I have chosen six major Victorian novels in order to prove that each writer uses death to develop the characterization of the protagonist. The deaths, literal or metaphoric, affect and reveal the character's evolving personality. The protagonist usually represents a large part of his society. Consequently, the society is illustrated by means of and in relation to death. If the protagonist is not representative of his society, this fact proves as telling. These portrayals of character and illustrations of societies relate philosophies that ground themselves in death and address the event of death itself. Chapter 1 explores Heathcliff from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights who manifests a self influenced by death and a hostile world. Ultimately one trancends this world through death and achieves liberty. Chapter 2 considers Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Jane's encounters with death assist her in maturity. Death enables those like Jane to fear death less and to affirm life more. Chapter 3 investigates those deaths that affect David Copperfield from Charles Dickens's novel. These deaths help David gain a disciplined heart and accept the eventuality of his own death. Chapter 4 examines Margaret Hale from Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. Death helps Margaret accept transition, which leads to reconciliation for individuals like herself as well as for England's social classes. Chapter 5 studies Maggie Tulliver of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. Death provokes Maggie's contrary and altruistic nature while it underscores the materialistic and unspiritual society of St. Ogg's. Chapter 6 analyzes Jude from Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Death acts as catalyst for the negative change in his personality while death emphasizes the indifference of his world. Death works as a microscope that magnifies, examines, and comprehends the character's personality. Death gives significance to each character's life and to his society. Those novels written in the earlier Victorian period share the idea of life as challenging but worthwhile. Death is most relevant and transitory. The two later novels portray life as filled with insurmountable obstacles and as terminal. Despite the broad differences in their philosophies, these Victorians perceive life, paradoxially, by means of death.

This study expands the definition of British Modernism by interweaving an epistemological analysis with issues of sexual construction in the following texts: Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, E. M. Forster's Passage to India and Maurice, and D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. My reading of Modernism illuminates how the epistemological concerns of the British modern novel both expose a collapsing patriarchal order, and conversely, how anachronistic epistemological systems become resuscitated through gender relations. Gender relations, in essence, become a substitute metaphysics. Hardy's Jude, suggests that neither the Platonic/romantic nor the empiricist/realist episteme is a valid way of reading the world. In doing so, it collapses traditional notions about sexuality upon which these systems rely. The larger narrative structure, though, anchored in a romantic distancing attempts to revive a slipping patriarchal control. Conrad's Heart of Darkness, subverting Descartes, empiricism, and Romanticism disrupts the possibility for mastery which challenge the traditional means of storytelling, upon which Marlow, in part, relies. Exposing the adventure and the romance as meconnaissance, Heart of Darkness links the exclusion of women from both action and knowledge as a mistaken fantasy of male autonomy. Yet like Jude, Heart of Darkness oscillates, attempting to preserve the status of the male community to whom Marlow relays his tale. Victory, Conrad's last novel, continues this critique with less equivocation. The most radical of the selected texts, Forster's Passage to India and Maurice, invoke Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and Phaedrus respectively. Connecting metaphysics to how one thinks about sexuality, Forster's texts illuminate how a Platonic preoccupation with fixity and binary oppositions generate a misreading of the world and sexual relations. Lawrence's Women in Love, the most conservative of this selection, resuscitates a Hegelian metaphysics under the guise of a supposed liberatory "blood consciousness" and philosophy of the body. In Lawrence most explicitly, the love relationship becomes haven not for its promises of love, but for its enticement into epistemological certainty.

Though Virginia Woolf's giant achievements in modernist fiction have long been recognized, an analysis of the body of her critical work, of her more than 500 essays, reviews, and articles, has yet to be undertaken. Either critics have looked at scattered essays, most notably "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" and "Modern Fiction," for Woolf's theories of the novel; or at her feminist manifesto, A Room of One's Own, for her analysis of what it means to be a middle-class, white woman writer in a patriarchal society. Neither group of critics--neither those who are primarily interested in her literary aesthetics, nor those who highlight her feminism--have examined the feminist aesthetics of Woolf's entire critical opus. In addition to investigating Woolf's current position as a literary critic among both feminist and non-feminist critics, this project treats Woolf as a cultural critic who assiduously reader the symbols, structures, events, and written texts of her culture. Woolf's cultural criticism extends into an analysis of the institution of writing about literature or, more specifically, reviewing. As someone who spent the first half of her writing career as a reviewer--from 1904 until 1922, the release of Jacob's Room, most of her published writings were for newspapers--Woolf was in a position to know the ins and outs of the reviewing profession. As a cultural critic Woolf was thorough in her examination, taking into account the genre, in terms of form, content and ideological implications; the reviewer, in terms of her (for the reviewer usually was a woman) suitability for this occupation; the reader, in terms of enlightening and entertaining her or him; and the location of the institution of reviewing in the broader network of the writing profession. Woolf's analysis is marked by complexity and ambivalence. She held contradictory ideas from the time she articulated them early on in her life until her death in 1941. Sometimes, as my analysis shows, Woolf was not always in control of the contradictions she revealed; there are conflicting and inconsistent arguments within her body of criticism on the review, arguments which she did not resolve--nor want to. Though she may have leaned more on one side than another, it was enough to make apparent the contradictions that exist within any institution.

