The purpose of this thesis are to show that Fielding's dramas reflect the social and political abuses prevalent in England during the first four decades of the eighteenth century; to show through careful delineation of specific drams that those dramas led to repeated attempts by the Walpole Ministry to pass a licensing act; and to show that Fielding was seriously concerned about the political and social deterioration which he felt was occurring during the decade of the 1730's.

Unhappy Consciousness is a study of recognition scenes in the Victorian novel and their relation to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. Victorian recognition scenes often show a hero's self-discovery as a retrospective identification with things. When, for example, in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer learns the truth about her marriage: "She saw, in the crude light of that revelation... the dry staring fact that she had been an applied handled hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and iron." The retrospective discovery of identity in Victorian novels is often figured as a catastrophic falling-apart of a stable self that is also an economic object or instrument: a bank check, a debt, a forgery, an inheritance, or an accumulated principal. Recognition scenes cannot be considered in the light of a timeless "master plot" or the classical poetics of Aristotelian anagnorisis, but need to be interpreted in terms of historical forms of social misrecognition (such as Marx's analysis of fetishism). Unhappy Consciousness contends that, if we are going to talk about nineteenth century things, we will have to take into account the novelistic misrecognition of the self, insofar as the heroes misrecognize themselves in forms of commodity fetishism. The thing is so often the subject herself insofar as "barred," dispersed among retrospective or delayed object identifications. I respond to the historical contextualization in Victorian cultural studies of "commodity culture," insisting that the economic structure of the commodity is not only a topic for realist notation, but makes up the inner logic of the novel form. Unhappy Consciousness urges a return to questions of novel theory which were perhaps set aside during New Historicism, arguing for a particularly novelistic mode of "objectification" (the form of the hero's activity) seen in interaction with the historical mode of objectification found in the capitalist value-form. I advance this argument through studies of several canonical Victorian works. Chapter One looks at the tension in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit between the ideological closure attained in the "family romance" plot of buried wills and restored parents, and the dead-end of interpretation and retrospection found in the plot of financial crisis and stock swindles. Chapter Two argues that, in Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset, the tautological nature of interest rate is not confined to the urban financial plot but is displaced and affectively diffused over the provincial mystery plot. Chapter Three is a study of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in which I read the detective as an exaggerated portrait of the subjective effects of capitalist alienation, a monad whose only intervention in the world is to link predictive results with opaque processes, to "produce" recognition scenes (the solutions to each case) as a salable commodity. He is a machine for retrospection who has no personal past. In Chapter Four, I read Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady as a critique of the fetishizing of autonomous consciousness, using Marx's definition of fetishism as the misrecognition of a social form as the content of a thing. Isabel's mistake is to misconstrue the structure of the male gaze that constitutes her "freedom" as the inherent property of her individuality--until it is unmasked as a trap. As so often in the Victorian novel, fetishism is a mode of self-knowledge.

Invoked as the novel's generic other, poetry is simultaneously central and marginal in our understanding of the Victorian novel. Poetry is the idealism to the novel's realism, the elevated verse to the novel's prosaic prose, entering into our theories of the novel only so that it can be expelled. Even when we define the novel as the genre of complete inclusion, poetry is singled out as the ultimate expression of monoglossia, which the novel subsumes without altering its own generic identity. In my dissertation, Losing the Margin: Poetry and Poetic Form in the Victorian Novel, I argue that Victorian novelists engage poetry not as a simple foil against which to defend the borders of their genre, but as a shifting collection of representational techniques that highlight the limitations of the novel and attempt to transgress them.

This dissertation identifies wifely counsel as a major theme in The Canterbury Tales. My analysis of The Tale of Melibee, The Clerk's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Prologue, and The Wife of Bath's Tale reveals a pattern of women instructing, transforming, and collaborating with their husbands to accomplish important work for both the household and the public sphere. Wife-counselors in the Tales do not merely provide advice; in moments that modern critics too often overlook, these women also supersede their husbands in leadership roles to mediate conflicts and dispense justice. By reading the tales in my study as narratives of wifely counsel, I show how greater critical attention to plots and characters illuminates underexplored arguments about gender, marriage, and women as political agents in the Tales.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2007. / Principal faculty advisor: Carl Dawson, Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2007. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2005. / Title from title page screen, viewed September 27, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Ron Strickland (chair), Rebecca Saunders, Lynn Worsham. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-152) and abstract. Also available in print.

The poets of the Romantic period and before learned their craft by reading poetry. John Keats fell in love with poetry when he was about seventeen and became a powerhouse in the canon of poetic literature by reading and thinking about poetry—what it is, how it’s made, and its value. Although critics regularly consider multiple sources, and even trace influence from one poet to another, influence is rarely the focus of critical analysis, but is instead a method of that analysis. Influence is not merely a tool, but a lens through which to understand more fully how poetry’s form and themes evolve over time, and perhaps how they devolve as well. This thesis traces the influences of Spenser in Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes, and draws connections beyond the Romantic period to demonstrate how Spenser’s world-making, Keats’s lush language, and a tradition of re-evaluating sexual power roles and definitions of chastity carries through to the future, specifically Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King. My argument focuses on three major aspects of these poets’ work: definitions of chastity; using legend and poetry to shape English identity; and the varied uses of poetic language in lyric poetry to create ambiguity which reinforces and forces interpretations of these themes beyond the poems they reside in.

