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It is the purpose of this thesis to discuss the Bronte juvenilia only in reference to the mature works and to make clear what influences and likenesses there are between the two, and what currents of continuity exist from the childhood writing through the adult accomplisbment. In such an inquiry Charlotte Bronte, of course, provides the richest reward. For only hers and Branwell's juvenile writings remain to us, and of these two only she wrote significantly with a mature purpose. But the search is barren in none of the four: in all--Charlotte and Branwell, Emily and Anne--the investigation becomes the means of a deeper understanding of the whole picture of their literary lives.

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This dissertation tracks the automaton’s appearance in Victorian literature from 1840 to 1900. It shows how authors across genre, form, and time conceptualized and responded to the Machine Age, using the automaton as a symbol of humanity’s changing relationship to machine technologies. Chapters 1 and 5 trace how Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and E.E. Kellett’s “The New Frankenstein” (1900) similarly address concerns about gender equality in Victorian Britain, challenging the assumption that women could themselves be classified, and controlled, as talking/reproducing automata. Chapter 2 argues that Dickens’s conceptualization of the human machine in Our Mutual Friend (1865) allows his working-class characters a degree of class mobility outside of bourgeois object-oriented ontologies. The automaton informs Dickens’s commentary on Victorian class. Chapter 3 reads The Coming Race (1871) as a reactionary response to what Bulwer-Lytton perceived as the machine’s potential to liberate women from the domestic sphere. In this dystopic vision, women would necessarily come to control all aspects of society when freed of housework by the machine. Chapter 4 looks at Scots working-class poet Alexander Anderson’s 1878 collection Songs of the Rail. Anderson lauds the train engine as savoir and prophet of a coming technological age. I argue that he creates a literary aesthetics for that age by anthropomorphizing the steam engine, extending to it his own poetic voice.

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Cultural tourism is assuming ever greater significance, and this study examines one particular form of this tourism whose main resource is the literary work of authors. Literary tourist destinations are places visited because of their associations with books or other literary outputs and with their authors. Such destinations are becoming increasingly popular as visitor attractions. This research examines the visitors to one well-known literary tourist destination. It examines the motivations, experiences and attitudes of the visitors as they relate to the authenticity of the destination. Although literary tourism is a significant part of both the cultural and tourism industries, it is very largely under-researched. Most concentrates on the historical emergence of literary tourist destinations. The present examination uses a case study of tourists visiting the literary tourism area of Haworth, West Yorkshire, England which was home to the literary Bronte family. The nature of the links specifically between literature, authenticity and tourism remain under-researched, with little sustained attention given to questions surrounding the authenticity of literary tourist destinations. Hence, the case study investigates visitor attitudes to the character of authenticity at the destination. Authenticity is evaluated explicitly as a social construct, and the research also questions how tourists respond to the signs or markers of literary connections. In this way, the research adds to the understanding of literary tourist destinations, visitor attitudes to authenticity, and their perceptions of, and responses to, signs as markers of authenticity. The case study is based on a social survey which comprises three different semi-structured questionnaires. While these surveys shared standard questions on motivations and authenticity, each had a distinct focus, which facilitated the assessment of visitor attitudes to a wide range of potential tourism products in the literary tourist destination. This research adds to methodological sophistication in tourism research by its innovative use of visual stimuli as a projection technique, with this method rarely being used in tourism studies. Verbal stimuli were less likely to be appropriate to explore the signs that visitors use as markers of authenticity. Consequently, photographs including key potential signs were used as a stimulus to gain insights into visitor responses. The results indicate that the literary tourist destination of Haworth attracts a broad range of visitor types, and that the different types of visitors differed in their motivations and experiences. It was found that different visitors were motivated to visit Haworth by the desire to learn and by the desire to have fun to varying degrees. Such motivations affected the extent to which they were concerned about the authenticity of the various aspects of the literary tourism product. In a similar vein, the empirical data suggests that visitors varied in the extent to which they considered their experience of the destination had been authentic, and differences also emerged between the features of the literary place that visitors used as markers of authenticity or of inauthenticity.

