Browsing by Subject "Victorian literature"

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Benevolent failures : the economics of philanthropy in Victorian literature
(2010-12) Kilgore, Jessica Renae; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Hedrick, Elizabeth, A.; Ferreira-Buckley, Linda; Hoad, Neville; Cleaver, Harry
This dissertation critically examines why mid-Victorian fiction often dismisses or complicates monetary transactions and monetary charity, even as it negatively portrays differences in social status and wealth. I argue that the novel uses representations of failed charity to reconstruct, however briefly, a non- monetary and non-economic source of value. Further, I examine how the novel uses techniques of both genre and style to predict, form, and critique alternate, non-economic, social models. While tension surrounding the practice of charity arises in the late eighteenth century, the increasing dominance of political economy in public discourse forced Victorian literature to take a strong stance, for reasons of both ethics and genre. This stance is complicated by the eighteenth-century legacy that sees charity as a kind of luxury. If giving to the poor makes us feel good, this logic suggests, surely it isn’t moral. Thus, while much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature remains dedicated to the ethics of charity, the practice becomes immensely complex. By discussing the works of Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, this project exposes a wide variety of responses to this deep cultural anxiety. These authors are, ultimately, strongly invested in redefining the meaning of benevolence as a valid form of social action by moving that benevolence away from monetary gifts and toward abstractly correct moral feelings, though their individual solutions vary widely.
The intimate pulse of reality : sciences of description in fiction and philosophy, 1870-1920
(2014-08) Brilmyer, Sarah Pearl; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Matysik, Tracie; Mackay, Carol H; Baker, Samuel; Wojciehowski, Hannah; Hoad, Neville
This dissertation tracks a series of literary interventions into scientific debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how the realist novel generated new techniques of description in response to pressing philosophical problems about agency, materiality, and embodiment. In close conversation with developments in the sciences, writers such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner portrayed human agency as contiguous with rather than opposed to the pulsations of the physical world. The human, for these authors, was not a privileged or even an autonomous entity but a node in a web of interactive and co-constitutive materialities. Focused on works of English fiction published between 1870-1920, I argue that the historical convergence of a British materialist science and a vitalistic Continental natural philosophy led to the rise of a dynamic realism attentive to material forces productive of “character.” Through the literary figure of character and the novelistic practice of description, I show, turn-of-the-century realists explored what it meant to be an embodied subject, how qualities in organisms emerge and develop, and the relationship between nature and culture more broadly.
The formation of George Eliot’s authorial identity
(2020-05) Fiehn, Charlotte Anne Damaris; MacKay, Carol Hanbery
Mary Ann (Marian) Evans (1819-1880), better known by her pseudonym, George Eliot, keenly understood the disadvantages of gender when she began writing fiction in 1856. She knew, from her experience as an editor and critic, that women writers were judged differently from their male counterparts. In an 1856 essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Evans argued that women writers were all the more likely to be attacked if they were talented. She also recognized the risks of publishing under her own name. In 1854, she began a relationship with fellow writer, George Henry Lewes, traveling with him to Germany and eventually deciding to live with him, even though he was already married and options for divorce were limited. This report argues that Evans’s decision to adopt a male pseudonym when she began publishing fiction in 1857, and her decision to retain her pseudonym throughout her career, even when her real identity was widely known, represents an important instance in nineteenth-century British literature of a woman writer challenging the limitations of gender through the construction of sustained authorial identity. This report argues that the development of George Eliot’s authorial identity in her earliest published fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede (1859), was a decision compelled not only by Eliot’s concerns about the impact that her unorthodox relationship with George Henry Lewes might have on the reception of her work, but by deep-seated concerns about gender stereotypes in fiction. This report proposes that Eliot not only sought to challenge these stereotypes by maintaining her authorial identity, but that she ultimately used her male narrative personae in Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede to help control her reception as a novelist.