Browsing by Subject "Victorian novel"

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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.
Reading female learning in the mid-Victorian novel
(2014-05) Shafer, Jessica Elise; MacKay, Carol Hanbery
"Reading Female Learning in the mid-Victorian Novel" considers depictions of learning girls and learned women in English novels between 1848 and 1870 as dramatizing the varied relationships between femininity and learning during an era of great educational change. In analyzing novels by Charlotte Yonge, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Lewis Carroll in the context of their cultural-historical conditions, this project examines the significance of education to understandings and performances of Victorian femininity. Its readings identify a pervasive vision of middle-class femininity as incompatible with scholarly learning or educational ambition. "Reading Female Learning" surveys shifting contemporary perceptions and practices of education for girls and women, demonstrating that female education remained a central concern over the course of the nineteenth century in England. Close readings track how novels portray how education affects the female learner as well as how novels construct, consider, and resolve (or not) the perceived incompatibility between femininity and learning. This dissertation reads narratives of girls' progress to womanhood in novels by Yonge and Dickens as modeling the effects of learning on individual women and broader concepts of womanhood. It investigates how Brontë's Villette and Carroll's Alice books represent the impact of education and ambition for learning on the female body. It examines how Eliot's The Mill on the Floss represents the influence of learning on individual female identity in relation to society. As a whole, the project explores the relationships between individual women and society, paying particular attention to how novels implicitly or explicitly position the learning female character as a example for women inside and outside the text. Looking beyond the governess and the "New Woman" to the diverse concepts and experiences of female education in mid-Victorian England, "Reading Female Learning" presents the learning or learned woman as a valuable lens through which to investigate education's potentials for and effects on individual and gender development.
Victorian commodities : reading serial novels alongside their advertising supplements
(2010-08) Devilliers, Ingrid; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Ferreira-Buckley, Linda; Hoad, Neville; Hutchison, Coleman; Patten, Robert L.
Victorian serial novels were bound with pages upon pages of advertisements marketing goods to readers, yet the relative inattention paid to this significant material component of the novel is surprising. This project explores the interaction between fictional narrative and commercial advertisements, and aims to recover the material context in which three Victorian novels—Bleak House, Middlemarch, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—were first published and read. These three case studies—a novel published in 20 monthly serial numbers, another packaged in the rare format of eight “books” in bimonthly installments, and the third published in a monthly magazine in three excerpts—are exemplary of a larger phenomenon in Victorian book production wherein fiction and commerce were inextricably bound. This project investigates the ways in which the advertisements can be reconceived as a significant element of the novel, mediating the reader’s experience of the text. The Bleak House chapter examines how the advertisements for hair products in the “Bleak House Advertiser” serve to highlight an aspect of Charles Dickens’s text about Victorian responses to the mass of new consumer goods and individuals’ desire to control the physical aspects of their world. The following chapter considers George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans’s) Middlemarch, finding that just as the narrator’s asides compel readers to attend to the temporal difference between the 1830s setting of the novel and the 1870s perspective of the serial edition, sewing machine advertisements in the advertising supplement of the novel serve to remind readers of their role as observers of past events. The examination of Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’s) Huck Finn, as published in three excerpts in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, demonstrates that the magazine articles, the excerpts from Huck Finn, and the advertisements all engage in a project of unifying the nation and alleviating the physical and metaphorical wounds of war. The unity of the message emerges when the excerpts are read together with the many advertisements for wheelchairs and other such implements for disabled bodies. The dissertation ends with a chapter indicating the merits of further analysis and critical discussion of advertisements in the undergraduate literature classroom.