonal layers captured in the travel narratives examined in this dissertation, I demonstrate that the richness of this archive creates a sort of narrative heterotopia—a narrative space encompassing the irreducible nuances and relationships provoked by the physical and imaginary spaces they describe. These travel narratives are a space in which these intersectional policies, practices, and beliefs coexist. Furthermore, this dissertation concludes by suggesting that study of such narratives is increasingly important from an archival perspective in the twenty-first century. The archive of multiple perspectives, memories, and cultural landscapes provided by the travel narrative represents a “reservoir of shared experience” (Stavans and Ellison 5) that can allow readers and scholars to access places they might otherwise find inaccessible in the current geopolitical climate, in which IS/Daesh works to erase signs of diverse cultural pasts in their monocultural zealotry.Item Publishing short stories : British modernist fiction and the literary marketplace(2012-08) Zacks, Aaron Shanohn; Winship, Michael, 1950-; Nadel, Ira; Friedman, Alan; Carter, Mia; Lesser, WayneThe short story was the most profitable literary form for most fiction-writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries because it was quick to write, relative to novels, marketable to a wide variety of periodicals, and able to be re-sold, in groups, for book collections. While the majority of writers composed short fiction within conventional modes and genres and published collections rarely exhibiting more than a superficial coherence of setting or character, modernist authors found in the form’s brevity helpful restrictions on their stylistic and narrative experiments, and, in the short story collection, an opportunity to create book-length works exhibiting new, modern kinds of coherence. This dissertation examines four modernists' experiences writing short stories and publishing them in periodicals and books: Henry James in The Yellow Book and Terminations (Heinemann, 1895); Joseph Conrad in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (Blackwood, 1902); James Joyce in The Irish Homestead and Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914); and Virginia Woolf in Monday or Tuesday (Hogarth, 1921). For these writers, the production of short fiction within the literary marketplace had definite and important consequences on their texts as well as the formation of their mature authorial identities. (With the exception of James, I focus on the early, most impressionable periods of the writers’ careers.) In bucking the commercial trend of miscellaneous collections, the unified book of stories came to represent, for such artists, something of a bibliographic rebellion, which, because of its inherent formal fragmentation, proved a compelling and fruitful site for their exploration of modernist themes and styles. The conclusion explores some of the consequences of these experiences on the writers’ subsequent, longer texts—Lord Jim, Ulysses, and Jacob's Room—arguing that such so-called “novels” can be understood better if studied within the literary and professional contexts created by their authors’ engagements with the short story. The same is true of the “short story cycle,” “sequence,” and “composite,” as strongly-coherent books of stories have been termed variously by scholars. This dissertation, particularly its introduction, sets out to provide historical, material background for scholarship on this too-long neglected literary genre.Item “Quality is everything” : rhetoric of the transatlantic birth control movement in interwar women’s literature of England, Ireland and the United States(2009-12) Craig, Allison Layne; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Cullingford, Elizabeth; Cloud, Dana; Carter, Mia; Roberts-Miller, Patricia; Wilks, Jennifer MThis dissertation suggests that burgeoning public discourse on contraception in Britain and the United States between 1915 and 1940 created a paradigm shift in perceptions of women’s sexuality that altered the ways that women could be represented in literary texts. It offers readings of texts by women on both sides of the Atlantic who responded to birth control discourse not only by referencing contraceptive techniques, but also by incorporating arguments and dilemmas used by birth control advocates into their writing. The introductory chapter, which frames the later literary analysis chapters, examines similarities in the tropes Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, the British and American “Mothers of Birth Control” used in their advocacy. These include images such as mothers dying in childbirth, younger children in large families weakened by their mothers’ ill-health, and sexual dysfunction in traditional marriages. In addition to this chapter on birth control advocates’ texts, the dissertation includes four chapters meant to demonstrate how literary authors used and adapted the tropes and language of the birth control movement to their own narratives and perspectives. The first of these chapters focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a 1915 political allegory about a nation populated only by women who have gained the ability to reproduce asexually. Gilman adopted pro-birth control language, but rejected the politically radical ideas of the early birth control movement. In addition to radical politics, the birth control movement was associated with racist eugenicist ideas, an association that the third chapter, on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand examines in detail by comparing birth control and African-American racial uplift rhetoric. Crossing the Atlantic, the fourth chapter looks at the influence of the English birth control movement on Irish novelist Kate O’Brien’s 1931 Without My Cloak, a novel that challenges Catholic narratives as well as the heteronormative assumptions of birth control discourse itself. The final chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Three Guineas (1938), illuminating Woolf’s connections between feminist reproductive politics and conservative pro-eugenics agendas. Acknowledging the complexity of these writers’ engagements with the birth control movement, the project explores not simply the effects of the movement’s discourse on writers’ depictions of sexuality, reproduction, and race, but also the dialogue between literary writers and the birth control establishment, which comprises a previously overlooked part of the formation of both the reproductive rights movement and the Modernist political project.Item Radio