This study claims a space for the Victorian short story in the literary canon. It explores what forces were at work between 1830, when the rise of the magazine created a venue for short story publication, and 1884, when critics codified the British short story. Contemporary criticism tends to compare the short story to the novel to show what it lacks. This project examines the short story in relation to the novel to see what it reveals about the novel as well as what it offers short story writers. Ultimately, the short story develops as a reaction against the limitations imposed upon authors by the novel and by the culture that so strongly valorizes the novel. Although British writers failed to theorize overtly about the short story's form, close readings indicate that they delineate the short story's aesthetic in an economy of narrative and thematic confinement. Significantly, that confinement allows them to take liberties with subject and plot in the short story that they could not take in the novel. In fact, writers of the short story revise the novel's realist aesthetic. The rise of photography assists writers with this revision. As the photograph captures the Victorian imagination, a shared aesthetic develops between the two art forms that teaches readers and writers that meaning is subject to interpretation. The stories suggest that the novel's objective, omniscient third-person narrator may not accurately reflect the reality of the Victorians after all. This project suggests several opportunities for scholarship and teaching. For scholarship, it brings to light texts previously unknown to many readers, offering them new insights into well-known authors' oeuvres. Second, it suggests lines of inquiry for those interested in the ways a text can be shaped by its publication and market. For teaching, it delineates ways of complementing studies of the novel, either through the themes of confinement and freedom or the themes of marriage and community. Finally, it provides a fascinating look at the self-conscious development of a genre as it finds its own generic aesthetic.

This dissertation traces the changing story of female sexuality--a distinctly heterosexual story--through three pairs of British novels written between the 1740s and the 1860s. The central trope of the dissertation is defloration, since the story of female sexuality as told in the novels invariably revolves around literal or figurative representations of a woman's first heterosexual intercourse. Chapter 1 first explores the theoretical and historical implications of the concept of defloration against the backdrop of the social history of sexuality and of marriage, and then situates the story of defloration within a double context of narrative theory and the history of the novel. The moment of defloration, seemingly the most triumphant moment of the heterosexual narrative, crucially disrupts this narrative's hegemony by working against narrative linearity either by way of repeating this moment excessively or by omitting it altogether from the narrative. As two strategies of narrative disruption that increasingly interact with each other, the excessive repetition and narrative omission of the moment of defloration are central to the three pairs of novels read in the subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2, I show how John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1747) and Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748) feature literal moments of defloration that disrupt narrative linearity respectively through narrative excess and narrative absence. In Chapter 3, I discuss the transition from the literally sexual narratives of the mid-eighteenth century to a domesticated marriage plot by contrasting Fanny Burney's Evelina (1778) and Jane Austen's Emma (1814). This reading is based on the argument that both novels' assault and proposal scenes are transformed and desexualized versions of the moment of defloration. In Chapter 4, I argue that Mrs. Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866) and Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn (1869) are re-sexualized variants of the defloration narrative. In both novels, excessive repetitions of disrupted and unsuccessful marriage proposals, together with a figurative reduplication of the heterosexual plot in a political narrative, signal the radical destabilization of the marriage plot's conventions, in particular of its prescribed gender constellations, in the mid-Victorian era.

Certain characters in Shakespeare share lineages grounded in thematic concerns. Tracing such lineages can create inroads into key Shakespearean issues that elude more straightforward approaches. Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff in I Henry IV, Part One, the Fool in King Lear, Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra: whether we call them skeptics, cynics, "nay-sayers," demystifiers, or pragmatic realists, they share such a lineage. Even though these figures are among Shakespeare's most charismatic and psychologically complex creations, they involve us not just in characterological subtleties but in issues which have to do with the impingement of skepticism on the "illusion" of theatrical embodiment. Exploration of the "resistances" these characters maintain with such tenacity discovers what could be called a Shakespearean meditation on the nature of belief--in the other, in oneself, in imagination, in theater--and on the forces that compel belief into crisis--skepticism, disavowal of desire, distrust of theatrical display, fear of vulnerability and otherness. From play to play, the elements of male friendship and rivalry, sacrifice and scapegoating mechanisms, and the plain-speaking ironist almost painfully overinvested in the protagonists are reconfigured into a powerful exploration of the creation of belief in the very space made empty by doubt, distrust, grief, and loss.

