This dissertation explores the relationship between the ‘rise’ of the British novel and the critical changes happening in contemporary English marriage law from early eighteenth-century to the end of the nineteenth-century. While citing landmark legal treatises and acts and positioning these novels as the medium through which to see the way these legal moments significantly shaped British culture and society, equity is ultimately at the heart of this study, with equity functioning as part of law but a corrective to it. Running parallel to this protocol of reading through equity is a reading informed through moral philosophy, drawn predominantly from the work of Adam Smith and other thinkers from the Scottish Enlightenment. They encourage us to think about obligation, and the relationship between intentions, expectations, and consequences on the point of promise and contract. Beginning with Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), I show the moral and legal difficulties that arise when promises are based purely on verbal contracts. I then move to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Pamela in Her Exalted Condition (1741) to address the importance and utility of contract, but also the need to outline and endorse a system—introduced through Hardwicke’s Act (1753)—that would provide a more reliable structure for the marriage narrative. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria (1798) and Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), both of which I call historical novels, pinpoint legal structures that are both oppressive and obsolete, and those who fall victim to the insufficient common law require a more equitable judgment. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) encourages readers to think about the potency behind intentions, both expressed and implied, and how resulting consequences can often run counter to the original intentions and expectations. I posit each text as a ‘case’ warranting treatment and judgment in a court of equity, where the particular details are judged in and of themselves but then stand as an offering for ways to continue to think about the general pattern and evaluation of human nature and morals. / English

<p>This dissertation explores the ways in which British popular novels of the eighteenth century functioned as commodities. "Novel Addiction", the title of this dissertation has a double meaning: Addiction was a new conceptual framework developed during the eighteenth century in order to manage the increasing anxiety brought upon the culture of consumption, and the novel, one of the most popular commodities of the same period, was addictive. Both as successful commodities and efficient cultural agents, popular novels that were categorized as the sentimental or the gothic participated in the process of creating and disseminating models of addiction that warranted perpetual discipline. However, this discipline does not aim at preventing or eliminating addiction. It rather manages addiction as "habit" in a way that guarantees proliferation of the market economy. By employing the framework of addiction, I intend to reconfigure the role of the novel in the construction of individual and collective models of consumption-oriented subjectivity. </p><p>The first chapter begins with Eliza Haywood's Present for Women Addicted to Drinking where the author proposes novel-reading as the best cure for alcohol addiction, which allows me to explore a parallel between the phenomenon called the "gin craze" and the proliferation of print commodities. The second and third chapter discuss the sentimental novel and the gothic novel respectively focusing on the characteristics of each genre that make them addictive. The fourth and final chapter discusses Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, which address and attempt to manage "novel addiction," a problem posed by the popular novels of her contemporaries.</p> / Dissertation

FundaÃÃo de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Cearà / Em 1915, um dos romances mais lidos na Biblioteca Provincial do Cearà entre 1878 e 1887, A mulher adÃltera, do espanhol Enrique Perez Escrich, foi definido numa espÃcie de Ãndex como âuma obra indigna de um larâ. DefiniÃÃes como essa nÃo foram incomuns ao longo do sÃculo XIX quando se falava das histÃrias romanescas. Aqui, a leitura de um romance acontecia no meio de vÃrios impasses e interesses. Ou seja, consumir ficÃÃo impressa era uma prÃtica de muitos discursos cruzados. Por isso que falar dos usos histÃricos da leitura à contribuir para uma anÃlise da cultura do livro, seu lugar e significado numa determinada configuraÃÃo histÃrica. Nossa pesquisa discute as prÃticas de leitura na Biblioteca Provincial do Cearà na perspectiva de uma cartografia crÃtica do circuito das letras em Fortaleza nas Ãltimas dÃcadas do XIX. / In 1915, one of the most widely read novels in the Provincial Library of Cearà from 1878 to 1887, The Adulterous Woman, by the Spanish Enrique Perez Escrich, was defined, in a kind of index, as "an unworthy work for household". Definitions like that one were not uncommon during the XIX century, when there was talk of novelistic stories. At that time, reading a novel was done among several impasses and interests, that is, consuming fiction books was a practice discussed by many crossed speeches. That is why speaking about historical uses of reading is to contribute to an analyses of book culture and of its place and meaning in a particular historical situation. Our work discusses the reading practices in the Provincial Library of CearÃ, in the perspective of a critical mapping of books circuit in Fortaleza in the last decades of the XIX century.

