This dissertation explores how the descriptive backgrounds of the Victorian novel helped to shape the emerging concept of environment in the nineteenth century. Thomas Carlyle introduced “environment” into English in 1827, spurring writers, scientists, and social thinkers to forge a diverse conceptual lexicon for describing the relationship between organisms and their material surroundings. Comte developed the idea of a singular organic “medium” that supports and nourishes all living beings, while Darwin imagined the plural “conditions of existence” as a chaotic field of competitive struggle. Whereas Zola’s “milieu” exerted destructive pressure on the individual, Spencer claimed that “environment” was in fact constitutive of life itself. This project argues that novelists turned to vivid description as a means of materializing these competing environmental discourses, and exploring their social and affective implications. From the noxious fogs of Bleak House, to Mary Mitford’s concern for the sufferings of uprooted vegetables, novelists gave detailed attention to the exchanges between individual bodies and the physical world. Each of my four chapters examines how a Victorian writer used a distinct type of description to explore an environmental concept: Mitford’s botanical detail and natural theology’s idea of correspondence between body and world; Eliot’s weather and Comte’s organic medium; Hardy’s architecture and Spencer’s theory of environment; and Stevenson’s islands and the discourse of circumstance. Whereas recent critical re-evaluations of description often prize its detachability from narrative, this dissertation thus argues that description was central to the Victorian novel’s ability to represent interactions between individuals and their surroundings. Through close analysis of the descriptive surrounds of nineteenth-century realist fiction (weather, atmosphere, landscape, architecture), this project shows how the novel’s described backgrounds shape and participate in plot in surprising ways, functioning not merely as static pictorial backgrounds to narrative, but rather as dynamic participants in it. The Victorian novel, this dissertation ultimately shows, places interactions between characters and their environments at the center, rather than the periphery, of its drama.

This dissertation argues that the destabilization of species categories over the course of the nineteenth century generated vital new approaches to animal figuration in British poetry and prose. Taxonomized by the followers of Linnaeus and organized into moral hierarchies by popular zoology, animals entered nineteenth-century British culture as fixed types, differentiated by the hand of God and invested with allegorical significance. By the 1860s, evolutionary theory had dismantled the idea of an ordered, cleanly subdivided “animal kingdom,” leading to an attendant problem of meaning: How could animals work as figures—how could they signify in any coherent way—when their species identities were no longer stable? Examining works in a wide range of genres, I argue that the problem of species produced modes of figuration that grapple with—and in many ways, embrace—the increasing categorical and referential messiness of nonhuman creatures. My first chapter centers on dog poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Michael Field, in which tropes of muteness express the category-crossings of dogs and the erotic ambiguities of the human-pet relationship. Chapter 2 looks at midcentury novels by Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, arguing that the trope of metonymy—a key trope of both novels and pets—expresses the semantic wanderings of animals and their power to subvert the identities of humans. Chapter 3 examines two works of literary nonsense, Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, arguing that they invert and critique prior genres that contained and controlled the queerness of creaturely life—including, in Kingsley’s case, aquarium writing, which literally and figuratively domesticated ocean ecologies in the Victorian imaginary. In my fourth and fifth chapters, I turn to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, two late-nineteenth-century works that explore the destabilization of the human species while still fighting against the overwhelming irresistibility of both human exceptionalism and an anthropocentric, category-based worldview. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that these representational approaches achieve three major effects that represent a break from the more indexical, allegorical forms of animal figuration that were standard when the century began. Rather than reducing animals to static types, they foreground the alterity and queerness of individual creatures. At the same time, they challenge the very idea of individuality as such, depicting creatures—including the human—tangled in irreducible webs of ecological enmeshment. Most of all, they call into question their own ability to translate the creaturely world into language, destabilizing the Adamic relationship between names and things and allowing animals to mean in ways that subvert the agency of humans. By figuring animals differently, these texts invite us to see the many compelling possibilities—ontological, relational, ethical—in a world unstructured by the taxonomical gaze.

