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British literature of the long nineteenth century, exemplified by three authors who lived and wrote in England from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth centuries, was deeply focused on understanding human relationships and increasing equality between the sexes. From the novels of Jane Austen in the late Romantic period, through George Eliot’s Victorian novels, to the prose and plays of Oscar Wilde written on the cusp of a new century, constructions of love and marriage matured within and throughout the authors’ life experiences and art, affecting and reflecting cultural changes in all levels of English society but most notably through the changing mores of the rising middle class. Attesting to their lasting universality in depicting male and female emotions, social standards, and cultural goals, the written works of Austen, Eliot, and Wilde influenced a century of contemporary readers and continue to draw audiences for their timeless understandings of, and insightful approaches to, human relationships. Through detailed analysis of the authors’ selected works, with references to contemporary and modern critical interpretations, I will focus on these ever evolving individual and collective constructs of love and marriage, from Austen’s practical approach to love and sometimes deceptively witty arguments for equal partnership in marriage, through Eliot’s complex studies of individuality and redefined concepts of marriage, to Wilde’s insistence that love, marriage, and partnership be redefine by and true to self, despite pressure to conform. Throughout this detailed study of increasing realism in English society and fiction, changing gender roles and rights, developing relationships between the sexes, and the evolution of conceptions of love, the institution of marriage, a partnership between and within the sexes, this dissertation will focus on the long-term effects of the literary contributions of Austen, Eliot, and Wilde to ever evolving constructions of love and marriage in nineteenth-century England and their enduring effects on the Western World. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / January 18, 2018. / Austen, Eliot, Love, Marriage, Wilde / Includes bibliographical references. / Candace Ward, Professor Directing Dissertation; Aimee Boutin, University Representative; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Eric Walker, Committee Member.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / The relationship of Elizabeth Bowen's critical theory to her practice has not yet received detailed treatment. Her essay "Notes on Writing a Novel" (1945), a comprehensive and revealing source of practical formulations on method, reveals her basic traditionalism and her striking individual qualities as well. It serves, furthermore, to bring her novels into relief and it suggests tentative conclusions about her place in contemporary literature. Examined here in detail are the eight main divisions of the essay: Plot, Characters, Scene, Dialogue, Visual Angle, Moral Angle, Advance, and Relevance of special importance in considering each of the eight novels are the following: under Plot, "the non-poetic statement of a poetic truth," "mystification as emphasis," "action of language," and "what-is-to-be-said"; under Characters, "materialization," "unpredictability and inevitability," and "diminution of alternatives"; under Scene, "the mood of the 'Now,'" "categoricalness," "staticness," and "dramatic use"; and under Dialogue, "faked realistic qualities" and "functional use." [TRUNCATED]

<p> This thesis takes a look at three major texts: Mark Z. Danielewski&rsquo;s <i> House of Leaves</i> (2000), Charlotte Bront&euml;&rsquo;s <i>Jane Eyre</i> (1847), and Edgar Allan Poe&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). These texts are certainly linked by the gothic motif, past trauma (and thus memory), and also desire. However, I see these texts as a set for several reasons. These texts are representations of how the gothic motif can be used to supply the narrative, not supplement it. This means, for me, that the narratives of these texts are not just staples of &ldquo;the gothic,&rdquo; but their very <i>architecture</i> is founded upon the gothic tradition. Each text takes place within a house, in a sort of labyrinthine creation, haunting in nature with supernatural manifestations, and, on top of that, a theme of misery within the family. Although these three texts are connected by their treatment and reliance on the gothic motif, I&rsquo;m drawn to them as a set because of 1) the characters&rsquo; transmutability of the spaces they inhabit and 2) the physicality of the publication themselves. I am concerned with the transformations that occur within and without these texts. By that, I mean I am a concerned with transformations within the minds of the characters (development) and the spaces they occupy, as well how these texts call readers to action. Above all, I am concerned with agency, that of the characters within these texts and of the texts themselves. I argue that these spaces within these texts as well as the texts themselves are posthuman. Though, where does regarding these texts as posthuman leave us as scholars? </p><p>

