<p> This dissertation discusses how Victorian writers, artists, and critics represent historical queens as shadows of Queen Victoria throughout her long reign (1837&ndash;1901). Focusing on Victorian representations of four queens&mdash;Catherine de Medici, Mary Stuart, Queen Elizabeth I, and Marie-Antoinette&mdash;this project seeks to establish a literary genealogy by showing how British writers drew upon historical interpretations of dead French and English queens to express psychological ambivalence, political anxiety about female monarchy, national, confessional difference, and complex sexual and erotic dimensions. Rather than approach these queens as historical persons, this dissertation concentrates on the literary, figural, and spectral qualities that translate unevenly across cultural, religious and historical lines. The dissertation uses interdisciplinary methods drawn from history, psychoanalysis, and feminism to examine how Victorian writers relate their representational strategies to novels, dramas, visual texts, and historiographies in which the queens are sources of sensation, fascination, English moral exceptionalism, and spectacle. The mix of canonical and non-canonical writers recasts the familiar images of these queens in a new light and brings unfamiliar and long forgotten writers into the discussion. In examining how these cultural texts work against the grain of more canonical texts, the dissertation shows how they have the potential to unsettle what it is thought is known about Victorian attitudes toward female monarchy. Finally, I argue that it matters that Queen Victoria is on the throne because she casts her shadow over these cultural texts while they are being produced and consumed.</p>

The thesis documents the censorship histories of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Richmal Crompton's William books under Franco, and analyses these censorship histories in terms of the changing character of the regime. Previously unconsulted primary sources are used, such as censors' reports and translation proofs held in the Archivo General de la Administración del Estado at Alcalá de Henares. The censors' reports demonstrate that children's literature and translated literature were treated as special cases by the regime, and that censorship was particularly harsh in both areas. These findings demonstrate the crucial importance of attitudes to childhood and foreignness in the Francoist ideological scheme. The censorship histories of Tom Sawyer and the William books reveal some surprising facts. The William books began to be persecuted by the censors in late 1942, precisely the moment when the regime was seeking a rapprochement with the Allied powers as the course of the War turned in the latter's favour. This prohibition cannot be understood without exploring the factors which differentiate children's literature from adult literature in the context of Francoism. The books' peculiarly English character also had a vital bearing on how they were censored. The history of Tom Sawyer in Spain demonstrates the effect of literary status on censorship practice. Early in the regime, the censors generally considered Tom Sawyer to be a work for adults. From the mid-1950s, however, children's literature was inscribed as a special category in censorship legislation, and the censors began to view editions of the work as specifically intended for children. Tom Sawyer thus encountered censorship problems in the later years of the regime, supposedly more liberal than the earlier period. Again, these problems would be inexplicable without examining the evolution of the publishing industry and Francoist attitudes to literature and the child. The thesis also provides a detailed analysis of the type of suppressions imposed on the books studied, under the following headings: religion; love, sexuality and gender; authority and politics, nation and race; crime, terror and violence.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Syracuse University, 2009. / "Publication number: AAT 3381591."

<p> As steam-powered industrialization intensified in mid-nineteenth century Britain, the rate and severity of workplace injuries spiked. At the same time, a range of historical dynamics made working class people individually responsible for bearing the effects of industrial injury and carrying on in the aftermath of accidents without support from state or company. By the midcentury, railway accidents were represented as events that put on display the moral character of individual rail workers and widows, rather than &mdash; as in radical rhetorics of previous decades &mdash; the rottenness of state or company bureaucracies. Bearing injury or loss in a reserved manner came to appear as a sign of domestic virtue for working class women and men, though the proper manifestations of this idealized resilience varied by gender. Focusing on dynamics in the railway and nursing sectors, and in the sphere of reproduction, <i>Infrastructures of Injury</i> shows how variously situated working class subjects responded to their conditions of vulnerability over the second half of the nineteenth century. These responses ranged from individualized or family-based self-help initiatives to &mdash; beginning in the 1870s &mdash; strikes, unionization drives, and the looting of company property. Ultimately, this dissertation tells a story about how working class cultural and political practices were remade through the experience of injury and loss.</p>