Late-Victorian and Edwardian British ideology represented male homosexuals as psychically and somatically arrested. In response, many middle-class, male homosexual writers drew on versions of Hellenic pederasty and primitivism to distinguish between youthful strains and more degenerate forms of homosexuality, or to celebrate the youthful homosexual and his potential to educate and regenerate a corrupted heterosexual culture. Drawing on Michel Foucault's insight that power does not simply repress deviance but also has the potential to produce oppositional "reverse discourses," I examine how the generational fictions of these writers employed and partially transvalued the very terms that were used to denigrate them in order to legitimate and affirm male same-sex desire or some strains of male same-sex desire. In the first section of the dissertation, entitled "Youthful and Degenerate Homosexualities," I examine how Oscar Wilde and E. F. Benson distinguish between corrupted and youthful, privileged forms of same-sex desire that they align with Hellenic values, as mediated through contemporary national and imperial concerns. In the second section, entitled "The Youthful Homosexual versus Aged/Corrupted Heterosexual Culture," I examine how Edward Carpenter and E. M. Forster use the youthful homosexual to critique their culture's obsession with developmental narratives and to construct a dialectical model of history in which the homosexual plays the crucial role of recovering a lost, organic wholeness associated with working-class and primitive, non-Western cultures. The project draws gay literary theory into conversation with postcolonial studies. The writers I examine link their critique of heterosexist developmental ideology to their indictment of colonial Britain's contempt for "primitive" peoples and its obsession with progress. They also draw on cross-cultural data to denaturalize Western assumptions about same-sex desire. However, they ignore their implication in the imperial privilege they critique. I use this vexed conjunction between anti-homophobic and anti-colonial concerns to explore the possibilities and limits of an alliance between contemporary postcolonial theory and a hitherto Western, metropolitan-centered, gay literary theory.

In his seminal essay on Ulysses, Edmund Wilson called such episodes as The Oxen of the Sun and Eumaeus "artistically absolutely indefensible," and he wondered if Joyce had forgotten, in his flights of technical virtuosity, the "drama which he had originally intended to stage." Friendlier judgments have occurred since then, but rarely have critics taken the late narrative strategies as seriously as did Joyce. The difficulty lies in what seems a widespread assumption that Joyce's youthful aesthetic bears little relation to his advanced narrative art in Ulysses. Yet the aesthetic holds clues to the later performance--the clamor of debased viewpoints, the ridicule, the ferocity, the swift disruptions of mood and manner, the disorienting strains of unrhymed poetry that appear when least expected. We learn that Joyce will work through indirection: that he will portray people and events as they are not, the better to define what they are. He will purge from his art unsuitable moods of "desire" and "loathing"; will fashion a poetry which "transcends the mode of its expression," thus helping to liberate the reader from avenues of pedestrian response. While the aesthetic should be construed as a roadmap, rather than a destination, it can reveal thematic profundities in such late episodes as Eumaeus, Oxen, and Sirens--principal targets for hasty critical response over the years--and whose sequence in this dissertation I have reversed to suit my exposition of fraudulence, purgation, and poetic intensity foreshadowed by the aesthetic. The Eumaeus chapter has been condemned as a relinquishment to "expressive form," a projection through rambling style of the fatigue felt by Stephen and Bloom. Yet wider implications lie beneath the verbal drizzle: Through a hopelessly vagrant narrative voice, Joyce has dramatized the pathology of exhausted minds and spirits; has amassed an encyclopedic digression upon a civilization in decay. Joyce has challenged his reader to navigate through shoals of false, tasteless and inhumane sentiments, on a negative journey towards ethical truth. While layers of archaic style obscure our vision of the Holles St. hospital's "action," The Oxen of the Sun can profitably be viewed as a study in mixed tonalities. The past authors cast shadows of mortality upon the young revelers. In turn, the rowdies disturb the repose of the sober dead. Consequently, the term "parody" fails to characterize the double-edged thrust of Joyce's burlesque. Further, a reading of Oxen which is confined to the immediate text can prove short-sighted: Unspoken thematic dialogues exist between this chapter and (1) Joyce's prose models found in George Saintsbury's A History of English Prose Rhythm, and (2) earlier moments in Ulysses which Joyce has recollected "subtly" in Oxen. With Sirens, scholarship of a literal sort has dwelt upon Joyce's success in imitating an art other than writing. But only upon an analogous plane of poetic intensity does the author achieve the inarticulate eloquence of music. Such poetry has little to do with a tradition of versification as Joyce knows it, and ridicules it, in Sirens. Rather the author employs such poetic tools as synaesthesia, oxymoron and archetype to force our irrational identification with fallible Bloom. Even so brutal an early chapter as Lestrygonians contains subtle hints of the fraudulent, purgative, and poetically intense techniques to follow. And noting that Bloom's bodily organs are personified--only to be figuratively "cannibalized"--we sense, too, the creative dissolution of meaning, prevalent in the late chapters, whereby Joyce will use a variety of narrative ambiguities to create new dimensions of doubt--a doubt which Joyce believed held mankind together. *Author completed requirements in 1980, but degree to be granted in 1981. UMI

