<p>This dissertation draws on the virtue ethics tradition in moral theology and moral philosophy for inquiries regarding the acquired and infused virtues, virtue's increase and remission, and virtue's relation to sacramental practice. I rely on two medieval texts to ask and answer these questions: the <italic>Summa Theologiae</italic> by Thomas Aquinas and <italic>Piers Plowman</italic> by William Langland. My arguments are primarily inter- and intra-textual with some attention to the texts' history of interpretation and the socio-historical Catholic culture in which they were written. I conclude that the texts share pedagogical features that teach their readers in what the perfection of virtue consists and show readers how to increase in that perfection.</p><p>This thesis follows from the work of David Aers, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Josef Pieper, and Eberhard Schockenhoff.</p> / Dissertation

Attention to Victorian reviews of eighteenth-century and Romantic novels reveals sympathy's importance to the survival of classic novels and its role as a catalyst for critical standards that remain central. I demonstrate that reviewers used sympathy to describe a widespread but untheorized system of useful reading. Reviewers argue that rational sympathy could make reading a process of moral education. That is, if readers reject emotional stimulation, then reading about characters' motives teaches readers to evaluate the people and situations they encounter in the real world. By looking at already canonical novelists like Richardson, Fielding and Scott, by denying canonicity to gothic novelists, and by creating new classics with figures like Austen, Victorian reviewers engage sympathy to teach their readers how to read reviews and novels appropriately. In doing so, reviewers also alter the reviewing voice, making it more sympathetic as well as using it to cajole and convince readers (rather than expecting agreement based on the reviewer's expertise). Additionally, reviewers use persuasive techniques to build imagined relationships between readers, encouraging readers to take the moral ideals garnered from their reading and put them to use in relationships. I claim, then, that Victorian reviews, aimed at leisure readers, explore artistic questions primarily as contributors to sympathy and focus on how to read for moral and emotional education. As a result, crucial definitions and tenets about novel writing and reading are buried in paragraphs on morality or biography. If scholars understand why and how Victorian reviewers criticize novels, they will also recognize the complex arguments in these oft-derided articles. The result will be a fuller understanding of the history of novel criticism and a clearer picture of the values that guided the canonizing process during the Victorian period. / English

Over the last forty years, nineteenth-century British art has undergone a process of recovery and reevaluation. For nineteenth-century women painters, significant reevaluation dates from the early 1980s. Concurrently, the growing field of interart studies demonstrates that developments in art history have significant repercussions for literary studies. However, interdisciplinary research in nineteenth-century painting and literature often focuses on the rich selection of works from the second half of the century. This study explores how transitions in English painting during the first half of the century influenced the work of British writers. The cultural authority of the writer was unstable during the early decades. The influence of realism and the social mobility of the painter led some authors to resist developments in English art by constructing the painter as a threat to social order or by feminizing the painter. For women writers, this strategy was valuable for it allowed them to displace perceptions about emotional or erotic aspects of artistic identity onto the painter. Connotations of youth, artistic high spirits, and unconventional morality are part of the literature of the nineteenth-century painter, but the history of English painting reveals that this image was a figure of difference upon which ideological issues of national identity, gender, and artistic hierarchy were constructed. Beginning with David Wilkie, and continuing with Margaret Carpenter, Richard Redgrave and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, I trace the emergence of social commitment and social realism in English painting. Considering art and artists from the early decades in relation to depictions of the painter in texts by Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Mary Shelley, Joseph Le Fanu, Felicia Hemans, Lady Sydney Morgan, and William Makepeace Thackeray, reveals patterns of representation that marginalized British artists. However, writers such as Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Robert Browning supported contemporary painting and rejected literary myths of the painter. Articulating disparities between the lived experience of painters and their representation calls for modern literary critics to reassess how nineteenth-century writers wrote the painter, and why. Texts that portray the painter as a figure of myth elide gradations of hierarchy in British culture and the important differentiations that exist within the category of artist. / English