Thesis (M.A.)--Boise State University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-100).

Texte remanié de : Thèse de doctorat : ? : University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign : 1989-96. / Bibliogr. p. 207-219. Index.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. John Fenstermaker, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 7, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 261-270). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

No description available.

In a Victorian Britain in crisis, Chartism was as it remains an exemplary site for contestation of various forms of authority--social, political, theological, historical, and literary. When Carlyle in his Chartism essay demands what "the under classes intrinsically mean," he discounts "these wild inarticulate souls" unable to recognize or express their own true state (122). But even as Carlyle authorizes detached observation, he also helps cement those unpredictable alliances that haunt his work. In an increasingly statistical culture, the representation of Chartism has much to tell about technologies of power, the cultural inflection of difference, and the production and reproduction of knowledge, value, and legitimacy. Thus, it seems timely to re-examine Chartism and its diverse representations within and beyond the so-called social-problem novel. Like other forms of knowledge production, the novel both helped shape and was reshaped by Chartism which tested to the limit the novel's pretension to adequate representation of a common world. / Such investigation indicates the importance of interpretation despite its being attacked by everyone from political economists to postmodernists. I thus interpret Victorian reform through its literary mediations, and in relation to the kinds of authority and accounting associated with a history and theology in crisis. In reading for reform largely male middle-class experts, I deploy a double strategy, reading them to bring out the power and agency of the underrepresented, and realigning texts and contexts to reform the ways they are read. While Carlyle and Peter Gaskell defined the terms of succeeding debates on Chartism, they did not fully determine the interpretations of their own words or other pertinent evidence by the underclasses or by writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley. By the forms of their fiction, these two writers helped legitimate the lives and utterances of the working classes and exposed the class- and gender-based hierarchies of literary genres and social and political conventions. Elizabeth Gaskell and Kingsley rework such authoritative discourses as history and theology and reform reading and writing in ways that frustrate the efforts of literary taxonomists then and now, and accept the burden of interpretation to make a difference in the literary and social scene. / By socializing and historicizing literary categories in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin and others, I aim to escape those intellectual "tramlines" that have constrained commentary. The careful generic and other demarcations and hierarchies of traditional critical discourse and unexamined allegiance to stable notions of class, gender, nation, and religion have operated against the disruptive power and productivity of the work of Gaskell and Kingsley. Equally, whereas historians like Dorothy Thompson turn to "empirical data" (Chartists x) to dispel the confusion of interpretations of Chartism, my practice is theoretical, as my story of the past is continuous with my understanding of the present. Even Gareth Stedman Jones (part of the linguistic turn in historical studies) cannot sufficiently rethink Chartism when he concedes determining force to government policy and Carlyle's terms, although he usefully shifts attention from the economic to the political. He operates, however, within a rigid binary logic that separates the social and political while underplaying the cultural and a range of linguistic practices and forms of dissemination that constituted Chartist identity.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 198-219).

Thesis (M.A.)--Boise State University, 2009. / Title from t.p. of PDF file (viewed May 27, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-100).

No description available.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010. / Directed by Mary Ellis Gibson; submitted to the Dept. of English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jul. 14, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-253).