Many Nineteenth century writers experienced the withdrawal of God discussed by Miller in The Disappearance of God. Robert Browning and Charles Dickens present two examples of "Fra Lippo Lippi" and Great Expectations model effective alternatives to accepting God's absence. Conversely "Andrea del Sarto" accepts the void the other two heroes shun.

This project investigates the social role of gentleman in Victorian England as defined in two Victorian novels, Dinah Maria Mulock's John Halifax, Gentleman and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. Mulock and Dickens promote the middle-class gentleman as a role that prioritizes the fulfillment of duty. Mulock's protagonist, John Halifax, displays this gentlemanliness throughout his social and economic rise. He bridges the upper and lower classes and embodies both a model and a pathway to middleclass gentlemanliness. Dickens's protagonist, Pip, develops this middle-class gentlemanliness as he learns from his own and four other characters' experiences. Dickens separates the inward, duty-focused gentleman and the outward, appearance-focused gentleman in the four characters that influence Pip, thus emphasizing their relationship and the power of social role encoding. These two novels reveal the performances of roles as social constructions that utilize the power of group definitions and the role writers play in shaping those definitions. / Department of English

The plot twist is a complex narrative surprise in which a revelation retroactively transforms readers’ understanding of the preceding events. Readers discover belatedly that the situation depicted in the narrative had all along been quite different from what they thought. Although the term “plot twist” was first used in the early twentieth century, many of the best-known works of fiction of the nineteenth century were revealed, in retrospect, to be twist narratives. This dissertation studies twist narratives and their readers in the period before the plot twist became a known device. Through case studies of Jane Austen’s Emma, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the chapters investigate what kinds of knowledge-making practices readers engage in during first-time readings and rereadings of twist narratives, as well as before and after reading. Across these chapters I make the case that twist narratives demonstrate the crucial and interconnected roles of knowledge and temporality in any narrative experience. What we know, and when, and especially what we don’t (yet) know, is crucial to how narratives work and why we enjoy them.