texts : the broadcast drama of Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard(2010-08) Jesson, James Roslyn; Friedman, Alan Warren; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Kackman, Michael; Loehlin, James; Richmond-Garza, ElizabethRadio drama developed as a genre as new media proliferated and challenged the cultural primacy of print. The methods of production and distribution and the literary genres that developed during the age of print provided models for radio playwrights to follow but also cultural forces for them to challenge. This dissertation considers these dual influences of print on the radio drama of four playwrights: Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard. Each playwright “remediates” the printed page in radio plays by adapting or evoking the form of various literary texts, including novels (Welles), travel writing (Thomas), diaries and transcribed speech (Beckett), and historical writing (Stoppard). By representing written texts in an electronic, primarily oral medium, these authors examined the status of literary expression in an age of ascendant electronic media. Welles’s The War of the Worlds and Huckleberry Finn, Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and other broadcasts, Beckett’s Rough for Radio II and Embers, and Stoppard’s In the Native State highlight defining features of the print tradition and reveal how practices of writing and “reading” changed in the radio environment. These plays suggest that radio prompted writers to reconsider the literary author’s creative role, the text’s stability, and the audience’s interaction with the work. “Radio Texts” ultimately argues, therefore, that radio drama’s significance transcends its place in media history and dramatic criticism; the works I examine also point to radio plays’ important role in authors’ re-evaluation of literary expression in a changing twentieth-century media ecology.Item The ludic and the strategic : games, war, and the conduct of character in the literature of British imperialism(2015-08) Ortiz y Prentice, Chris S.; Hoad, Neville Wallace, 1966-; MacDuffie, Allen, 1975-; Wojciehowski, Hannah C; Baker, Samuel; Carter, Mia EThis dissertation examines the language of games in the literature of British imperialism, paying special attention to turn-of-the-century and Edwardian works of Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. Where critics have called attention to the centrality of terms and concepts derived from games in this literature, it has been to show a conformance with the ideological intrusion of ludic play into rationales for British imperialism. By likening the British Empire to a “Great Game,” popular adventure literature aimed at male British readers not only made imperialism seem a form a play, it also helped to install a shame-inducing agonal mindset, which was itself in conformance with the aggressive expansionist policies of Disraeli and the New Imperialists. As this dissertation shows, Kipling, Wells, and Conrad drew their interests in games both from British Edwardian political discourse and the bearing of strategy on war, geopolitics, and human sociality. Studying such texts as Stalky & Co. (1899-1927) and Kim (1901), The War of the Worlds (1897) and Little Wars (1913), and Nostromo (1904) and Chance (1913) reveals that attentiveness to strategic dynamics tends to undercut the racialist and classist logics subtending British imperialist discourse. Preachers of the “games ethos” argued that Britain’s imperial supremacy testified to the quality of English character. For Kipling, Wells, and Conrad, by contrast, individual persons are moral agents that are also caught up in overlapping contests occurring on scales as large as international finance and as local as particular mental processes. These texts associate moral authority with strategic insightfulness. While Kipling restricts his interest in strategy to the criticism of British political discourse, Wells and Conrad explore the strategic bases of laws and morality. Supplying the significance of game-strategy to these and other works by Kipling, Wells, and Conrad, adds to their legibility and contributes to critical conversance with the meaning of games in the literature of British imperialism.Item Writing for pleasure or necessity : conflict among literary women, 1700-1750(2011-05) Beutner, Katharine; Bertelsen, Lance; Barchas, Janine; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Ezell, Margaret; Ingrassia, CatherineIn this dissertation, I examine antagonistic relationships between women writers in the first half of the eighteenth century, focusing on the works of Delarivier Manley, Martha Fowke Sansom, Eliza Haywood, and Laetitia Pilkington. Professional rivalry among women writers represents an under-studied but vital element of the history of print culture in the early eighteenth century. I argue that the shared burden of negotiating the complicated literary marketplace did not, as critics have at times suggested, inspire women who wrote for print publication to feel for one another a sisterly benevolence. Rather, fine gradations in social class, questions of genre status and individual talent, and -- perhaps most importantly -- clashing literary ambitions spurred early eighteenth-century women writers into vicious rivalries recorded in print and driven by print culture. Women documented their literary battles in poems, in prefaces, and in autobiographical texts replete with self-justification and with attacks on former friends or disappointing patronesses. This dissertation recognizes rivalry as a crucial mode of interaction between eighteenth-century literary women and analyzes the ways in which these professional women writers labored to defend themselves not just against patriarchal pressures but against one another. In doing so, it contributes to the construction of a more complete literary history of the first half of the eighteenth century by exploring how early eighteenth-century women writers imagined their own professional lives, how they imagined the professional lives of other women, and how they therefore believed themselves influenced (or claimed themselves influenced) by the support or detraction of other women. The first two chapters of this dissertation focus on Delarivier Manley's career and writings, while the second two address the entangled writing lives of Eliza Haywood and Martha Fowke Sansom. The concluding chapter briefly examines Laetitia Pilkington's Memoirs. I investigate the way these women employed the practice of life-writing as a means of self-construction, self-promotion, and public appeal.