Scholarship on Herman Melville has a tendency to treat the sea as a destination in itself, but in one of Redburn's autobiographical moments the narrator confesses that initially his "thoughts of the sea were connected with the land; but with fine old lands, full of mossy cathedrals and churches, and long, narrow, crooked streets without side-walks, and lined with strange houses". When in literary trouble, Melville rebounded by employing the earliest furnishings of his imagination, using England as his setting and his theme. In his examination of the political, economic, and above all cultural ties between Britain and the United States, Melville anticipated the analytical models used by transatlanticist scholars today: At times he treated England and America as uncanny doubles and trips abroad as akin to time-travel, with each country seeing the other as both a point of origin and a vision of the future. Elsewhere, Melville tracked the circulation of people and objects throughout a unified--and dehumanized--Anglo-American world. Critics are often tempted to treat Melville's English writings, like his trips to England, as a vacation from his real work, but a deep engagement with British culture, and his attempt to write his way into it, was Melville's life's work. He is never writing only about England; produced at moments of professional crisis, Melville's transatlantic fictions include interrogations of the global marketplace and the possibilities for art. Through readings of Redburn, the diptych stories, and Israel Potter, this dissertation aims to explicate what Melville's English works have to say about England, America, commerce, art, and the author's own place in the British literary heritage he valued so highly.

The popular British theatre of the late nineteenth century has often been regarded as both aesthetically and politically bankrupt: bombastic and spectacular, it offered a vision of sensational theatricality lacking both the formal innovation and the intellectual charge of the later avant-garde stage and of literary modernism. My dissertation, by contrast, argues that one element of the nineteenth-century stage survived and claimed a place at the heart of British modernism: the idea of the actor. In successive chapters stretching from 1897 to 1958, I take up works of fiction and drama by Bram Stoker, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, revealing how various performers of the late-Victorian stage became essential to the formation of modernist aesthetics. I show that the actor's significance lay not only in her cultural station but also in her subversive mediation of artistic convention and self-conscious reenactment of the past; by returning to the performers of the 1890s, these British and Irish writers reconceived the terms that are central to our understanding of modernism: personality, history, and tradition. As the late-Victorian stage passed out of living memory, these writers continued to invoke the actor in their treatments of the technological proliferation of text, the politics of reading during the First World War, the authority of obituary in the literary tradition, and the potential for re-writing historical progress through the lens of community theatre. Positioned between media--theatre, poetry, and the novel--and also between opposing visions of creativity and the artistic process, my research intervenes in related discussions in both theatre studies and the scholarship on modernist literature. By focusing on the art of the actor at this pivotal moment in both theatrical and literary history, I challenge the dominant assumption of an abstract anti-theatricality on the modernist stage by discussing the ambivalently "naturalistic" performance styles of Henry Irving, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Marie Lloyd, and Ellen Terry. Likewise, I argue that their art of acting reframes the key terms of literary modernism by reversing the prerogatives of textuality and the cultural practice of reading. In these ways, the actor provided a means of continually restaging the advent of modernity (and the death of the past) into the middle of the twentieth century.

This dissertation shows that print illustration – particularly its technologies, its financial implications, and its role in scientific representation – influenced three major nineteenth-century British writers as they built their versions of realism for their long fiction. William Makepeace Thackeray was inspired by lithography and the scientific atlas to make fast, socially-relevant characters which he catalogued in The Book of Snobs. Collaboration with John Everett Millais helped Anthony Trollope in the mid-century develop a realism in his Barsetshire novels that required close observation and included careful details. Toward the end of the century, Thomas Hardy’s engagement with George Du Maurier in A Laodicean helped Hardy develop a realism that both showed the instability of the visual representation and showed how images were made. All three novelists were interested, in their own ways, with the connection between seeing and knowing. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2019. / March 27, 2019. / Illustration, Nineteenth Century, Novel, Realism / Includes bibliographical references. / Meegan Hanson, Professor Directing Dissertation; George S. Williamson, University Representative; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; David Gants, Committee Member.

Flann OBriens At Swim-Two-Birds is a complex reflexive novel that explores the creation of fiction. OBriens layered narrative includes several author/characters, each with his own literary theory. This discussion traces OBriens reflexive structures development and demonstrates its repercussions on the characters within the novel, and the novel as a whole. Beginning by placing OBriens novel within a critical framework, this study examines each of the four narrative levels and the uses of reflexivity in each. OBrien builds and dismantles several structures within his narrative levels, and this thesis shows that the basic reflexive structure of At Swim-Two-Birds is the only remaining structure at the novels end.

Flann OBriens At Swim-Two-Birds is a complex reflexive novel that explores the creation of fiction. OBriens layered narrative includes several author/characters, each with his own literary theory. This discussion traces OBriens reflexive structures development and demonstrates its repercussions on the characters within the novel, and the novel as a whole. Beginning by placing OBriens novel within a critical framework, this study examines each of the four narrative levels and the uses of reflexivity in each. OBrien builds and dismantles several structures within his narrative levels, and this thesis shows that the basic reflexive structure of At Swim-Two-Birds is the only remaining structure at the novels end.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English Language and Literature, December 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.