<p> This dissertation grows out of a conversation between two fields&mdash;those of Victorian Literature and Science Fiction (SF). I began this project with a realization that there was a productive overlap between SF and Victorian Studies. In my initial engagement with SF, I was frustrated by the limitations of the field, and by the way that scholars were misreading the 19^th century, utilizing broad generalizations about the function of Empire, the subject, technology, and the social, where close readings would have been more productive. Victorian studies supplied a critical and theoretical basis for the interrogation of these topics, and SF gave my reading of the nineteenth century an appreciation for the dynamic nature of the mechanism, and a useful jumping-off point for conversations around futurity, utopia, and the Other. Together, these two fields created a symbiotic theoretical framework that informs the progression of the dissertation.</p><p> In this project, I am shifting the grounds of engagement with early SF between two main terms; my aim is to question the establishment of &ldquo;cognitive estrangement&rdquo; as the seat the power in SF studies and supplant it with an emphasis on the &ldquo;novum&rdquo;. While both terms are indebted to Darko Suvin, I argue that the fixation on cognitive estrangement has blurred the lines of the genre of SF in nonproductive ways, and has needlessly complicated an already complex field. This dissertation is a deep engagement with the SF novels of 1871-2 to establish how the genre was defining itself from the very beginning, and looks to examine how a close-reading of early SF can inform our engagement with the field. Chapter one treats the work of Edward Bulwer-Lytton&rsquo;s <i> The Coming Race</i> (1871), chapter two examines Sir George Chesney&rsquo;s <i> The Battle of Dorking</i> (1871), chapter three engages with Samuel Butler&rsquo;s <i> Erewhon,</i> and chapter four is an examination of the relationship between the first three novels and Robert Ellis Dudgeon&rsquo;s <i>Colymbia</i> (1873) and <i>A Voice from Another World</i> (1874) by Wladyslaw Somerville Lach-Szurma (W.S.L.S).</p><p> There are four fundamental concerns. The first is that the near simultaneous publication of Chesney, Lytton, and Butler signaled the emergence of SF as a genre, rather than as the isolated texts that had existed prior to this moment. The clustering of the novels of 1871-2 marks the transition of SF concerns from singular outlier events to a generic movement. The second claim is that the &ldquo;novum&rdquo;, one of the key aspects of a SF novel, is not just a material component in the text, but is a kind of logic that undergirds these novels. While the novum is often thought of as &ldquo;the strange thing in a strange world&rdquo;, I lock onto the early language of Suvin and critics such as Patricia Kerslake and John Rieder to suggest that it is, instead, a cognitive logic that is experimented on within the narrative of the novel. The third claim is fundamentally tied to the second: this foundation logic of the text is technological or mechanical. It is this connection of cognitive logic and technology and the mechanism that situates the novum as a technologic that is experimented on or evolved within the body of an SF novel, and is important because it helps us lock onto how SF is a product of the industrial age. In the break that occurs in 1871, this form of the novum plays a critical role in the development and identification of SF as a genre, and helps to distinguish texts with scientific themes (what I am calling <i>scientific fictions)</i> from those featuring a fundamental technologic that is intrinsic to the development and deployment of the narrative (what will come to be called <i>science fiction).</i></p><p> The fourth and final claim is a product of the function and nature of the novum: and is that SF as a genre not only helps to understand technology and culture, but actively works to define the relationship between the two. Technology is registered as an important influence on culture, and culture shapes the future of technology. This genre is ultimately growing out of the rise of the scientific method, and the logic of the texts reflects that experimental paradigm. The logic of SF is one that experiments with the future, testing the implications of the known world against the possibilities of time, and in doing so, defining the terms of engagement with what the future might bring. </p>

<p> Late medieval English texts often represent unfinished quests for obscurely significant objects. These works create enchanted worlds where more always remains to be discovered and where questers search for an ur-text, an authoritative book that promises perfect knowledge. Rather than reaching this ur-text, however, questers confront rumor, monstrous babble, and the clamor of argument, which thwart their efforts to gather together sacred wholeness. Yet while threatening, noise also preserves the sacred by ensuring that it remains forever elsewhere, for recovering perfect knowledge would disenchant the world. Scholarship on medieval noise often focuses on class: medieval writers tend to describe threats to political authority as noisy. These unfinished quests, though, suggest that late medieval literature&rsquo;s complex investment in noise extends further and involves the very search for the sacred, a search full of opaque language and unending desire. Noise, then, becomes the sound of narrative itself.</p><p> While romance foregrounds questing most clearly, these ideas appear in a variety of genres. Chapter 1 shows that in the <i>House of Fame</i> rumor both perpetuates and undermines knowledge, so sacred authority must remain beyond the poem&rsquo;s frame. Chapter 2 juxtaposes the <i>Parliament of Fowls</i> and the <i>Canon&rsquo;s Yeoman&rsquo;s Tale</i>, in which lists replace missing quest-objects, the philosopher&rsquo;s stone and certainty about love. Chapter 3 centers on <i>Piers Plowman</i>, which becomes encyclopedic as one attempt to &ldquo;preve what is Dowel&rdquo; leads to another, and Will never definitively learns how to save his soul, the knowledge he most wants. Chapter 4 turns to Julian of Norwich&rsquo;s search for divine &ldquo;mening&rdquo; and her confrontation with an incoherent fiend, an anxious moment that aligns her with these less serene contemporaries. Chapter 5 argues that Thomas Malory&rsquo;s elusive, noisy Questing Beast at once bolsters and undermines chivalry. The final chapter looks ahead to Book VI of <i>The Faerie Queene</i>, where the Blatant Beast, a sixteenth-century amalgam of the fame tradition and the Questing Beast, menaces Faery Land yet, as a figure for poetry, also contributes to its enchantment. In trying to locate and maintain the sacred, these unfinished quests evoke worlds intensely anxious about &ldquo;auctoritee.&rdquo;</p>

