Thesis advisor: Rosemarie Bodenheimer / This dissertation considers England's imperial rivalry with France and its influence on literary production in the long nineteenth century. It offers a new context for the study of British imperialism by examining the ways in which mid-Victorian novels responded to and were shaped by the threat of French imperialism. It studies three canonical Victorian novels: William Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1846-1848), Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and argues that even though these texts deal very lightly with the British colonies and feature very few colonial figures, they are still very much "about empire" because they are informed by British anxieties regarding French imperialism. Revolutionary Narratives links each novel to a contemporary political crisis between England and France, and it argues that each novelist turns back to the Revolutionary period in response to and as a means to process a modern threat from France. This project also explains why Thackeray, Brontë and Dickens would return specifically to Revolutionary history in response to a French imperial threat. Its first chapter traces the ways in which "Revolutionary narratives," stories about how the 1789 French Revolution had changed the world, came to inform and to lend urgency to England and France's global, imperial rivalry through their deployment in abolitionist writings in both countries. Abolitionist tracts helped to fuse an association between "empire" and "Revolution" in the Romantic period, and recognizing this helps us to understand why Victorian writers would use Revolutionary narratives in response to imperial crisis. However, this dissertation ultimately asserts that Vanity Fair, Villette and A Tale of Two Cities revive Revolutionary history in order to write against it and to lament its primacy in popular discourse. In the mid nineteenth century, public discussion in England and France tended to return quickly to the history of the Revolutionary period in order to contextualize new political drama between the two countries. This meant that history often seemed to be repeating itself when it came to England and France's rivalry. Thackeray, Brontë and Dickens use Revolutionary history in their novels as a way to react against this popular use of history and in an effort to imagine a new path forward for England and France, one not burdened by the weight of the past. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis advisor: Judith Wilt / This project argues that the concept of haunting pervaded Victorian society, imagination, and thought and reflected anxieties regarding destabilized conceptions of the self and the world. It spans the nineteenth century from Mary Shelley to Henry James in order to claim that the living can invite and employ haunting in ways useful to self discovery or recovery. Rather than view haunting as a primarily one-directional relationship in which the haunter imposes itself on the haunted, I suggest that haunting can be invoked by the haunted in order to integrate new perspectives, conceptions, information, and situations vital to advancing self-perception and understandings of the surrounding world. Consequently, this study introduces a term I call "hauntedness," which amounts to the state of feeling or being haunted. Through this word, I hope to confer greater agency to the notion of being haunted than the more passive, acted-upon "to be haunted" can sometimes convey. Haunted Mind and Matter employs concepts from Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and "Différance" to complicate the question of haunting and enter the critical debate about Victorian haunting in particular. The works of Derrida and critics like Julian Wolfreys, following Sigmund Freud, reveal haunting as not restricted to bonds with spectral ghosts; it exists in every person and discourse. Using the term "haunt" in a multifaceted, flexible manner can challenge notions of the self and what is human through biological, social, and other constructs. The introduction examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in my view an inverted ghost story, to exemplify this text's employment of the term "hauntedness." The project then explores uses of terms related to haunting in texts in which mental, historical, and social haunting are infused with strong gothic and Romantic imagery: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898). I claim that these works both reveal the powerful presence of haunting in Victorian thought and society and show characters generating productive, reverberating uses for the haunting they experience in order to progress into the future. Haunted Mind and Matter demonstrates what the lens of haunting can reveal about character and social context in fiction. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This bachelor thesis will have its focus on Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The central claim of this thesis is that in the novel Great Expectations, the protagonist Pip is used by Dickens as a metaphor for the British urbanization during the period of industrialisation.       The literary theory that will help to analyse and prove this claim will be New Historicism. The central praxis of using non-literary historical documents and comparing them it to a literary text such as Great Expectations will be used in the discussion part of this thesis. As New Historicism tends to be unclearly defined, this thesis applies H.Aram Veeser’s definition and his definition is explained in this thesis.      The thesis is structured thus firstly, Pip’s time in the marshes will be discussed and in this discussion and the following ones. Characters that influence Pip is used to see Pip’s alternation.Secondly, after discussing Pip’s time in the marshes, his time in London is discussed. Finally, Pip’s return to the marshes after living in the city is discussed to clearly see his change in attitude and whether the urbanisation is for the better or it worsens his state of mind. Pip’s journey in Great Expectations expresses an ambivalence against urbanization. As urbanisation has great expectations in the rural communities, Pip sees that this comes to a high cost.

