In this studyi apply a feminist-narratological grid to the works under discussion. I show how narration is used as strategy to highlight issues of concern to women, hereby attempting to make a contribution in the relatively new field of feminist narratology. Chapter One provides an analysis of Pride and Prejudice as an example of a feminist statement by Jane Austen. The use of omniscient narration and its ironic possibilities are offset against the central characters' perceptions, presented by means of free indirect style. Chapter Two examines The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a critique of Wuthering Heights, both in its use of narrative frames and in its at times moralistic comment. The third and fourth chapters focus on Charlotte Bronte. Her ambivalences about the situation of women, be they writers, narrators or characters, are explored. These are seen to be revealed in her narrative strategies, particularly in her attainment of closure, or its lack. Chapter Five explores the increasing sophistication of the narrative techniques of Elizabeth Gaskell, whose early work Mary Barton is shown to have narrative inconsistencies as opposed to her more complex last novel Wives and Daughters. Finally, I conclude that while the authors under discussion use divergent methods, certain commonalities prevail. Among these are the presentation of alternatives women have within their constraining circumstances and the recognition of their moral accountability for the choices they make. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

In this studyi apply a feminist-narratological grid to the works under discussion. I show how narration is used as strategy to highlight issues of concern to women, hereby attempting to make a contribution in the relatively new field of feminist narratology. Chapter One provides an analysis of Pride and Prejudice as an example of a feminist statement by Jane Austen. The use of omniscient narration and its ironic possibilities are offset against the central characters' perceptions, presented by means of free indirect style. Chapter Two examines The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a critique of Wuthering Heights, both in its use of narrative frames and in its at times moralistic comment. The third and fourth chapters focus on Charlotte Bronte. Her ambivalences about the situation of women, be they writers, narrators or characters, are explored. These are seen to be revealed in her narrative strategies, particularly in her attainment of closure, or its lack. Chapter Five explores the increasing sophistication of the narrative techniques of Elizabeth Gaskell, whose early work Mary Barton is shown to have narrative inconsistencies as opposed to her more complex last novel Wives and Daughters. Finally, I conclude that while the authors under discussion use divergent methods, certain commonalities prevail. Among these are the presentation of alternatives women have within their constraining circumstances and the recognition of their moral accountability for the choices they make. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

The plot twist is a complex narrative surprise in which a revelation retroactively transforms readers’ understanding of the preceding events. Readers discover belatedly that the situation depicted in the narrative had all along been quite different from what they thought. Although the term “plot twist” was first used in the early twentieth century, many of the best-known works of fiction of the nineteenth century were revealed, in retrospect, to be twist narratives. This dissertation studies twist narratives and their readers in the period before the plot twist became a known device. Through case studies of Jane Austen’s Emma, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the chapters investigate what kinds of knowledge-making practices readers engage in during first-time readings and rereadings of twist narratives, as well as before and after reading. Across these chapters I make the case that twist narratives demonstrate the crucial and interconnected roles of knowledge and temporality in any narrative experience. What we know, and when, and especially what we don’t (yet) know, is crucial to how narratives work and why we enjoy them.

There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.