My study employs the feminist psychoanalytic theory of Jessica Benjamin and Nancy Chodorow in order to describe and analyze the sado-masochistic paradigm which structures many female-authored Gothic novels, and which is implicit in some earlier male-authored texts as well. Beginning with an examination of the Satanic "hero" in influential works by John Milton and Samuel Richardson, I proceed to analyze Gothic novels by five women: Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, Lady Caroline Lamb, Charlotte Bronte, and Emily Bronte. I am concerned, as is Benjamin, with exploring why a woman would choose to structure male-female relations (whether fictional or real) along the apparently oppressive axis of sado-masochism. Although more than a generation of readers had been warned by novelists such as Dacre and Lamb not to succumb to the glamorous seductions of men such as Zofloya and Glenarvon, when we come to the novels of the Brontes, we read the stories of women who marry such men. At issue are some essential controversies about the psychology of women, including Freud's assignment of a "natural" passivity and masochism to women, and some feminist debates about whether the marriages that conclude these novels constitute proto-feminist revisionings of the oppressive institution of marriage, or are merely conventional romantic rationalizations for women's continuing submission to the patriarchal status quo. I argue that women's use of the sado-masochistically informed paradigm to structure relations between men and women both reflects their perception of contemporary male-female psychological dynamics and propels them to imagine a less polarized pattern of engagement with the other, one which, if troubled by conflicts with the larger social world, yet may be sustained in the more private arena of marriage.

Although Richardson cannot be considered a politician in an official sense of the word--he never ran for a formal political office--he created a different type of political role for himself which he considered more urgent and more appropriate to the survival of his community. We know from his letters, and references in his novels, that he read widely in Locke, whose definition of political power is "a Right of making Laws ... and of employing the force of the Community" (Second Treatise ... 269). Richardson's unique type of political power builds upon these Lockean concepts: he creates his own communities of correspondents and readers. He earns the right to make laws for, and employs the force of, communities who exist through shared mental exercise: "interpretive communities" by Stanley Fish's definition. This dissertation makes a case for Richardson's political power in two parts. The first section will center on Richardson himself; the second section will show how his novel Clarissa helped him to achieve his own political power through a female heroine who was politically powerful herself. Richardson reacts against traditional methods of gaining political power whereby social position rather than merit guarantees access to power. He provides for another type of political power than that of those who hold formal political office: by sending communities of readers who have responded emotionally to Clarissa back out into the world full of questions about the social and political systems of which they are a part, Richardson is a catalyst in the creation of a public sphere which will eventually affect political policy.

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The growth, popularity, and decline of the so-called "Spasmodic School" represents a chronologically brief phenomenon in Victorian poetics. Yet between 1850 and 1860, Spasmodic works affected virtually every serious discussion of Victorian poetics, and influenced (often disadvantageously) periodical reviewers' estimates of Tennyson and Browning. Even Arnold's 1853 Preface has been identified as a response to Spasmodic theories and practices. The history of the Spasmodics has largely been inscribed by the winners in the cultural debate surrounding that group of poets. The dissertation, therefore, rejects that simplified post-Arnoldian position, and examines the Spasmodic controversy as a complex discourse exposing the crucial ideological concerns of early Victorian culture. Without the disdain coloring most modern appraisals, it attempts to place the Spasmodics in the cultural setting they share with melodrama, the penny dreadfuls, and the craze for working-class poetry. Attention is also given to the critical debate fueled by the Spasmodic phenomenon, particularly concerning an idea that captivated the reading middle class: the revival of the Romantic notion that a priestly poet/prophet or vates would appear to lead their age both morally and artistically. The first two chapters are given to contextualizing the movement on these two fronts, therefore, while the next three are devoted to analyzing the works of the Spasmodic poets Bailey, Marston, Dobell, Smith, and Bigg. The final two sections attempt to delineate the effects of the Spasmodic debacle, spearheaded by the parody Firmilian, on later Victorian productions both major and minor as well as on the formation of the Victorian canon. The Spasmodic poets, young and inexperienced as they were, can above all be seen as victims of critical badinage between Arnoldian and neo-Romantic factions; they may be counted among the first excisions from this "canon" as we know it today. The longing for the vates is not found again until the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and in sometimes parodic form among its declension, Aestheticism.