Not only did Charles Dickens respond to the political and social scene of Victorian England, he was touched by the religious climate as well. He was particularly affected by the serious and long term attention given to discussions of doctrines about spiritual regeneration, conversion, and baptism which coincided with his own interest in the "discipline of the human heart" as a prerequisite for personal and social reformation. Although Dickens was significantly touched by the secular humanism of Carlyle, his thought and writing indicates equally important influence by the Evangelical, Sacremental, and Incarnational groups active in nineteenth-century religious life. There appears valuable, and as yet unnoticed, evidence indicating influence on Dicken's thought by Frederick W. Robertson, a Broad Church Anglican who preached in Brighton. Dicken's interest in spiritual rejuvenation and his concern about the role of the church in English life are clearly indicated in his reportage, his letters, and his minor prose. There is even some evidence of his interest in certain of the controversies over baptismal ritual and doctrine that occupied national attention in the 1840's and 1850's. Dickens's interest in spiritual rebirth and baptism is indicated in his fictional creation of complex patterns of baptismal immersion arranged in a typological manner in Our Mutual Friend which indicate his increasingly Incarnationalist attitude toward human spiritual growth. In this novel, a pattern of water crossings and water immersions, together with subsidiary motifs of fairy tales and biblical allusion, reaches its most potent and resonant development. Beginning early in his fiction, the pattern of patriarchal "god father" and the plot element of water crossing that figures prominently in novels like Martin Chuzzlewit becomes a pattern of water immersion accompanied by growing emphasis on the responsibility of each character to make his own life rather than to accept the imposed scheme of a benevolent "father" figure. As Eugene Wrayburn, John Harmon/Rokesmith, Lizzie Hexam, and Bella Wilfer become regenerate, they acknowledge the fact of their shared mortality and recognize the reciprocal mutuality that must characterize regenerated human relationships. Consequently, they work together to establish a redeemed community within the City that appears able to touch the world of Society and require it to notice their refusal to accept its values. Finally, Dickens's exploration of the possibilities of human regeneration permitted him a way to work toward the reunion of his own personal psychic disjuction arising from his childhood "Blacking Warehouse" trauma. Approaching a resolution to his own psychic disjunction, Dickens celebrates the baptismal recognition of the necessity of unselfish love for the redemption of humanity and himself.

Shakespearean drama is communally performed to celebrate and re-create the life of its attendant culture. This celebration and re-creation is the action by which a transcendent Shakespearean threatre convokes of its many audiences a greater audience extending through time. But this transcendent theatre's face is perennially transformed by history: for the Shakespearean theatre's scenic and gestic acts change in kind from performance to performance, in nature from culture to culture. The experiences of Shakespearean theatre are shaped by the complex and ambiguous relationship of any performance, or reading, with a generative culture, and with the many cultures Shakespearean theatre circumscribes and expresses. Neither our literary nor performance-oriented commentaries on the plays have accounted for the variability of Shakespeare experiences. The former have located authentic "Shakespeare experience" in supposedly objective meanings infolded in the scripts; the latter in projected "original-authentic" experiences of the Renaissance theatre: yet history demonstrates both that "objective" meanings are necessarily read into as they are read out of the scripts, and that every Shakespearean production is a substantially new creation to whose particular historical context authentic meanings and experiences are bound. A transparency before the endless creations of cultures characterizes Shakespearean drama, and reflects, I believe, the identifying feature of authentic Shakespeare experiences: the emotional/intellectual transformation of on-stage and off-stage participants. Transformative Shakespeare experiences are invoked initially by the scripts' unique presentational sketch--which survives history's changing intentions to encourage persistently a heightened self-consciousness in our theatrical playing. The sketch, influencing patterns of performance and response much as a pencil sketch influences probable patterns of eye movements, induces both extreme fascination and extreme self-consciousness in an audience by: verbal eloquence, presentational speech conventions, gestic language and gestic eloquence, and a playfulness accommodating "multiconscious" participation in theatrical creation. The extremes of response called for by Shakespearean presentationalism lead us, more consistently than responses to any other literature or drama, to experience the emotions of the moment within the frame of the concrete details of our own lives, and to allow our apprehension of theatrical images to transform the emotional/intellectual structure of our perceptions.