Texte remanié de: Thesis Ph. D.--Boston, Mass.--Tufts university, 2004. / Notes bibliogr.

This paper explores how Charles Dickens’s use of a female narrator in Bleak House (1853) fundamentally problematizes and undermines his use of the fairy tale’s cultural cachet, motifs, and characters to prop up and project his fantasies of the feminine ideal. More specifically, it examines the effects of the thematic presence of several tale-types and stock fairy tale figures on Dickens’s ability to prescribe ideal feminine behaviors, such as incuriosity and selfless obedience, to both his characters and his female audience. Because Esther’s ability to write and her interest in either discovering or constructing her own identity establish her as competitor to the males who attempt to script her life, Dickens tries to control and circumscribe her ability to know and act through her own and other characters’ resemblance to traditional fairy tale character types, especially Bluebeard and Griselda. Esther’s narrative, however, betrays these unnatural delimitations in telltale interruptions and denials as Dickens attempts to circumvent the constraints he has placed on her voice. Esther’s narrative therefore resists but imperfectly overcomes the Victorian male author’s scripting of femininity. / text

This critical edition presents to the reader, for the first time, a definitive text of Charles Dickens's short story, "George Silverman's explanation". This edition presents a critical unmodernized text. Besides the text of the story, this edition includes historical and textual introductions; lists of substantive and accidental variants; word-division; and of collated editions. / Graduate / 0593

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Baylor University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 166-187).

Zugl.: München, Univ., Diss., 2009

276 f. / Submitted by Cynthia Nascimento (cyngabe@ufba.br) on 2013-02-22T13:41:44Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Robert Eli Salem.pdf: 10737407 bytes, checksum: 997ba7878c3f74c8b58cbd06323b8b7a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Valdinéia Ferreira(neiabf@ufba.br) on 2013-02-22T15:49:34Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Robert Eli Salem.pdf: 10737407 bytes, checksum: 997ba7878c3f74c8b58cbd06323b8b7a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-02-22T15:49:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Robert Eli Salem.pdf: 10737407 bytes, checksum: 997ba7878c3f74c8b58cbd06323b8b7a (MD5) / A presente dissertação analisa as versões impressas em português do romance Oliver Twist(1837-38) do escritor inglês Charles Dickens (1812-1870), com referência especial à representação do fenômeno do anti-semitismo, manifestado no personagem de Fagin. O trabalho insere-se na área descritiva dos estudos da tradução, direcionado, por um lado, à história das traduções, uma vez que as versões abrangem quase 140 anos; e por outro, à tradução intersemiótica, considerando que a maioria das versões tem fortes aspectos pictóricos, umas sendo dominadas por tais. As versões receberam uma classificação em quatro grupos distintos: as traduções integrais, as condensações, as adaptações infantis ilustradas e as histórias em quadrinhos. Cada grupo foi investigado no que concerne sua história e seu lugar nos sistemas literários de origem e brasileiro, bem como as políticas tradutórias envolvidos na criação dos trabalhos individuais. Os textos dos mesmos foram analisados, usando cotejo e análise estatística, tanto dos aspectos verbais, quanto das ilustrações. Concentrou-se, nessas análises, nas imagens verbais e visuais de Fagin. Sempre se procurou identificar traços nessas imagens, que indicassem uma contextualização especificamente brasileira, em consideração à natureza distinta do anti-semitismo social no Brasil, mas poucos foram encontrados. Dentre as ferramentas teóricas utilizadas na análise, aproveitou-se, especialmente, do conceito dos memes, paralelo cultural aos genes da biologia,desenvolvido nos anos 1970 pelo biólogo Richard Dawkins. / Universidade Federal da Bahia. Instituto de Letras. Salvador-Ba, 2010.

No description available.