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This study arranges symptoms of polarity into a causal sequence# beginning with the origin of contrarieties and ending with the ultimate effect. The origin is considered as the fall of man, denoting both a mythic concept and a specific act of betrayal. This study argues that a sense of separateness precedes the fall or act of separation; the act of separation produces various kinds of fragmentation; and the fragments are reunited through paradox. Therefore, a causal relationship exists between the "fall" motif and the concept of paradox.

This dissertation considers the role of affective management in realist aesthetics and British imperial culture. Drawing on formalist analyses of English novels, nineteenth-century theories of emotion, and postcolonial accounts that identify the colonizer’s affective desensitization as the ground from which ongoing violence can be perpetrated, this study explores how domestic English novels developed new techniques for deflating the heightened feelings surrounding empire and distant intimacy. Through satires of sensibility, the replacement of epistolary style with impersonal omniscience, and newly dispassionate presentations of villains and protagonists alike, realist novelists explored affective restraint as at once a generic characteristic and an increasingly central element of British imperial and racial identities. This dissertation therefore argues, through readings of works by Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad, for the deep influence of imperial culture on the realist novel’s distinguishing formal features. At the same time, it prompts critics to revisit longstanding accounts of the relationship between the novel and sympathy. Since the Victorian era, critics have readily understood the realist novel as concerned with the expansion of readers’ sympathies: this study reframes this important account by examining how the insistence on sympathy in novels often rerouted more turbulent reactions to empire’s dislocations—such as longing, desire for vengeance, and guilt—into cooler, more tractable feelings.

This dissertation argues that climate is both a meteorological reality and an ideological term that operates in the discursive matrix of empire. Nowhere was this more perceptible than the tropics, which were the most prolific theater for conquest and colonization, generating discourses that traveled across empires, constructing the tropics as a region of untold wealth that was hostile to European health. This dissertation considers how figurations of the climate in works set across the tropics from 1899 to 1992 negotiated the ideological paradoxes that surrounded the end of empire, the political and aesthetic project of decolonization, and a postcolonial reckoning with Atlantic World Slavery. Through readings of works by Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Alejo Carpentier, Pepetela, and Caryl Phillips, I show how colonial theorizations of the tropics as a counter-civilizational force resonated across British, Spanish, and Portuguese discourses of the tropics that cut across Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. This shared theorization, which imagines tropical climates as destructive to the trappings of European colonial modernity, interrogates the stability of empire and becomes a means to imagine alternate political realities.

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From the first electric lights in London along Pall Mall, and in the Holborn Viaduct in 1878 to the nationalisation of National Grid in 1947, the narrative of the simple ascendency of a new technology over its outdated predecessor is essential to the way we have imagined electric light in London at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, the interplay between gas and electric light - two co-existing and competing illuminary technologies - created a particular and peculiar landscape of light, a 'lightscape', setting London apart from its contemporaries throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this narrative forms the basis of many assertions made in critical discussions of artificial illumination and technology in the late-twentieth century; however, this was not how electric light was understood at the time nor does it capture how electric light both captivated and eluded the imagination of contemporary Londoners. The influence of the electric light in the representations of London is certainly a literary question, as many of those writing during this period of electrification are particularly attentive to the city's rich and diverse lightscape. Though this has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, electric lights are the nexus of several important and ongoing discourses in the study of Victorian, Post-Victorian, Modernist, and twentieth-century literature. This thesis will address how the literary influence of the electric light and its relationship with its illuminary predecessors transcends the widespread electrification of London to engage with an imaginary London, providing not only a connection with our past experiences and conceptions of the city, modernity, and technology but also an understanding of what Frank Mort describes as the 'long cultural reach of the nineteenth century into the post-war period'.