This dissertation examines the trope of filiation in novels by three contemporary British writers: John Banville, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. The trope of filiation and the related theme of inheritance has long been central to the concerns of the British novel, but it took on a new significance in the twentieth century, as the novel responded both thematically and formally to the aftermath of the two world wars. This study demonstrates the ways in which Banville, McEwan, and Ishiguro each situate their work in relation to this legacy, by means of an analogy between the inheritance structures figured within their novels and the inheritance performed by their engagement with the genre itself. This study relies on an instructive analogy to similar treatments of the larger problem of cultural filiation by the theorists Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Levinas exposes in his work the ethical and political problems of modernist temporality by critiquing modernity’s rejection of filiation, a rejection modeled also in the lost children, and barren and celibate men and women of modernist novels. Derrida meanwhile provides a way forward with his representation and performance of inheritance as a critical and transformative act, which is characterised on one hand by an ethical injunction, and on the other, by a filtering or a differentiation which changes the tradition even as it reaffirms it.

O Gabinete de Leitura, Serões das Famílias Brasileiras, Jornal para todas as Classes, Sexos e Idades foi publicado no final de década de 1830 no Rio de Janeiro. O principal objetivo de seus redatores era o de difundir o hábito da leitura de ficção. Por conseguinte, publicaram textos ficcionais traduzidos de periódicos estrangeiros, principalmente europeus. Este estudo investiga os textos ficcionais e não-ficcionais britânicos presentes no Gabinete de Leitura: 1) tendo como ponto de partida como a nação britânica era vista pela jovem intelectualidade brasileira; 2) relacionando a ficção britânica ao conjunto ficcional do Gabinete de Leitura com o objetivo de averiguar algumas de suas peculiaridades. Dessa forma, pretendo contribuir para a discussão sobre a presença da ficção britânica nos periódicos oitocentistas brasileiros. / The Gabinete de Leitura, Serões das Famílias Brasileiras, Jornal para todas as Classes, Sexos e Idades was published at the end of the 1830\' s in Rio de Janeiro. Its editors aimed at developing the habit of reading fiction. Accordingly, they offered translated fiction from foreign periodicals, notably European. This study investigates the British fictional and non-fictional texts of the Gabinete de Leitura: 1) by taking into account how the British nation was regarded by the young Brazilian intellectuals; 2) by relating the English fiction to the body of fictional texts offered by the periodical in order to detect some of its peculiarities. Therefore, I intend to contribute to the discussion of the presence of British fiction in nineteenth-century Brazilian periodicals.

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This study claims that formally experimental novels written in the early twentieth century place urgent, if often implicit, demands for acknowledgment upon their readers. Scholars have long held that the economic and cultural upheavals of the early twentieth century led novelists to doubt language’s referential capacities. But, even as signal modernist works by E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others move away from a view of language as a means of gaining knowledge, they also underscore its capacity to grant acknowledgment; they treat words as tools for recognizing and responding to the inner lives of others. Stanley Cavell finds such a vision of language in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), a work Cavell describes as “modernist.” This dissertation demonstrates that Wittgenstein’s interest in acknowledgment emerges via his negotiation of the same historical forces with which literary modernism grapples: industrialization, World War, cross-cultural encounter. I argue that modernist representations of consciousness offer readers a way of hearing what Wittgenstein calls “the silent soliloquy of others,” giving us words by which we might adopt an attitude of acknowledgment toward the otherwise unvoiced inner lives of socially marginalized figures. Chapter One considers the crisis of reason that convulses early twentieth-century Britain and demonstrates how Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) critique excessive commitments to rationality as counterproductive to the acknowledgment of politically disenfranchised citizens. Chapter Two discusses Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929): three texts that, I show, cast traditional Victorian marriage as an unsatisfying form of intimacy and depict speakers hesitant to acknowledge their desires for alternative, same-sex modes of intimate relation. Chapter Three examines Faulkner’s portrayal of capitalist modernization in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), arguing that characters in these novels insist on the immitigable privacy of their experiences and struggle accordingly to gain acknowledgment from family members. Chapter Four reads Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) as two texts that represent the psychological experience of having one’s humanity go brutally unacknowledged under Jim Crow. / 2020-11-07T00:00:00Z