Since Aristotle, we have categorized characters in terms of relative quantity and proportion. From Henry James's "center of consciousness," to E. M. Forster's theory of "round" and "flat," to Deidre Lynch's "pragmatics of character," to Alex Woloch's influential "one versus many," scaled distinctions between "major" and "minor" characters have remained unchallenged since the Poetics. Yet such classifications don't capture the ways characters claim amounts of interest and consequence that are disproportionate to their textual presence. My book counters these approaches to character by calling attention to how novels concisely render the rich interior fullness of even very minor figures. While literary critics associate representations of consciousness with major characters, I demonstrate that, through the application of narrative techniques such as first-person narration and focalization, the limited amounts of text allotted to minor characters can yield brief flashes of depth. These depictions of consciousness may lack the "exhaustive presentation" that Ian Watt claims is inherent to the novel, but they are nonetheless brimming with the personality and specificity critics typically associate with central characters. Indeed, many canonical novels, especially those of literary realism's highpoint in nineteenth-century Britain, resist the character hierarchy implied by distinctions such as major and minor. In addition to manifest examples such as Wilkie Collins's "experiment" with many narrators in The Woman in White (1859), we can count instances in which the centrality of a major character is disrupted or challenged. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), where the title character's initial prominence is undermined by his creature's arresting autobiography, to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), in which readerly affections are split between a Jewish hero, an egoistic heroine, and a narrator's attempt to relate "everything" to "everything else," novels that are far from generic outliers fit uneasily into scaled models of characterization, even when their titles and critics imply otherwise. By recuperating the significance of representations of minor characters' consciousnesses, I argue that such novels disrupt the impulse for sustained identification with a single exceptional perspective, directing attention towards characters who might otherwise appear nondescript, inscrutable, threatening, or even inhuman. My rethinking of minor characters' interior fullness allows me to reframe our understanding of the social purpose that Victorian authors such as Dickens and Eliot claim for the novel. As Eliot suggests in "The Natural History of German Life" (1856), literature should "amplif[y] experience and exten[d] our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot," resisting stock figures and stereotypes to produce a form of social sympathy that is deliberate, sustained, and self-reflective. This view of the novel's morally instructive capacity is refracted in recent arguments by scholars such as Martha Nussbaum, who claims that readers' involvement with the novel's prolonged form and involved descriptions cultivates their ethical imagination. Yet both Eliot and latter-day critics suspect that the readerly experience of identifying with characters impedes the novel's social utility: the narrator in Middlemarch (1871-2) must ask "But why always Dorothea" of its likeable heroine, while Wayne Booth describes identification as an "immature" approach to literature that occludes "aesthetic experience." Character, however, is not always so all-consuming. I argue that both the brevity and the sheer numerousness of depictions of minor characters' consciousness make them the locus of novels' engagement with socially-oriented sympathy. By countering a protagonist's too-engrossing psychology with many full conscious centers, minor characters both mark and extend beyond novels' textual limits. In their ability to encompass and briefly reorient themselves around these many rich individual points, nineteenth-century novels themselves come to embody an ideally sympathetic perspective: capacious, inclusive, and free of excessive partiality.

Recent scholarship on the representations of Jews in British Romantic fiction has explored the relationship between the radical changes in Jewish characterization of the period and shifting cultural values. Judith Page, for example, considers the effect of Romantic notions of sentiment, detailing especially how Jews test the limits of sympathetic feeling, and Michael Ragussis has linked the surge of interest in Jews to their value as rhetorically useful subjects in relation to debates surrounding English and British identity. Such studies at times draw attention to the impact of older characterizations of Jews on the new, typically to reinforce claims that relate changing Jewish portrayals to particular cultural and historical developments. Yet, the impact of literary precedent itself has not been fully considered as a leading factor in inspiring new ideas about Jewish characterization. This study takes as its centrepiece the development of the sympathetic or benevolent Jew in the Romantic period, best characterized by Richard Cumberland’s sentimental comedy The Jew (1794), and the historical novels Harrington (1814), and Ivanhoe (1819) by Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott respectively. These works draw heavily on pre-existing Jewish-themed texts, notably Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1598). While the play’s Jewish villain Shylock exerts a powerful and well-documented influence on later Jewish characters, the relevance of these Shylockian imitators merits more minute investigation in terms of their impact on the gradual transformation of ideas about Jews in fiction. For this reason, this dissertation takes a long period of history as its subject in order to emphasize that innovation in Jewish portrayal results not from ongoing social change alone, but equally from the interplay of past literary influences and developments in style and genre.