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This work challenges common arguments as to the division of the political from other fictional genres and, in treatments of nineteenth-century fiction and culture, the private from the public sphere. Through an examination of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Gaskell, I uncover a common concern with the preconditions of liberal selfhood which posits the household as the space in which the political rights-bearer, defined by interiority and mental qualities, comes to be. This rights-bearer is not, as has been argued, defined by purely formal and abstract procedural reason, but in terms of a capacity for reason which includes the capacity for emotion. This work therefore shows domestic space to be the foundation of, rather than the occluded counterpart to, the liberal polity, and argues that an account of the household, in which the liberal self is disclosed, is likewise at the centre of Victorian political fiction.

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iv, 374 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.1980) from the Dept. of English, University of Adelaide

The purpose of this study is to investigate the Gothic novel, a much neglected and misunderstood school, as a unified literary cycle. Attention has been centred on the domains or sub-systems of the novel where cultural models and generic traits are particularly important and distinguishable: character, plot (with the necessary evocation of a fictional world), theme and symbol. No apology is offered for the many quotations: far too little recourse is made to the texts in most discussions of the Gothic novel and this has all too frequently led to misapprehensions and unfounded generalizations. The opening section places the genre in a historio-literary context, and centres attention on the major novels, while the final section opens additional perspectives on the cycle, suggests the importance of the Gothic school for modern times, and illustrates the inevitability of its central vision of evil.

The English family chronicle novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It occurred as a reflection of the controversies of nineteenth-century natural science over evolutionary development--directly, in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, and indirectly, as English novelists felt the influence of French naturalism. Because the emergence of the family chronicle novel is so closely bound up with naturalism, nowhere can we more clearly see the reaction to naturalism worked out than in the Victorian and Edwardian family chronicles. Very often, to understand the way in which a given novel is a family chronicle--that is, how the author has used the form for his own purposes--is to define the author's stance toward naturalism. In this thesis, I examine works of five chronicle writers--Butler, Hardy, Galsworthy, Bennett, and Lawrence-- and argue that a measure of the success of the works as family chronicles is the degree to which the artists succeed in overcoming the inherent limitations of the naturalist convention, even as they used the form bequeathed by it. I suggest that D. H. Lawrence's, The Rainbow is the most interesting of these family chronicles because he has used aspects of the art of Butler and Hardy, in order to create in opposition to Bennett and Galsworthy. He works with the underlying concerns of naturalism in order to transform them into a passionate denial of the determinist attitude implicit in naturalism. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The thesis studies the social criticism in five English novels written between 1850 and 1913. All the novels can be located in the central tradition of realistic English fiction. The thesis focuses on the thematic similarities of three Victorian novels: Great Expectations, Hard Times, and Middlemarch, and two early modern novels: Jude the Obscure and Sons and Lovers. The novels voice the authors' criticisms of social, and more specifically family, conditioning. The novelists portray the arbitrary ethical norms that define and regulate behavior within specific social environments. Each novel describes the individual's aspirations which are ultimately frustrated by external forces. Although more than half a century separates the publications of Hard Times and Sons and Lovers the critical perspectives of the novelists are essentially the same. The thesis isolates aspects of the novels which realistically portray the attitudes and values of mid and late Victorian society. One avenue of investigation discusses those institutions which enforce the prevailing social doctrine. The dramatic conflict analyzed in this thesis is often between the adolescent and characters, usually older, who personify the repressive doctrine. Much of the anxiety experienced by the protagonists is a result of the confrontation of individual desire and internalized social norms. In Great Expectations and Hard Times Dickens portrays the childhood and adolescent consciousness as it emerge's within a given moral climate. The thesis analyzes how Dickens isolates and criticizes those aspects of Gradgrindery which are dehumanizing and soul-destroying. The first chapter also compares the experiences of the protagonists in Middlemarch to those of Great Expectations and Hard Times. George Eliot heightens the psychological realism by detailing the subjective conflicts within characters. The second chapter describes how Jude the Obscure and Sons and Lovers maintain the focus on the external manipulation of individual desire. The thesis compares how Hardy and Lawrence chronicle the crucial childhood and adolescent experiences of Jude Fawley and Paul Morel respectively. The second chapter analyzes those relationships and conflicts of the major and minor characters which amplify the theme of social repression. The final chapter of the thesis discusses another manifestation of social repression in Jude the Obscure and Sons and Lovers. In these novels this theme is expressed, for the first time in English fiction, in explicit sexual terms. The thesis isolates those external influences, both social and domestic, which inhibit the psycho-sexual development of Jude Fawley and Paul Morel. The family, largely maternal, conditioning of Sue Bridehead and Miriam Leivers is also analyzed as another amplification of the central thematic focus on social conditioning. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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This thesis explores the construction of masculinity in novels written by New Women authors between the years 1881-1899. The fin de siècle was a period during which gender roles were renegotiated with fervour by both male and female authors, but it was the so-called New Woman in particular who was trying to transform the Victorian notion of femininity to incorporate the demands of the burgeoning women's movement. This thesis argues that in their fiction, New Women authors often tried to achieve this transformation by creating male characters who were designed to justify and to mitigate the New Woman protagonist's departure from traditional structures of heterosexual relationships. The methodology underlying this thesis is the notion that men and women were perceived as binary opposites during the Victorian period. I refer to this as the binary code of the sexes. This code assumes that men and women naturally possess diametrically opposed character attributes, and also that “masculine” attributes are perforce better than “feminine” ones. In the body of this work, I argue that New Women authors attempted to contest both of these assumptions by creating, on the one hand, traditional male characters whose masculinity is corrupted in crucial and recurring ways, and on the other, impaired male characters who cannot assume the traditional role of man. The comparison of the New Woman protagonist with the corrupt traditional man elevates her feminine attributes, while the impaired man's dependency legitimises her acquisition of what were otherwise considered “masculine” attributes and privileges, thereby contesting the notion that men and women possess sex-specific attributes at all. The second part of my thesis examines contrasting examples, in which this way of characterising masculinity – as traditional or impaired – is questioned and manipulated. It examines the limitations of the New Women authors' specific approach to reconstructing the binary code.