Emily Brontë began transcription of two poetry notebooks in February 1844. The title of one, 'Gondal Poems' is self-explanatory in its content and focus. But the purpose of the second, simply headed 'EJB. Transcribed Febuary [sic] 1844' has never been fully explored. It has not been recognised as a discrete piece of work, nor has it been printed in a complete edition of Emily's work with the exact text, and in the sequence in which she created it. In this thesis I ask what Emily's composition of her EJB notebook reveals about her as a writer and thinker, and why readers have never had the opportunity to read the poems in the context that she created for them. Chapter One examines the critical history of the poems, and here I describe the 'lexicon' created by Charlotte Brontë, Emily's first posthumous editor, through which much of Emily's work is still interpreted. I propose that the continued use of elements of this 'lexicon' impedes a recognition of Emily as a rigorous intellectual and thinker. In Chapter Two I show how a sequential reading of the EJB poems places her within her contemporary intellectual world. I propose that her purposeful creation of the notebook provides evidence of an engagement with the philosophies and literature of early nineteenth-century Europe, and reveals not only a profound understanding of the thought-systems of the time, but also a capacity to use those systems to develop a unique philosophy through poetry, a philosophy which she then employed in her creation of Wuthering Heights. The EJB holograph is not currently available for examination but this investigation is supported by my own transcription of the notebook which is based on a set of photographs taken over eighty years ago. Chapters Three, Four and Five are supported by a series of 'post genetic' diagrams which describe the textual development of the poems from the first publication of fifteen of them in 1846, to the most recent collected edition published in 1995. These chapters elucidate the effects of the activities and decisions of the editors, collectors and scholars who have influenced the texts and the presentations of the poems since the beginnings of transcription in 1844. This thesis proposes that in creating her EJB notebook Emily constructed a discrete piece of work which should stand alone as evidence of her distinctive philosophical engagement with her contemporary intellectual world. It demands a new vocabulary through which to interpret Emily and her work, and it requires an end to the 'lexicon' which has shaped Emily Brontë scholarship since her death in 1848. The evidence presented in this thesis supports the need for a new and definitive edition of Emily's poems, and particularly for a contextual presentation of the EJB notebook. This will enable a new conception of her as a systematic, methodical and abstract thinker, a philosopher-poet who has engaged with some of the foremost ideas of the early nineteenth-century.

My dissertation begins with the central crisis of Jane Eyre, in which Jane flees Thornfield Hall after her failed marriage, is unable to find work, and almost dies of exposure and starvation on the moors. She finds herself asking "What was I to do? Where to go? Oh, intolerable questions, when I could do nothing and go nowhere!" I suggest that this passage, and others that echo it in Villette and works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot can be read in terms of early Victorian anxieties over middle-class women's inability to support themselves should they need to. Most literary criticism on women and work focuses on the end of the century, which saw an explosion of the topic in public debate and literature of the time; in my work, I explore how these discussions and anxieties about women's work were developing much earlier than is usually discussed. While the fin-de-siècle figure of the New Woman characteristically moves through urban landscapes in ways that emphasize her independence (alone, on bicycles, on buses, to and from places of work and her own domicile), earlier middle-class Victorian women walk out of domestic spaces that are not their own, and any brief sense of freedom is swiftly followed by a sense of desperation or need. These women wander through economic landscapes in ways that point to their profound state of dependence and their inability to support themselves. Given that women are still, today, the first economic victims of a recession, I am interested in tracing how women writers started responding to this vulnerability almost as soon as it became visible with the establishment of an industrial economy and the rise of the middle class in early- and mid-Victorian England. While some extant criticism examines Victorian gender and economics in literature on a text-by-text basis, I propose a comprehensive model with four modes for understanding how woman move through economic and physical landscapes in Victorian fiction: 1) in a mode of desperation that points to a fundamental problem with middle-class women's vulnerable economic position (Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette); 2) in a mode of learning to better understand their limited but relative privilege compared to working-class women (Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh); 3) in a problematized mode of successful self-reinvention, prompted by economic aspirations, that poses a danger to conventional social hierarchy and therefore marks the woman as errant or evil (sensation fiction, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd); and 4) in a mode of self-revelation in which a woman comes to realize how her own perpetual state of dependence has affected her choices (Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch). Desperation, comprehension, problematic self-invention, revelation: Victorian women's wanderings consistently point to, through the movement of the woman's body, the ways that the woman is an economic subject, perhaps before she is anything else.

Among Charlotte Bronte's four full-length novels, three are composed in the form of autobiography: Jane Eyre (1847), Villette (1853), and The Professor (published posthumously in 1857). The abundance of first-person narratives in Bronte's juvenile writings also highlights her marked preference for the first-person perspective in telling stories. In fact, due to the vital sense of truth inherent in first-person narration, Bronte is often identified by her readers as the heroines in her novels. This thesis aims to deal with the complex relationships of the authoress, her works, and the first-person narration. As a famous woman writer in the nineteenth century, Bronte satisfies her desire for self-expression by means of writing autobiographical fictions instead of composing her real autobiography. The first chapter examines the social and cultural contexts as well as Bronte's personal reasons behind such a choice. There is also the discussion of Bronte's presentation of the different characteristics of Victorian autobiographies by men and women in her novels. The second chapter investigates into Bronte's narrative strategy, and provides answers to her insistence on first-person narration while the omniscient narration is the mainstream of novel writing. The development of Bronte's narrative technique and her transition from the early masculine narrative to the later female discourse are also traced. The third chapter reviews the everlasting subject of Bronte's novels¡Xlove and marriage. With a careful textual study of Bronte's novels and a comprehensive examination of her biographical documents, I find that Bronte's fictional hero and heroines have faithfully reflected the authoress's real thoughts and true beliefs. As can be detected, to deliver the truth that she knows of and to influence her readers on issues that concern her most have always been Bronte's main preoccupations in respect of novel writing.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2009. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.