A escrita de ficção no Brasil iniciou-se definitivamente em fins da década de 1830. Jornais e revistas do Rio de Janeiro publicaram essas narrativas ao lado de ficção estrangeira (especialmente européia) traduzida. Este trabalho tem dois objetivos centrais: 1)apresentar criticamente o conjunto de textos ficcionais britânicos, traduzidos e publicados em periódicos do Rio de Janeiro, na primeira metade do século XIX, através da análise comparativa da tradução (aqui vista como processo e produto cultural) com os textos originais; 2)avaliar o papel dessa ficção britânica na produção de alguns dos nossos primeiros ficcionistas. O estudo implica discutir o lugar dessa ficção britânica nos jornais e revistas que foram seu meio de circulação: os periódicos britânicos, os brasileiros e a Revue Britannique, revista francesa que se coloca como importante intermediadora nesse percurso. Dessa forma, pretendo contribuir para a discussão das condições de circulação de ficção britânica no Brasil, no século XIX. / The writing of prose fiction in Brazil did not definitely start until the end of the 1830's. These narratives were published in periodicals from Rio de Janeiro side by side with translated (notably European) fiction. This thesis has two main purposes: 1)to critically present the collection of British fictional texts, translated and published in periodicals from Rio de Janeiro, during the first half of the nineteenth-century, by comparing their translation (here considered both as cultural process and product) with the original texts; 2)to evaluate the role of that British fiction in the production of some of the first Brazilian fiction writers. This study also discusses the insertion of such British fiction in the periodicals in which it circulated: in the British, and Brazilian periodicals, but also in the Revue Britannique, a French magazine that constitutes an important mediation in this process of circulation. Therefore, I intend to contribute to the discussion of the conditions in which British fiction circulated in nineteenth-century Brazil.

A escrita de ficção no Brasil iniciou-se definitivamente em fins da década de 1830. Jornais e revistas do Rio de Janeiro publicaram essas narrativas ao lado de ficção estrangeira (especialmente européia) traduzida. Este trabalho tem dois objetivos centrais: 1)apresentar criticamente o conjunto de textos ficcionais britânicos, traduzidos e publicados em periódicos do Rio de Janeiro, na primeira metade do século XIX, através da análise comparativa da tradução (aqui vista como processo e produto cultural) com os textos originais; 2)avaliar o papel dessa ficção britânica na produção de alguns dos nossos primeiros ficcionistas. O estudo implica discutir o lugar dessa ficção britânica nos jornais e revistas que foram seu meio de circulação: os periódicos britânicos, os brasileiros e a Revue Britannique, revista francesa que se coloca como importante intermediadora nesse percurso. Dessa forma, pretendo contribuir para a discussão das condições de circulação de ficção britânica no Brasil, no século XIX. / The writing of prose fiction in Brazil did not definitely start until the end of the 1830's. These narratives were published in periodicals from Rio de Janeiro side by side with translated (notably European) fiction. This thesis has two main purposes: 1)to critically present the collection of British fictional texts, translated and published in periodicals from Rio de Janeiro, during the first half of the nineteenth-century, by comparing their translation (here considered both as cultural process and product) with the original texts; 2)to evaluate the role of that British fiction in the production of some of the first Brazilian fiction writers. This study also discusses the insertion of such British fiction in the periodicals in which it circulated: in the British, and Brazilian periodicals, but also in the Revue Britannique, a French magazine that constitutes an important mediation in this process of circulation. Therefore, I intend to contribute to the discussion of the conditions in which British fiction circulated in nineteenth-century Brazil.

This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions. / Graduate / 2021-08-08