<p> The effect that fiction has on readers has been continuously debated since at least the fourth century B.C.E. In this dissertation, I first analyze historic arguments of philosophers and critics who have participated significantly in the debate. I organize their critical judgments about reading&rsquo;s effects into three categories&mdash;<i>useful, detrimental</i> and <i> nonaffective.</i> The <i>useful</i> fiction claim is that reading fiction influences readers toward beneficial change. The opposite claim is that reading produces a variety of <i>detrimental</i> effects&mdash;it deceives, inflames, coerces or develops false expectations. At the root of this argument is the idea that fiction appeals to the emotions, therefore, reason and good judgment are suppressed. The third broad category of argument suggests that literature is simply art and has only an aesthetic effect. I explore only the <i>useful</i> and <i>detrimental</i> possibilities in this research. I apply Joshua Landy&rsquo;s critical perspective that novels are primarily <i>formative</i> rather than informative to interrogate ideas about private reading that British women authors explore in their novels from the mid-eighteenth century through the early nineteenth century. During that period, the idea that novels might be formative&mdash;beneficial and educational&mdash;is argued <i>within</i> the narratives and dialog of their novels. I evaluate and describe the critical interrogative work that Charlotte Lennox <i>(The Female Quixote),</i> Maria Edgeworth <i> (Belinda),</i> Jane Austen <i>(Northanger Abbey)</i> and Sarah Green <i>(Scotch Novel Reading)</i> perform using their novels as a platform to consider ideas about women, education and particularly, the potentially <i>positive</i> effects of novel reading. Drawing on threads of theory as ancient as Plato&rsquo;s and Quintilian&rsquo;s and ideas about novels as recent as Huet&rsquo;s and Johnson&rsquo;s, I analyze how these authors use their novels to discuss reader maturation and character development. In their novels, they weave reader development, critical analysis and social critique into narratives about complex characters. I examine in new ways the questions of fiction&rsquo;s effect, reader response and authorial influence. I conclude that novel reading has primarily a positive, formative effect. Consequently, there is potential to use novel reading with university students to help improve decision making and point to issues of character development.</p>

<p> In many advanced societies today, it is taken for granted that the relatively free circulation of opinion on a minimally regulated print market brings social and political benefits. Such benefits can only be taken for granted if one assumes that markets are capable of regulating themselves and that the clash of opposed opinions in venues of public expression is salutary for the society in which those clashes occur. Early eighteenth-century Britons lacked both of these assumptions, and so for them the deregulation of the print market that resulted from the 1695 lapse of the Licensing Act was a formidable problem, a challenge to the intelligibility of their world that had, somehow, to be confronted. This dissertation seeks to give an account of this confrontation. Specifically, it seeks to understand how key metaphors within British culture were adapted and repurposed as descriptions of what printed writing was, what it was good for, and what rules and norms readers and writers needed to respect in order to serve that good, at an historical moment when such descriptions were lacking but badly needed.</p><p> The first two chapters argue that the early decades of the eighteenth century were characterized by an intense struggle, conducted across an array of printed genres, over which descriptions would be prove authoritative in this new environment of reading and writing. In this contest, two key metaphors&mdash;one was "debate," the other "conversation"&mdash;emerged as particularly strong candidates as ways of figuring print and mediating it for its users. These two candidates were called upon to do similar work: to provide the procedural and ethical norms needed to turn the unruly production and consumption of printed matter into an orderly and beneficial cultural routine. Because these two metaphors were substantively different, however, they produced divergent understandings of the meaning of print. Indeed, a main claim of these chapters is that the two metaphors struggled for authority in the early decades of the century, with conversation emerging as the dominant (though certainly not exclusive) metadiscourse. These chapters give an account of how metadiscursive struggle was conducted and offer some claims about why it took the precise form that it did. Along the way, they complicate existing scholarly histories of eighteenth-century British print that locate the major metadiscursive innovations of the century in the legal realm. By contrast, I emphasize the extent to which writers, in trying to make of print an ordered and rule-bound totality, drew on their existent discursive culture and its metaphors as resources for figuring print. The resulting cultural process was a complex and dynamic one, whereby the application of these metaphors to print changed both the meaning and force of the metaphors and the practices of reading and writing.</p><p> The first two chapters contribute to the history of how British culture helped to mediate print technology for eighteenth-century Britons. The third and fourth chapters are somewhat narrower in scope; they work to identify a particular formal category, crafted by Hogarth and Sterne, and then to demonstrate that this category came to be used, by writers like Burke, to represent British society to itself. In Burke's hands, this politico-aesthetic category, which I call "the eccentric," represented the British social and political order as the intricate result of historical time rather than the work of purposive human agency. Through it, Burke forged a rhetoric designed move his fellow Britons to understand their "country" as an intricate totality whose very existence was threatened by Jacobin "political metaphysics." In adapting this formal category as a vehicle for political and historical thinking and argumentation, Burke invented a style of public address in which whole social and political orders could be revealed as precious, fragile things in need of the protection that a reading public might provide simply by feeling grateful for them and concerned about them.</p><p> As a whole, the dissertation seeks to identify and theorize forms of "thin mediation"&mdash;that is, forms of mediation that have discernable formal and affective features but few necessary ideological entailments. The metadiscourses analyzed in the first half of the dissertation and "the eccentric" analyzed in the second are "thin" in this sense: they are able to disconnect themselves from robustly articulated ideologies, to circulate widely, and to give strangers a sense of their social order as a totality and of their place within that totality. If, as I suspect, such thin forms of mediation are indispensable to "liberal governmentality," this dissertation may contribute in its modest way to the on-going genealogy of liberalism.</p>