One of the first features of the eighteenth-century novel to strike the modern reader is its sheer length, and yet critics have argued that these novels prioritize emotional experiences that are essentially fleeting. “Novel Feelings” corrects this imbalance by attending to ongoing emotional experiences like suspense, familiarization, frustration, and hope—both as they are represented in novels and as they characterize readerly response to novels. In so doing, I demonstrate the centrality of such protracted emotional experiences to debates about the ethics of feeling in eighteenth-century Britain. Scholarship on the sentimental novel and the literature of sensibility tends to locates the ethical work of novel feeling in short, self-contained depictions of a character’s sympathetic response to another’s suffering. Such readings often rely on texts like Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling or Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, short works composed out of even shorter, often disjointed scenes in which the focal characters encounter and respond emotionally to the distresses of others. And yet, these fragmentary productions which deliberately deemphasize narrative connection between scenes do not provide ideal models for approaching the complex large-scale plotting of many eighteenth-century novels. Through my attention to larger-scale formal techniques for provoking and sustaining feeling throughout the duration of reading a lengthy novel, I demonstrate how writers from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen taught readers to linger with feelings, particularly ones that might initially produce pain or discomfort. By challenging readers to remain within a feeling that refuses to be over, these novels demand a vision of ethical action that would be similarly lasting—moving beyond the comfortable closure of a judgment passed or a sympathetic tear shed to imagine a continuous, open-ended attention to others.

This thesis examines the idea of China in British literature during a clearly defined period. Between 1757 and 1785, when Britain still had little direct contact and cultural exchange with the Chinese, China evoked various attitudes, images and beliefs in the British imagination. At times uncertain and evasive, popular understandings of China were sufficiently malleable for writers of the period to knead into domestic political satire and social discourse, giving fresh expression to popular criticisms, philosophical aspirations, and religious tensions. The period presents several prominent English, Irish, and Scottish writers who use the idea of China precisely in this manner in writings as generically diverse as drama, translation, travel writing, pseudo-Oriental letters, novels, and fairy tales. Some invoke China’s supposed defects to accentuate Britain’s material, scientific, and moral progress, or to feed contemporary debate about decadence in British society and government. Others exploit the notion of a more civilized and virtuous China to satirize what they regard as a supercilious cultural milieu attendant on their own emerging polite and commercial society, or to interrogate their nation’s moral criteria of the highest good, public-spiritedness, or evolving global enterprise. All give the idea of China new currency in the dialectical interplay between literary appeals to antiquity and the pursuit of modernity, enlisting it in philosophical and theological debates of Enlightenment. This thesis will argue that its subject writers, including Arthur Murphy, Thomas Percy, Oliver Goldsmith, John Bell, and Horace Walpole, use the idea of China to help define a British identity as culturally and politically distinct from Europe, especially France, and to contemplate Britain’s place within global history and a broadening world view at mid-century.

Women Poets and Place in Eighteenth-Century Poetry considers how four women poets of the long eighteenth century--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Leapor, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Mary Robinson--construct various places in their poetry, whether the London social milieu or provincial England. I argue that the act of place making, or investing a location with meaning, through poetry is also a way of writing a place for themselves in the literary public sphere and in literary history. Despite the fact that more women wrote poetry than in any other genre in the period, women poets remain a relatively understudied area in eighteenth-century scholarship. My research is informed by place theory as defined by the fields of Human Geography and Ecocriticism; I consider how the poem reproduces material space and the nonhuman environment, as well as how place effectively shapes the individual. These four poets represent the gamut of career choices in this era, participating in manuscript and print culture, writing for hire and for leisure, publishing by subscription and through metropolitan booksellers. Each of these textual spaces serves as an illustration of how the poet's place, both geographically and socially speaking, influences the medium of circulation for the poetic text and the authorial persona she constructs in the process. By charting how each of these four poets approaches place--whether as the subject of their poetry or the poetic space itself--I argue that they offer us a way to destabilize and diversify the literary landscape of eighteenth-century poetry.

digitalisering@umu

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-225). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2001. / Adviser: Sheila Emerson. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-235). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of New Brunswick, Dept. of English, 2003. / Typescript. Works cited: Leaves 119-123. Also available online through University of New Brunswick, UNB Electronic Theses & Dissertations.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2008. / Principal faculty advisors: Ann L. Ardis, Dept. of English; Margaret Stetz, Women's Studies Program. Includes bibliographical references.