Orientador: Eric Mitchell Sabinson / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-21T13:58:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Salmistraro_Renan_M.pdf: 708758 bytes, checksum: 70105929fb47a6129b578e18b85a13d9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: Malone meurt joga com a tradição realista do romance. Esse jogo reflete na criação do enredo, dos personagens e do estilo da narrativa e reflete como Beckett interpreta o que comumente é encarado como a realidade / Abstract: Malone meurt is a joke of the realistic narrative. The novel's structure - the characters, the events, and the style of the narrative - is an example of how Beckett interprets what is considered as the real world / Mestrado / Teoria e Critica Literaria / Mestre em Teoria e História Literária

<p>“Trade in Feelings: Shame in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” traces a genealogy of shame, a difficult feeling which is transformed and reworked in eighteenth-century narratives and which provides a ground for the self-reflective interiority required of commercial subjects. The stakes of this project are twofold. First, while cultural critics (e.g., Ahmed, Probyn, and Sedgwick) have recently theorized shame and suggested its potential for political activism, histories of this feeling have yet to be written. Reading narratives of shame in George Lillo’s <em>London Merchant ( 1731) </em>, Eliza Haywood’s <em>The British Recluse (1722)</em>, multiple editions of Defoe’s <em>Roxana (1724, 1730, 1745[49])</em>, Samuel Richardson’s <em>Clarissa (1747-48)</em>, and Frances Burney’s <em>Evelina (1778)</em>, this chronologically organized study supplies one part of such a history. As such, the analysis builds on and reframes Foucault’s historical narrative of the emergence of the modern disciplined and divided self-consciousness by focusing on the affects that produce and re-produce it, particularly the affect of shame. Second, while Michael McKeon has identified the formative force of questions of virtue and truth on the novel, this thesis suggests that these questions are critically condensed in narratives of shame. The dissertation argues that private shame and the psychological interiority of the eighteenth-century novel are mutually productive. Once a passion which could lead to vice and even murder, by the late eighteenth century shame becomes a feeling which is internalized, and which divides the self. Connected both to the question of truth and the question of virtue, as well as to the status of passion itself, shame informs our sense of emotions as interior, yet remains inextricable from questions of reputation, credit, and civility.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Vilhelm Fredrik Palmblad (1788–1852) was one of the leading men of the Romantic circle in Uppsala, known as the “New school” or the “fosforists”. Among the men in this group, Palmblad was the one devoting most attention to the novel, and he broke sharply with the dominating negative view of the genre. This thesis examines Palmblad’s conception of the novel genre, using his critical writings as well as his own novels. Palmblad holds that the novel originates from the chivalrous romances of the Middle Ages. Like these romances, the novel is, and should be, a “wonderful story”, dealing with adventures and heroic deeds in service of God and womanhood. It is of decisive importance that the novel is elevated from mundane life: the stature of the characters and the story are crucial criteria of value. Palmblad also emphasizes the importance of portraying characters and their circumstances in an individualized way. Influenced in particular by Walter Scott, Palmblad gradually opens his conception of the novel towards depictions of everyday life. However, this opening is surrounded by restrictions showing that Palmblad still adheres to his Romantic aesthetics. The study challenges the previous understanding of Palmblad’s development from Romantic to Realist. Instead, the shifts of his aesthetics towards a stronger connection with reality ought to be understood as endeavours to preserve the ideals of the Romantic novel at a time when they were contested. From a wider horizon, the study also questions the prevalent understanding of the transition from the Romantic to the realistic novel. The aesthetic contrast between “Romanticism” and “Realism” ought to be played down. The truly important opposition among the Swedish novelists of the time is rather a political conflict between conservatives and liberals.