<p> Descended from Celtic goddesses and the fairies of folklore, the literary character of Morgan le Fay has been most commonly perceived as a witch and a one-dimensional villainess who plagues King Arthur and his court, rather than recognized as the legendary King&rsquo;s enchanted healer and otherworldly guardian. Too often the complexity of Morgan le Fay and her supernatural abilities are lost, her character neglected as peripheral. As a literary figure of imaginative design this thesis explores Morgan le Fay as a unique &ldquo;window&rdquo; into the medieval mindset, whereby one can recover both medieval understandings of magic and female magicians. By analyzing her role in key sources from the twelfth to fifteenth century, this thesis uses Morgan le Fay to recover nuanced perceptions of the supernatural in medieval England that embraced the ambiguity of a pagan past and remained insulated from continental constructions of demonic witchcraft.</p>

<p> Many concerns contributed to the creative success of Charles Darwin&rsquo;s theorizing, including his humble character, reading Wordsworth, courting Emma for his wife, and considering the origins of creative thought in a material mind. Creativity is not straightforward; in Darwin&rsquo;s case, it was fed by diverse interests, literary sensitivities, character traits, unusual introspection and even thoughts of marriage.</p><p> During the time frame of this study, the two important years between his return from the <i>Beagle</i> and his Malthusian insight that led to natural selection, Darwin twice read <i>The Excursion</i> and fell in love. While he thought hopefully of Emma, he was focused on reproduction to understand species transmutation and pondered evolved roots for emotions like love, thus linking his sexual and creative stimulation. Part of his drive to succeed was for Emma&rsquo;s approval, to be a victorious naturalist and demonstrate that he would be a good provider. Emma appreciated Darwin&rsquo;s humble character, a trait that also allowed him to question belief systems and intellectual conceits that restricted other naturalists. Darwin noted that many of his peers were blocked from understanding species transmutation by their intellectual vanities&mdash;like the idea that man was the crown of creation instead of just one species in nature&rsquo;s panoply.</p><p> In the intellectual culture of Darwin&rsquo;s time creationism was science, while scientists competed with poets for authority over explaining nature. Wordsworth epitomized creativity while asserting that <i>The Excursion&rsquo;s </i> themes were man, nature and human life&mdash;parallel to Darwin&rsquo;s. Wordsworth&rsquo;s insights into human emotions, morality and creativity were important to Darwin, who needed to explain all human traits, physical, emotional and mental, as evolved from simpler animals. Darwin reflected on the roots of imaginative thought and proposed a process for thinking that he applied it to his own theorizing; from nascent generation of ideas through rigorous dialectic testing to solid conclusions, thus demonstrating thoughts in competition.</p><p> The strong correlation between the productivity of Darwin&rsquo;s theorizing and his humility, poetry, Emma and considerations of creativity, offers new insights into the path of his theorizing, and perhaps into the origins of creativity itself.</p>

The argument of this thesis is that Finnegans Wake is a peculiarly appropriate text for an investigation of the academic discipline of English, and that the issue of readership is the best way to approach the Wake. The thesis, which is organised into three main sections, shows that both Finnegans Wake and the discipline of English Studies are similarly engaged in problems of defining audiences. The opening section shows that the Wake has long been seen as a limit to literature, and as a defining text of literary study. Reception theory proves unable to cope with a study of historical audiences. Finnegans Wake was written over a period roughly concomitant with the rapid professionalisation of English studies and underwent a loss of audiences except for its critical reviewers. The extended third chapter sets out in some detail the growth of English studies, both in itself and more specifically as a context for the name of Joyce in the 1930s and beyond. This also includes analysis of the passage of the Wake in university syllabi. The second section considers post-structuralist claims that the Wake disrupts or subverts the space of the academy. It analyses a wide range of poststructuralist and other reactions to the Wake, and proceeds to a study of inscriptions of readership in the work of Derrida, and explores Derrida's idea of audiences for Joyce. The third section presents two readings of key elements of Finnegans Wake. Analysis of the letters, and of some of Joyce's sources, stresses the important role of the professor figures, which is indicative of the extent to which Joyce's last work was influenced by the professionalisation of literary study. Textual analysis proceeds with the Four, who function as an internal interpretive community. A brief conclusion sums up the argument of the thesis.

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