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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).

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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).

L’unitarienne Elizabeth Gaskell rejetait les doctrines anglicanes qui aliéneraient Thomas Hardy de sa religion. Elle était aussi championne de plusieurs penseurs qui exerceraient une forte influence sur les convictions d'Hardy. La continuité de la religion de Gaskell avec la vision du monde d'Hardy est évidente dans leurs écritures personnelles et aussi dans leurs romans. L'authenticité de voix que tant Gaskell que Hardy donnent aux caractères marginalisés, et spécialement aux femmes, provient aussi de leurs valeurs chrétiennes communes. Les convictions religieuses des deux auteurs et l'influence de la religion sur leurs travaux ont été abondamment étudiées, mais une comparaison entre elles doit encore être entreprise. Après avoir examiné les liens entre la foi de Gaskell et les convictions d'Hardy, je compare les attitudes des deux auteurs envers la classe dans North and South et The Woodlanders et leurs sympathies envers la femme tombée dans Ruth et Tess of the d’Urbervilles. / As a progressive Unitarian, Elizabeth Gaskell rejected the Anglican doctrines that would later alienate Thomas Hardy from his religion. She also championed many of the thinkers who would exert a strong influence on Hardy’s beliefs. The connection between Gaskell’s religion and Hardy’s worldview is evident in their personal writings and in their novels. The authenticity of voice that both Gaskell and Hardy give to marginalized characters, specifically to women, also springs from their common Christian-based values. Both authors’ religious convictions and the influence of religion on their works have been extensively studied, but a comparison between them has yet to be undertaken. After examining the links between Gaskell’s Unitarianism and Hardy’s beliefs, I compare the two authors’ attitudes towards class in North and South and The Woodlanders and their sympathies with the fallen woman as expressed in Ruth and Tess of the d’Urbervilles to demonstrate their intellectual and artistic affinities.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Barry Faulk, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 16, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

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This dissertation asserts a strong connection between democratic culture and the novel form in the period 1832--1867. As England debated constitutional reform and the extension of the franchise, novelists Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot endeavoured to define human communities on democratic terms. Drawing on work of contemporary political philosopher John Rawls to develop a methodology that considers constitutions and novelistic representations as analogous contexts for reasoning about shared political values and citizenship, this study provides readings of Bleak House, North and South, and Felix Holt that emphasize each novel's contribution to the period's ongoing deliberations about pluralism, justice, and the meaning of membership in democratic life. When read alongside Bentham's work on legislative reform, Bleak House offers a parallel model of social interaction that weighs the values of diversity of thought, security from coercion, and the nature of harmful actions. Felix Holt and North and South are novelistic contributions to defining and contesting the attributes of the new liberal citizen. Through their central characters, as well as in their respective novelistic practices, Eliot and Gaskell highlight the difficulty of uniting autonomous individuals with collective social groups, and this was as much a problem for literary practice in the period as it was for constitutional reform.