This thesis explores the representation of conspiracy in the literature of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its engagement with conspiracy thinking, with particular reference to the work of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and George Sand (1804-1876). In providing the first sustained scholarly exploration of conspiracy and cultural production in nineteenth-century France, it situates the novel within wider discourses on European political history in the years leading up to the upheaval of 1848. Through close readings of Balzac and Sand's common investment in conspiracist modes of explanation, this study makes the case for a new generic category, the novel of conspiracy, around which literary poetics, historical imagination and political fantasy come to coalesce. Chapter one proposes a re-evaluation of the dialectic between models of surface and depth reading in Balzac's Une ténébreuse affaire (1841), arguing that the conspiratorial landscape of this proto-detective novel belies Balzac's fraught relationship to the severed referentiality of his narrative. As illustration of a Balzacian poetics of conspiracy, Une ténébreuse affaire, it is suggested, points forward in literary history towards the Flaubertian aesthetic of platitude. Chapter two looks to the political criticisms Jacques Rancière makes of Sand's patrician benevolence to inform its reading of Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840), which depicts workers' secret societies and the underground networks of Restoration liberalism. Accusations of misguided idealism, this thesis shows, align Rancière's critique and the literary-critical narrative informing Sand's twentieth-century aesthetic devaluation with the reproach that she herself levels at the Carbonarist conspirators of her novel. Chapter three, finally, turns to the alternative origin myth of 1789 that Sand elaborates in Consuelo-La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842-44). Her engagement with the founding text of the conspiracist tradition of explanation, it argues, provides the cornerstone for the interrogation of the tensions of a pre-Revolutionary Europe torn between Enlightenment and Illuminism. Framing the Balzacian and Sandian novel as emblematic of a wider discourse on the conspiratorial origins of 1789 has a two-fold advantage. On an immediate level, it nuances received critical ideas on these authors' relationships to history and literary genre (a realist Balzac incapable of looking back further than the Restoration whose demise he so lamented; an idealist Sand too caught up in a utopian future to envisage the historical past). In doing so, this study seeks to problematize the narrative of oppositionality behind the Balzac-Sand binary in terms of which the literary history of nineteenth-century France is habitually couched. Yet, more significantly, it also gestures towards the importance of the conspiratorial as a prism through which to approach the porosity of the very categories of 'literature' and 'history' in the nineteenth-century French context.

La figure de lecteur, prégnante dans les romans britanniques des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, est porteuse de sens pour l’histoire du roman. Intimement liée à l’histoire du livre et à la discontinuité de lecture qu’impose la publication des romans en plusieurs volumes ou épisodes, elle s’impose aussi comme une représentation plus ou moins fidèle du lectorat. La figure de lecteur reconstruit ainsi l’histoire complexe que le roman entretient avec ses lecteurs. Derrière une bienveillante volonté d’inviter le plus grand nombre à la lecture romanesque se cache en réalité une tendance à la définition du lectorat par exclusion. Pour aussi paradoxal que cela soit, le roman a peur de ses lecteurs. Mus par la volonté de dissocier le genre des vulgaires « romances », les auteurs ne vont avoir de cesse de repousser en marge de leur texte tant de lecteurs indésirables susceptibles de faire échouer l’édifice littéraire aux préceptes encore très classiques qui se met en place. Au-delà, la figure de lecteur ne saurait être qu’une simple affaire de représentation : elle est aussi un double narratif, une sorte de miroir érigé au narrateur-auteur qui met à profit ce reflet inversé pour construire l’instance narrative encore bien peu légitime qu’il représente. Figure de lecteur et narrateur-auteur sont indissociablement liés. Ainsi les variations d’apparition de la figure de lecteur dans le texte n’ont d’égal que la fragilité de la voix auctoriale et l’expression de l’angoisse de réception que trahit une très symptomatique rhétorique de dépréciation. / Pregnant as it is in 18th and 19thC British novels, the reader in the text is potent with meaning for the history of the novel. Related to the history of the book and the discontinuous act of reading imposed on readers by the publication of novels in different volumes or episodes, the reader figure may also be seen as a more or less faithful representation of actual readers. The reader figure thus retraces the complex history of the relationship between the novel and its readers. Behind what appears as a complacent will to invite the widest audience to the reading of novels, a more systematic tendency to define readership by exclusion can hardly be concealed. Paradoxical as this may be, the novel has much to fear from its readers. Moved by their will to have the genre clearly distinguished from vulgar romances, the authors will repeatedly push those unwelcome readers likely to lead the whole literary edifice to a collapse back to the margins of their texts. But the reader cannot just be a matter of representation: it also is a narrative double, a sort of mirror erected to the self-conscious narrator who uses it to build up the hardly legitimate literary authority he stands for. Thus the reader figure and the self-conscious narrator are linked by an indissolvable bond. The variations in number of reader figures only reverberate the frailty of the authorial voice and the anxiety of reception expressed in a highly symptomatic text-undermining rhetoric.

