Bibliography: leaves 320-338. / iii, 364 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1995

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1994. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [335]-339).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 328-358 ).

Thesis--Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 840-866).

Thesis--Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 840-866).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2005. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 297 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-294).

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Over the course of the nineteenth century, gaslight supplanted the candles and oil lamps that had brightened Europe and America for centuries, and, by 1900, electricity would attain decisive dominance over both. In their narrative figurations of lighting, however, novels of the same period often arrest this march of progress, lingering in an Arcadian past organized around the rhythms of the solar day and the agricultural year. Mining works by Frances Burney, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, and others, my dissertation argues that novelists employ obsolete lighting technologies not merely to provide historical texture, but to express narrative impulses that run counter to the realist mode, to dramatize transgressive forms of ambition within the rural communities they depict, and sometimes even to voice ambivalence about the commercial constraints of the serial form. Characters in these novels who avail themselves of artificial illumination alter the rhythm of the workday in order to satisfy desires inconsistent with the interests and pursuits sanctioned by their neighbors: by the light of lamps and candles, they pursue cross-class romance, literary aspirations, or professional goals that fall outside the parameters dictated by social class and the historical moment. For Proust’s narrator, this entails a series of adjustments to his evening schedule over the course of the Recherche, first to accommodate an aristocratic social calendar, and, later, to facilitate the nocturnal composition of his own novel. In Eliot’s case, the inclination to stay awake after nightfall—whether the illicit romantic fantasies of a Hetty Sorrel or the workmanlike resolve of an Adam Bede—constitutes a meaningful challenge to the author’s narrative realism. By examining the formal innovations these technologies provoke in nineteenth-century fiction, my research unearths a pervasive counter-realist tendency in novels often famed for their fidelity to the protocols of realist representation.

Romantic heroes are questers, according to Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye. Whether employing physical strength or relying on the power of the mind, the traditional Romantic hero invokes questing for some sense of self. Chapter 1 considers this hero-type, but is concerned with defining a non-questing British Romantic hero. The Romantic hero's identity is problematic and established through contrasting narrative versions of the hero. This paper's argument lies in the "inconclusiveness" of the Romantic experience perceived in writings throughout the Romantic period. Romantic inconclusiveness can be found not only in the structure and syntax of the works but in the person with whom the reader is meant to identify or sympathize, the hero(ine). Chapter 2 explores Byron's aesthetics of literature equivocation in The Giaour. This tale is a consciously imbricated text, and Byron's letters show a purposeful complication of the poet's authority concerning the origins of this Turkish Tale. The traditional "Byronic hero," a gloomy, guilt-ridden protagonist, is considered in Chapter 3. Byron's contemporary readers and reviewers were quick to pick up on this aspect of his verse tales, finding in the Giaour, Selim, Conrad, and Lara characteristics of Childe Harold. Yet, Byron's Turkish Tales also reveal a very different and more sentimental hero. Byron seems to play off the reader's expectations of the "Byronic hero" with an ambiguous hero whose character reflects the Romantic aesthetic of indeterminacy. Through the accretive structure of The Giaour, Byron creates a hero of competing component characteristics, a focus he also gives to his heroines. Chapters 4 and 5 address works that are traditionally considered eighteenth-century sentimental novels. Mathilda and Evelina, both epistolary works, present their heroines as worldly innocents who are beset by aggressive males. Yet their subtext suggests that these girls aggressively maneuver the men in their lives. Mathilda and Evelina create a tension between the expected and the radical to energize the reader's imagination.

There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.