<p> In 1846 and 1847, ether and chloroform were used and celebrated for the first time in Britain and the United States as effective surgical anaesthetics capable of rendering individuals insensible to physical pain. During the same decade, British novels of realism were enjoying increasing cultural authority, dominating readers' attention, and evoking readers' sympathy for numerous social justice issues. This dissertation investigates a previously unanswered question in studies of literature and medicine: how did writers of social realism incorporate realistic descriptions of physical pain, a notoriously difficult sensation to describe, in an era when the very idea of pain's inevitability was challenged by medical developments and when, concurrently, novelists, journalists, and politicians were concerned with humanitarian reforms to recognize traditionally ignored and disadvantaged individuals and groups in pain? By contextualizing the emergence of specific realist novels including works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, William Howard Russell, and Charles Dickens, within larger nonfiction discourses regarding factory reform, prison reform, and war, this dissertation identifies and clarifies how realist authors, who aim to demonstrate general truths about "real life," employed various descriptions of physical pain during this watershed moment in medicine and pain theory, to convince readers of their validity as well as to awaken sympathetic politics among readers. </p><p> This study analyzes Gaskell's first industrial novel, <i>Mary Barton </i> (1848), Reade's prison-scandal novel, <i>It is Never Too Late to Mend</i> (1856), Russell's Crimean War correspondence (1850s) and only novel, <i>The Adventures of Doctor Brady</i> (1868), and Dickens's second <i>Bildungsroman, Great Expectations</i> (1861), thereby revealing different strategies utilized by each author representing pain - ranging from subtle to graphic, collective to individualized, urgent to remembered, and destructive to productive. This study shows how audience expectations, political timing, authorial authority, and medical theory influence and are influenced by realist authors writing pain, as they contribute to a cultural consensus that the pain of others is unacceptable and requires attention. These realist authors must, in the end, provide fictionalized accounts of pain, asking readers to act as witnesses and to use their imaginations, in order to inspire sympathy.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Vereinigte Friedrichs-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1912. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [7]-11).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Universität Zürich, 1922. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-90)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 6, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3862. Advisers: Deidre Lynch; Nicholas Williams.

<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>

While the growing body of literature on the relationship between feminist theory, classical myth, and classical scholarship has contributed to an understanding of general scholarly trends, there has not been a sustained examination of the relationship between feminist scholarship and classical receptions. Furthermore, the field of classical reception studies focuses almost exclusively on male authors and widely ignores female voices. This thesis addresses these lacunae through detailed discussions of the Ovidian receptions of four women writers active between 1950 and the present: Sylvia Plath, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Josephine Balmer, and Saviana Stănescu. The thesis tracks the ‘difference made’ by feminist scholarship on their varied receptions, and the ways in which recurrent concerns in their engagements prefigure, echo, or explicitly draw upon feminist theory and feminist Ovidian scholarship. This thesis poses the argument that women’s classical receptions offer a critical tool to advance feminist classical scholars’ attempts to ‘reappropriate the text’, by reclaiming female narrative authority from the male poet and interpellating the ‘resisting reader’. This diverse, yet characteristically feminine, Ovidian tradition challenges existing reception traditions based upon male practitioners alone, and reawakens the political and aesthetic critique at the heart of Ovid’s poetry.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p.75-77). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

<p> The <i>Brown v. Board of Education</i> decision marks a crucial moment, not only in United States civil rights history, but also in educational reform, as it presumed that national reform would follow the success of changes in the educational system. Surprisingly, within the vast body of <i>Brown</i> scholarship, little attention has been paid to the narratives that are taught to contemporary schoolchildren about desegregation, which presumably would help them to develop a framework for understanding their own racially fraught classroom experiences. Conversely, within children's literature scholarship, narratives of desegregation have not received attention as stories that are also about school. This dissertation examines the archive of children's novels about desegregation and makes the case that they can provide insights both for scholars of desegregation and for scholars of the school story genre. I argue that the often-discussed failures to realize the <i>Brown</i> decision's utopian vision can be traced to the underlying assumptions about individual success, failure, and ability that are built into the institution of the school, assumptions which come into focus when these novels are read as generic school stories. Nevertheless, I also suggest that children's novels highlight the potential agency of children, and suggest utopian methods of education, racial integration, and citizenship, in ways that policy discourse cannot do.</p>