<p> Jane Austen&rsquo;s Pride and Prejudice, Christina Rossetti&rsquo;s &ldquo;Goblin Market,&rdquo; and Louisa May Alcott&rsquo;s Little Women are three works which focus on communities of women. Since women had such limited opportunities available to them in the nineteenth century, marriage was the most viable option for survival. An interesting connection found, though, among the literature written by women at the time is the way in which women thrive together in communities with each other&mdash;up until the men enter the scene. Once the men, or more commonly, one man who is also the future husband, disrupt these women-centered communities, the close bond among women is severed. These three authors envisioned a better option than marriage&mdash;a supportive sisterhood&mdash;safe, loving, and uninterrupted. How and why did women thrive together in these three fictional nineteenth-century communities? How did they communicate? In what spaces did these communities exist? In what ways did men disrupt these communities, and was it possible for women to regain a similar level of closeness with each other after the disruption of men (i.e. marriage)? This thesis looks at the various viewpoints and treatments each author brought to women&rsquo;s communities, their importance, formation, and men&rsquo;s intrusions upon them.</p>

The desacralization of America before and during the twentieth century poses a particular problem for society in terms of teleology, that is, purposive behavior and the perception of ultimate ends. The rage for order in a world with God withdrawn results in various kinds of responses, including paranoia, anxiety, longing, and nostalgia. The sense of such spiritual loss or absence is one element of the connection between T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Thomas Pynchon's V. Both works also exhibit a strong impulse to move between or beyond the binarity which fragments twentieth-century experience. / Both modernism and postmodernism respond to the decentering which results from desacralization, searching for authentic responses to the spiritual loss and to the changed estate of man. The Waste Land and V. appear to be "bridge pieces," both modern and postmodern, demonstrating a drift toward destabilization and displacement of language, the speaking subject, the controlling consciousness, the transcendental signified, and chronology. / In The Waste Land Eliot attempts to incarnate in language, even in his simplest diction choices, the fusion of contrarities, producing something other than the poles of the opposition, but his attempt results in irresolution. Pynchon poises deliberately between such contrarities, denying that the unavailable insight can be so incarnated; he intentionally prolongs the hesitation between literal and figurative meaning in metaphor, heightening ambivalence, deferring closure. / Both authors force the audience into a wary, uncomfortable, ready state, using strategies that place them within the carnival attitude as delineated by Mikhail Bakhtin, and possibly within the tradition of Menippean satire. Carnival play in both works demands that the reader participate in the co-creation of the work with the author, foregrounds the experience of reading and writing as process, and encourages the subversion of conventions. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-04, Section: A, page: 0975. / Major Professor: Fred L. Standley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

This study argues that Adelaide Anne Procter's poetry is a hybrid of one of the century's most significant poetical modes, the Tractarian mode. The Tractarians viewed art and religion as complementary sources in ministering to the soul. Procter, like the Tractarians, used poetry as a handmaiden to religion, for almost each of her poems seems to have been written to help relieve women and men of their earthly affections and thus reach God. More specifically, the study applies the basic principles of Tractarian aesthetics (the cathartic benefits) as defined by John Keble in Lectures on Poetry and Occasional Papers and Reviews (both works by Keble) to Adelaide Procter's poetry. The similarities between Keble's ideas and Procter's work conclusively illustrate that Procter's poetry has affinities with Tractarian aesthetics, and because of the incessant themes about the spiritual gains in coping with the daily problems that beset humankind, the poetry can best be described as a "poetry of deliverance." / Because of Miss Procter's virtual obscurity to most contemporary scholars, Chapter One serves as an introduction to the poet as well as to the study. Chapters Two through Four apply three of Keble's principles, identified in works listed above, to the content, context, and images of Miss Procter' s poetics. Specifically, Chapter Two demonstrates how the poet used poetry to alleviate the stress of everyday living by showing the spiritual significance of each concern, thus responding to Keble's mandate that art should awaken moral and religious feelings in human beings. Chapter Three discusses Procter's use of poetry to attempt to effect social changes and to change conventional attitudes, thereby complying with Keble's principle that poetry should "better something imperfect." While the former two chapters address the benefits of poetry for the reader, Chapter Four focuses on the cathartic benefits that writing poetry provided Procter as poet, dramatizing Keble's principle that first and foremost poetry relieves the over-burdened mind of the artist and, in essence, prevents her or him from going insane. Finally, Chapter Five reiterates the therapeutic benefits of Adelaide Procter's work and the artist's view of the cathartic value of art in general. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-04, Section: A, page: 0976. / Major Professor: Fred Standley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