This thesis examines the novels of Christine Brooke-Rose and A. S. Byatt in order to question the extent to which contemporary British novelists are free to innovate with the forms of literary realism, forms that have a long and valued tradition in British literary production. Both authors, I argue, have reassessed the limits of the realist novel over the course of their careers, and the specific ways in which they engage with, or depart from, their literary inheritance are discussed. The introduction contextualises the literary climate out of which the two writers emerge. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was a commonplace of literary criticism to declare the “death of the English novel.” In the years following modernist experimentation, British novelists made a conscious return to the mimetic realism of the nineteenth century. Rather than the intellectual sterility that is often assumed to have dominated this period, I observe that there were in fact many writers who were continuing the innovations of the preceding generations, Christine Brooke-Rose and A. S. Byatt amongst them. To view realism to be in need of renewal is first of all to view literary production in terms of an ontological-historical distinction of texts as types of objects. It may be also to neglect the ways in which literary history is always already in dialogue with the present. Both authors have made concerted efforts to refresh literary realism; however, they have proceeded in very different ways. Brooke-Rose has experimented with the content and the form of the novel in order to renew conventions she insists are fatigued or overworked. The novels she has published since 1964 depart radically from what would ordinarily be recognised as realist fictions as they make no attempt to disguise their own textuality. Byatt, on the other hand, has reassessed realism through the forms of realism itself. Through an engagement with literary history, she revisits realism to pursue what has always been of value within it. In so doing, she creates a developmental model of literary production in which literary debts are made visible in the work of the contemporary writer. Chapter One examines Thru, the literary experiment for which Brooke-Rose is most celebrated. My starting point is her claim, following Roland Barthes’s S/Z, that she is the author of writerly as opposed to readerly texts. I argue that to establish any such easy opposition is to neglect Barthes’s departure from the polemicism that had marked his earlier work. Rather than interrogating how well her texts are supported by her claim to be writerly, I turn the opposition around in order to examine precisely how Barthes’s readerly operates within Thru. Through a close reading both of the novel and of Barthes, I illustrate that many characteristics of literary realism that Brooke-Rose argues are exhausted, in particular characterisation and narration, are still operating in Thru. Chapter Two develops Brooke-Rose’s opposition of readerly and writerly in order to examine its consequence for her own experimental writing. Here I return to Thru to demonstrate the ways in which Barthes’s readerly and writerly operate as interdependent processes rather than as opposing terms. I then reconsider her earliest work, a period she has since disavowed. I argue that rather than a separation, there is a continuum between her earliest works and her later, more experimental, writing that has not been recognised by the author or her critics. In Chapter Three I turn my attention to Byatt’s insistence on a developmental model of literary production. Here I identify the role that evolutionary narratives play in her texts. Two of her works, Possession and “Morpho Eugenia” are set largely in 1859, a year in which a specific epistemological emergence was to reconsider genealogical relations. In this chapter I examine the writings she invents for her characters and argue that she takes metaphors from natural history in order, not only to show the close relationship between literature and natural history, but to provide her reader with a framework of literary-generational descent. Chapter Four examines more closely the ways in which Byatt converses with her literary predecessors. She offers a version of realism that has always been concerned with perception, and with the impossibility of translating that perception into verisimilar fiction. In this chapter I identify the role that art works play within two of Byatt’s earlier novels, The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, as she finds in them the same metaphorical ambiguities that bind the language of the novelist to imprecision. I then examine the ways in which metaphor works in these novels to elude precise signification of meaning. Chapter Five returns to Byatt’s neo-Victorian texts, Possession and Angels and Insects, and examines the author’s ventriloquism of her Victorian characters, which includes Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. Ventriloquism, I argue, is concerned with a remembrance of the literary dead within the present work and is thus an expression of mourning. However, to avoid melancholia the new text must also emphasise its difference from that which is being ventriloquised. I then discuss Byatt’s focus on nineteenth-century spiritualism, as it is through the trope of the séance that she reconsiders the afterlife of literary history itself. The final chapter examines the role of the critic. The mourning of Byatt’s fictionalised Tennyson is singular and overpowering. Chapter Six begins with a consideration of two of Possession’s critics, Mortimer Cropper and Leonora Stern, whose readings, I argue, are similar to Tennyson’s mourning in their inhospitality to other readings, other mournings of the literary text. I compare Cropper and Stern to Possession’s other critics, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, whom Byatt places in the role of literary heir. Not only do Roland and Maud display an essential respect for the texts that they study, but also their reading is open to revision. The literary text, as Barthes argues, must always keep in reserve some essential meaning. Only through interpretive revision, Byatt implies, is the promise of this hopeful-yet-impossible revelation made to the reader.

