Diss.--Bochum--Ruhr-Universität, 1991.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also in a digital version from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

M.A. / Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) was a prolific writer in many genres. This dissertation takes the major works of his occult genre and examines them in the backdrop of the scientific and religious paradigms informing the mid-Victorian reading public. In response partly to the increase in materialism, popular Victorian novelists such as Dickens and Thackeray were writing in a realistic style which Bulwer-Lytton found not suited to convey his mystical ideas. Instead, he made use of the metaphysical novel — a sub-genre of the romance novel — well-suited for his purposes but antithetical to critics often not willing to explore new territory. Although always alive to developments in Spiritualism, Bulwer-Lytton's life-long interest lay in the study of the occult and secret societies. The works chosen for this dissertation indicate how the boundaries between science, religion and the occult are permeable. In his works, these three discourses conflate instead of being kept discrete by artificial means. His passion for the mystical aligns Bulwer-Lytton more with the Romantics than the Victorians. Through a close friendship with John Varley (1778-1842), an inner-circle friend of William Blake, Bulwer-Lytton came to learn of aspects of Blake which reflect particularly in A Strange Story. W B Yeates and Rider Haggard, both admirers of Bulwer-Lytton, would incorporate his ideas into their works, and Madame Blavatsky would shamelessly plagiarise him in her Isis Unveiled. Unwittingly, Bulwer-Lytton’s wholly-fictional novel, The coming Race, would serve as “proof” to Hitler that a secret master race actually existed.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1958 H86 / Master of Science

This dissertation analyzes melodrama as a common mode of mid-nineteenth century cultural expression. The dissertation centres on the melodrama in Bulwer Lytton's novels, emphasizing Lytton's use of melodrama as a form of radical social criticism. The first novels expose contemporary social inequities, but employ melodramatic techniques sparingly. Later, Lytton shows complete understanding of the melodramatic method and the 'political' basis of melodrama, resulting in novels such as Paul Clifford and Night and Morning. Other novels, though, display, uneasiness with the one-sided analysis of life presented in melodrama, while Zanoni attacks the naivety of melodramatic social criticism. Most of the last novels condemn melodrama for its simple-mindedness, or falsification of human experiences. In addition, 'reactionary' novels such as The Parisians reject the radical social vision of melodrama as neither attainable nor desirable.

No description available.

This thesis examines accounts of electricity in journalism, short stories, novels, poetry and instructional writings, composed between 1830 and 1880 by scientific investigators, popular practitioners and fiction authors. The writings are approached as diverse and often incongruous impressions of electricity, in which the use of figurative and narrative techniques brings into question distinctions between science and literature. It is proposed that the unusual combination of electricity’s historical characterisation as an elixir vitae, intense investigation by contemporary scientists, and close alliance with new technologies offered unique opportunities for imaginative speculation. The thesis contends that engaging with these conflicting characteristics created a synthesis of scientific, social and literary responses that defy epistemological and generic categorisation. Fictionality is approached in chapter two as a central feature of scientific conceptualisation, experiment and discovery, particularly in the work of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. In chapters three and four, the landscape of popular non-fiction books and periodicals is mapped, to show the ways in which the period’s publication contexts and forums, reading patterns, and use of literary practices contributed to wider engagement with ideas about electricity. Chapters five and six focus on fiction writings, identifying parallels and divergences between actual electrical science and its fictional portrayal. Short stories are shown to have emphasised associations between electricity, neurosis, deformity and the occult, complicating contemporary scientific optimism and presenting electricity as an alluring yet dangerous phenomenon, which disordered the natural world and man’s relationship with it. These characteristics are identified further in the metaphorical references of several canonical novelists, in the exploitation of electricity, elixirs and power depicted by William Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and through a case study of the text and reception of a popular novel about electricity by Benjamin Lumley. The thesis contends that electricity’s anomalous and protean nature produced distinctively hybrid responses that enhance our understanding of contemporary popular writing, its contexts and how it was read.

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This dissertation examines representations of deep time in nineteenth-century British novels in order to argue that these texts help carve a path for our contemporary definitions of deep time and the Anthropocene. Examining fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, I suggest that these novels participate in the secularization of deep time by transforming the concept of vast spiritual time that had been in use earlier in the nineteenth century into a scientifically-informed model that anticipates our current understandings of deep time. While the concept of geological time emerged in the late-eighteenth century and became widely recognized in the nineteenth, the phrase “deep time” originates in nineteenth-century literature when Thomas Carlyle first used it in a non-scientific context. By studying a wide range of fiction, I demonstrate how nineteenth-century authors employed innovative narrative strategies to convey these potentially inconceivable timescales in non-numerical terms, and thereby make them more accessible to human comprehension. I also challenge conventional distinctions between literary realism and popular romance in the period by analyzing the complementary ways in which both genres of fiction engage with vast temporal scales in their narratives. I develop my argument by examining how these novels use a model of what I call “folding time” to incorporate remote time periods into their texts. Departing from the novel’s linear narrative structure to bring distant historical moments into direct contact with one another, folding time situates human activity in relation to vast pre-and-post-human periods and in doing so acknowledges an age of humans within deep time; in this sense, these novels articulate an early concept of the Anthropocene. By including deep time in the novel’s traditionally individual and familial framework, these authors simultaneously expand the novel’s temporal scope and humanize vast scientific timescales. Further, as these novels illustrate characters’ psychological responses to overwhelming scientific timescales, they reposition deep time in relation to private temporal experience. This study employs an interdisciplinary approach to acknowledge the mutually reciprocal relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century, and draws on temporality studies, history of science theory, and literary criticism to situate its argument in relation to current critical discussions. I also consider the work of scientists such as Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and William Thomson in order to contextualize my novels’ scientific references. By studying nineteenth-century British novels in relation to scientific temporalities, this dissertation recovers an overlooked component of the history of deep time that has had significant and lasting cultural influence given the enduring popularity and wide readership of these texts.

No description available.