Theories of identity help illuminate satire. In identity formation, an individual introjects cultural values towards which he feels ambivalent. Like other tragic satirists, Juvenal, unable to accept his ambivalence, projects his selfishness onto his enemies. Condemning society, he precludes his social accommodation. Like other comic satirists, Horace accepts his ambivalence and turns it to comedy. By charming his audience, he ensures a place for himself in society. Swift, like Horace, tries to compromise his conflicts, but their severity gives his satire Juvenalian intensity. Unlike Juvenal, Swift sees the absurdity of the continuing battle. In the first section of the verses on his death, Swift laughs at pursuing reputation when one cannot control others' opinions. Nevertheless, he declares pride a universal human feature. In the panegyric section, Swift rebels against the futility of pride by taking credit for supporting the public interest. Despite the arranged compromises, conflict is everywhere apparent in the poem. Pride is a useful concept for defining Gulliver's identity confusion. In Book I Gulliver obtains high position, but, not realizing it depends upon his supporting the ministers, he falls from power. In depicting Gulliver, Swift attempts to justify his public activities and to renounce his tormenting pride. Swift represents dilemmas of impotence in Book II. Although some Brobdingnagians protect Gulliver, others exploit him, and he suffers many accidents. Compensating for his humiliation, Gulliver claims heroic identity. Rejecting this claim, Swift recommends, through the king of Brobdingnag, support for the public interest. In Book III Swift mocks using intellect to deny man's subjection to circumstance. A person should accept his limited control over events. Book IV presents a model for the proper use of reason in the Houyhnhnms, who live in social harmony. Through the disruptive, passionate, and dirty Yahoos, Swift condemns the evil nature of man. However, man is neither Houyhnhnm nor Yahoo, but both. Swift ridicules Gulliver's incomprehension of this fact but does not reconcile the conflicting forces. Man ought to be good but inherently is partly evil. Thus, Swift expresses his need both to conform to cultural values and to rebel against them.

This study examines the Southern female character's search for autonomy in the works of Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Carson McCullers, and Shirley Ann Grau. The first chapter discusses the historical and sociological factors which influence this character; in addition, the qualities of the character as well as her search are described. The second chapter reveals the origins of this character as she first appears in the works of Kate Chopin. Selective works of Ellen Glasgow and Carson McCullers are examined as examples which further develop Chopin's prototype. Chapters III, IV, and V provide indepth analyses of Shirley Ann Grau's The House on Coliseum Street, The Condor Passes, and The Keepers of the House. Grau's works dealing with the South are the focal point of this study, for her works reveal the contemporary complexities and similarities of various female characters' search for self. The "Conclusion" briefly discusses the prototype's appearance in the works of William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren, and Katherine Anne Porter. Collectively, these Southern women authors reveal the tragedy of the resuscitated myth of Southern woman as Southern belle. Although the search should ideally lead to an androgynous consciousness, most protagonists' attempts to realize their androgynous selves are thwarted by the conventional Southern society. Their search for self governed overwhelmingly by historical factors suggests a kind of historical determinism, for the characters' fates begin to appear predetermined by both their real and fictional predecesors. Yet the women who write these books have themselves successfully overcome their mythic roles through their writings. Perhaps by showing the reader how to fail in the search for autonomy, these novelists suggest simultaneously how to succeed. A new role model for the Southern woman must be developed. She must be an androgynous, autonomous person who understands the role of history in shaping her life and who understands that intuition and reason complement one another.

Humanist literary scholars and teachers, implicated in but unaware of the metaphysics of presence grounding their method, have long practiced mediating the literary artwork, representing it as an organic, structured design of signs identical with certain ideas and correspondent mimetically with extra-linguistic reality. These rationalists spatialize the artwork, locking its signifiers into a teachable object or centered design so that the body of literature becomes a collection of objects, a body of texts spatializing voice and consciousness, quantified knowledge packaged and assigned meanings or truth. For phenomenologists like Heidegger and certain post-structuralists, the textuality of the work is an ontological mood or moods, a Befindlichkeit or openness to being in-the-world, a special thrownness with certain possibilities for self-actualizing within that world of the artwork. Signifiers, linguistic things in the phenomenological sense, are specially measured and related to one another for Dasein to interpret as limitations and possibilities, horizons for being. The phenomenological post-modern imagination is hermeneutical, assigning the reader to explore the mood working in the world of the work. Post-modernists espouse a violent hermeneutical discourse, a re-opening of the site of the traditionalist historical sedimentation, a freeplay of criticism so that the artworks are not seen as objects enduring through time with certain inviolable truths or interpretations but rather as human worlds or experiences for that can be interpreted endlessly without closure by all cultures and societies. Paradise Regained is such a decentered text, a poem that questions itself as other than a supplement to the Biblical Word. It is marked by a complementarity, a measuring and metonymy of differences traced in the trackless desert, the groundless ground of the desert where Satan tempts Christ to despair or be saved with self-wrought miracles. The Word as Sign is under attack in Paradise Regained, parodied and supplemented, dismantled and remarked in the play of differing interpretations given the world brought forth in it. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of school.) UMI