My dissertation, Mimetic Sensations: Sensation Genres, Victorian Realism, and the Transmission of Feeling, focuses on the little explored subject of how Victorians imagined feeling to transfer both within fictional scenes of representation and between fictional scenes and the real bodies of the audience or readers consuming them. Turning to mid-nineteenth century criticism, Victorian theories of emotion and physiology (primarily by Alexander Bain), sensation genres across different media (novels and plays by Wilkie Collins, the sensation dramas of Boucicault), along with the “high” realism of George Eliot, I contend that sensation was envisioned as crucial to the transfer of fictional feeling into real feeling. Realism operates not only in how it converts the raw materials from real life into a fictional form of verisimilitude, but in how the fictional representation becomes reconverted into lived, embodied feelings in the real world through those who witness it.

This study seeks to demonstrate that nature provided Frost an objective background against which he could measure the validity of human experience and gain a fuller understanding of it. The experiences examined with reference to the poetry include loneliness, anxiety, sorrow, and hope. Attention is given to the influence of Frost's philosophical skepticism upon his poetry. The study reveals that Frost discovered correspondences between nature and human experience which clarified his perspective of existence. The experiences of loneliness, anxiety, and sorrow were found to relate to Frost's feeling of separation from nature and from the source of existence. The experience of hope was found to relate to Frost's vision of the wholeness and unity of life, a vision which derives from humanity's common source with nature.

M.A. / Emotive language is found is various sectors of grammar, and occurs'for instance in words, affixes, fixed expressions and certain syntactic constructions, and is, indicative of the speaker's emotionally charged attitudes or value judgments in regard to referents, or elements of the speech situation or participants in the speech situation. Certain figures of speech seem to be emotionally charged as well. Emotive language has clear formal or semantic correlates, and important parameters are the meliorative/pejorative scale and that of strengthening/weakening. In Chapter 2, which dealt with the morphological expression of emotion, certain affixes and types of compounds were found to play a part in marking language as emotive. It became clear that the diminutive suffix in particular played a major role, and was employed in expressing emotive aspects such as affection, admiration, ridicule, disdain, contempt, sympathy and mistrust. Compounds functioning as intensive forms or of the bahuvrihi type were moreover found to•be emotively charged. Chapter 3•dealt with the role of syntactic mechanisms in emotive language. While certain parts of speech, such as interjections, emphatic particles, degree words, forms of address and exclamations were found to be particularly prone to emotive expression, rhetorical questions, elliptical constructions and various kinds of repetition were also found to have emotive functions. In Chapter 4 the important part played by lexemes and fixed expressions in emotive language was investigated. Emotive words or expressions were found to contrast with neutral, i.e. purely referential, words or expressions in many cases. Modal adverbs proved to be an important carrier of emotive overtones, while the emotive sphere was seen to be enhanced by loans from languages such as English and Zulu. The role of figurative. language and certain figures of speech in particular in emotive expression, was studied in Chapter 5. The figures of speech which were considered, were metaphor, dehumanisation, hyperbole, comparison, sarcasm, synecdoche and irony. In Chapter '6 certain conclusions were drawn, such as the fact that emotive language may take on various forms and occur in various sectors of grammar and vocabulary. At the same time it is found in a spectrum of registers of Afrikaans, e.g. in novels, short stories, youth literature, magazines and even the language of the Bible.

This dissertation investigates how textual negotiations of "human feeling" and its ethically disruptive potential fundamentally shaped the production of literature in Japan over the early modern-modern divide well into the 20th century. "Human feeling" (Jap. jô, Chin. qing) was a loaded term in traditional Confucian discourses that subsumed amorous sentiment and sexual desire. It was seen as both a powerful force that could reinforce important societal bonds (such as the one between husband and wife) and as transgressive and ethically suspect. While traditional literary discourse, reaching back to the "Great Preface" of the Chinese Classic of Poetry (Shijing), defined poetry as a medium that could channel potentially unregulated emotions and desires, from the 18th century onward a strong awareness of "human feeling" started shaping the production of a broader spectrum of Japanese genres, such as jôruri puppet theater and, especially from the early 19th century, narrative fiction. I argue that the necessity to represent and write about potentially transgressive feelings and desires lies at the heart of major genres in 19th century Japan. At the same time this engendered the often conscious impulse to regulate these feelings ethically, for instance, through the specific dynamics of gender and plot. I define negotiations of "human feeling" as the simultaneous impulse in writing not only to represent but also to ethically and socially regulate and control feelings and desires. Precisely because the representation and negotiation of "human feeling" define the very essence of Japanese poetic writing and, from the 19th century onward, increasingly that of narrative writing as well, I argue that negotiations of "human feeling" are central to the broader emergence and formation of modern literature in Japan. My first chapter examines selected ninjôbon ("human feeling") by Tamenaga Shunsui (1790-1843) and Kyokutei Bakin's (1767-1848) long narrative yomihon ("books for reading") cycle Nansô Satomi Hakkenden (Eight Dog Chronicle of the Nansô Satomi Clan, 1814-42). I examine how both ninjôbon and yomihon writings explore the deep opposition as well as the implicit affinity between "human feeling" and the sphere of Confucian ethics. My second chapter investigates a variety of novels (shôsetsu) written in the "long" decade of the 1880s: the translated novel Karyû shunwa (Spring Tale of Flowers and Willows, 1878-79), political fiction, and Tsubouchi Shôyô's (1859-1935) rewriting and reform of political fiction at the end of the decade. I for instance examine how these novels -- such as Suehiro Tetchô's (1849-96) Setchûbai (Plum Blossoms in the Snow, 1886) or Shôyô's Imo to se kagami (Mirror of Marriage, 1885-86) -- allegorically negotiate both transgressive sexual desire and chaste spiritual love within a teleological plot structure of democratic reform and heroic activity. My third chapter turns to Meiji-period fiction after 1890, in particular to texts that thematize the new medium of art as well as the figure of the artist or the literary writer. I argue that these texts -- Kôda Rohan's (1867-1947) Fûryûbutsu (The Buddha of Romance, 1889), Mori Ôgai's (1862-1922) German trilogy (1889-90), or Tayama Katai's (1871-1930) Futon (The Quilt, 1907) - continue the ethical negotiation between transgressive sexual desire and spiritual feelings within an implicitly allegorical plot structure that points back to 1880s political fiction. My fourth chapter largely focuses on the diversity of Natsume Sôseki's (1867-1916) early literary oeuvre, including various genres of poetry, so-called sketch writing (shaseibun), and novels. I argue that Sôseki's literary experimentation, for instance in Kusamakura (The Grass Pillow, 1906), with various non-novelistic genres stems from the desire to devise an alternative regime of literature that mediates the representation of "human feeling" in a more detached manner than that of the novel. At the same time, Sôseki's novel writing - as I demonstrate through my reading of Sorekara (And Then, 1909) - brings back a non-detached focus on "human feeling" that profoundly echoes the earlier attempt in 19th century fiction to reconcile transgressive feelings with the telos of a heroic and ethically driven plot.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Frankfurt a.M., 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 256-279).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Frankfurt a.M., 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 256-279).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 200-205).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed June 16, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 302-329).

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-92)

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Paris I, 1979. / Includes indexes. Bibliography: p. 881-922.