This thesis examines the novels of Christine Brooke-Rose and A. S. Byatt in order to question the extent to which contemporary British novelists are free to innovate with the forms of literary realism, forms that have a long and valued tradition in British literary production. Both authors, I argue, have reassessed the limits of the realist novel over the course of their careers, and the specific ways in which they engage with, or depart from, their literary inheritance are discussed. The introduction contextualises the literary climate out of which the two writers emerge. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was a commonplace of literary criticism to declare the “death of the English novel.” In the years following modernist experimentation, British novelists made a conscious return to the mimetic realism of the nineteenth century. Rather than the intellectual sterility that is often assumed to have dominated this period, I observe that there were in fact many writers who were continuing the innovations of the preceding generations, Christine Brooke-Rose and A. S. Byatt amongst them. To view realism to be in need of renewal is first of all to view literary production in terms of an ontological-historical distinction of texts as types of objects. It may be also to neglect the ways in which literary history is always already in dialogue with the present. Both authors have made concerted efforts to refresh literary realism; however, they have proceeded in very different ways. Brooke-Rose has experimented with the content and the form of the novel in order to renew conventions she insists are fatigued or overworked. The novels she has published since 1964 depart radically from what would ordinarily be recognised as realist fictions as they make no attempt to disguise their own textuality. Byatt, on the other hand, has reassessed realism through the forms of realism itself. Through an engagement with literary history, she revisits realism to pursue what has always been of value within it. In so doing, she creates a developmental model of literary production in which literary debts are made visible in the work of the contemporary writer. Chapter One examines Thru, the literary experiment for which Brooke-Rose is most celebrated. My starting point is her claim, following Roland Barthes’s S/Z, that she is the author of writerly as opposed to readerly texts. I argue that to establish any such easy opposition is to neglect Barthes’s departure from the polemicism that had marked his earlier work. Rather than interrogating how well her texts are supported by her claim to be writerly, I turn the opposition around in order to examine precisely how Barthes’s readerly operates within Thru. Through a close reading both of the novel and of Barthes, I illustrate that many characteristics of literary realism that Brooke-Rose argues are exhausted, in particular characterisation and narration, are still operating in Thru. Chapter Two develops Brooke-Rose’s opposition of readerly and writerly in order to examine its consequence for her own experimental writing. Here I return to Thru to demonstrate the ways in which Barthes’s readerly and writerly operate as interdependent processes rather than as opposing terms. I then reconsider her earliest work, a period she has since disavowed. I argue that rather than a separation, there is a continuum between her earliest works and her later, more experimental, writing that has not been recognised by the author or her critics. In Chapter Three I turn my attention to Byatt’s insistence on a developmental model of literary production. Here I identify the role that evolutionary narratives play in her texts. Two of her works, Possession and “Morpho Eugenia” are set largely in 1859, a year in which a specific epistemological emergence was to reconsider genealogical relations. In this chapter I examine the writings she invents for her characters and argue that she takes metaphors from natural history in order, not only to show the close relationship between literature and natural history, but to provide her reader with a framework of literary-generational descent. Chapter Four examines more closely the ways in which Byatt converses with her literary predecessors. She offers a version of realism that has always been concerned with perception, and with the impossibility of translating that perception into verisimilar fiction. In this chapter I identify the role that art works play within two of Byatt’s earlier novels, The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, as she finds in them the same metaphorical ambiguities that bind the language of the novelist to imprecision. I then examine the ways in which metaphor works in these novels to elude precise signification of meaning. Chapter Five returns to Byatt’s neo-Victorian texts, Possession and Angels and Insects, and examines the author’s ventriloquism of her Victorian characters, which includes Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. Ventriloquism, I argue, is concerned with a remembrance of the literary dead within the present work and is thus an expression of mourning. However, to avoid melancholia the new text must also emphasise its difference from that which is being ventriloquised. I then discuss Byatt’s focus on nineteenth-century spiritualism, as it is through the trope of the séance that she reconsiders the afterlife of literary history itself. The final chapter examines the role of the critic. The mourning of Byatt’s fictionalised Tennyson is singular and overpowering. Chapter Six begins with a consideration of two of Possession’s critics, Mortimer Cropper and Leonora Stern, whose readings, I argue, are similar to Tennyson’s mourning in their inhospitality to other readings, other mournings of the literary text. I compare Cropper and Stern to Possession’s other critics, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, whom Byatt places in the role of literary heir. Not only do Roland and Maud display an essential respect for the texts that they study, but also their reading is open to revision. The literary text, as Barthes argues, must always keep in reserve some essential meaning. Only through interpretive revision, Byatt implies, is the promise of this hopeful-yet-impossible revelation made to the reader.