Narcissism is often evoked in discussions of James Joyce and his characters, yet no critical consenus has been reached as to what the narcissistic condition entails, or whether a distinction can be made between the narcissism of Joyce the author and the narcissism of his characters. Indeed, narcissism has been a critical chimera for centuries, plaguing all disciplines that attempt to define the process of self-formation and self-recognition. A close reading of Ovid's myth of Narcissus and Echo reveals a complex of thematic motifs and narrative modes that are a crucial starting point for a study of narcissism. Like Ovid, Joyce demonstrates an understanding of the semiotic nature of the self--that it is fluid rather than fixed. In this way both authors provide us with a model of the self as myth, a work-in-progress. This assumption links Ovid's and Joyce's depiction of the narcissistic condition with the twentieth-century debate between the two dominant models of self: the psychoanalytic, which posits the self as fixed or essential, and the phenomenologic, which posits the self as shifting and situational. Theories on narcissism have undergone a related paradigmatic shift in the past thirty years from the Freudian view of narcissism as a temporal, pathological phenomenon of self-development, to a view proposed by analysts such as Jacques Lacan, Heinz Kohut, and Julia Kristeva of narcissism as an atemporal, normative endo-psychic structure. Evidence of this reconfiguration can be found in recent critical theories that consider the seminal role of narcissism in the reading process and in contemporary social dynamics. Joyce's work also demonstrates an awareness of the mythic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, sociological, and political implications of narcissistic behavior in all his major works of fiction, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. Working from an assumption that the self is fundamentally fictional and fragmented, Joyce depicts the creative potential of narcissism as well as its limitations. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-01, Section: A, page: 0090. / Major Professor: Stanley E. Gontarski. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1993.

The novels of high life called "Silver-Fork" and those about criminals known as "Newgate" novels dominated fiction in early Victorian Britain. Their enormous popularity eventually incited heated debate regarding authorial responsibility and the tolerable and the admissible in literature. Charles Dickens and, even more broadly, William Makepeace Thackeray, authors of the first rank in the nineteenth-century literary canon, participated in these debates along with novelists writing in these subgenres but little read today like William Harrison Ainsworth, Catherine Frances Gore, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. / This study argues that to understand the sociohistorical significance of the rise and fall of the Silver-Fork and the Newgate phenomena in popular culture during the 1820s and 1830s, one must attend to the increasing consolidation of middle class ethics in these years. The decline of the Silver-Fork and Newgate novels was mainly the consequence of widespread middle-class hostility toward this popular literature of high life and crime that failed to embody and confirm middle-class moral perspective. / It was Thackeray who, reflecting the growing intolerance of the Victorian middle class for both Silver-Fork and Newgate novels, attempted to correct the false, even hazardous, view of reality implied in these two popular forms. A major argument in this study is that, through his efforts to disrupt the Silver-Fork and Newgate manner in Victorian fiction, Thackeray contributed much in establishing, solidifying, and perpetuating middle-class ideology in Victorian literature. / Adopting a social and historical approach, this study describes the effects of early Victorian middle-class ideology on literary taste through an analysis of the overt struggle between Silver-Fork and Newgate novelists, and Thackeray. By doing so, it aims to open a new perspective on such issues in Victorian literature as social class, popularity, and acceptability. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-04, Section: A, page: 1632. / Major Professor: John Fenstermaker. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1996.

Throughout his career, Malcolm Lowry deliberately used the "self" as an excavation site for revealing those hidden impulses which compel a person to create and destroy. Applying his theoretical knowledge of Freudian depth psychology, which he absorbed during his apprenticeship under Conrad Aiken, Lowry reveals himself as a writer driven by neurosis toward creative activity, striving, ultimately, to circumvent self-destructive tendencies and schizoid and manic-depressive mental states through his work. / Beginning in Ultramarine, engendered under Aiken's tutelage, Lowry brings to light oral, anal, and phallic pregenital sexual conflicts that lead to neurotic and moral anxiety, tormented dreams, sexual phobias, inhibitions, and defense mechanisms which impede maturity. By delving inward, he finds an aggravated Oedipal phase to be at the center of artistic sublimation. / In Lunar Caustic, Lowry attempts to break free of the anxiety of Aiken's influence while examining insanity at close range. Initially blurred in an alcoholic daze, patterns are soon clearly defined: oral dependency, phallic guilt, aggression, regressive infantilism, and, within the clinical situation, principles of "basic trust," transference neurosis, transference defense, and interpretation. / Under the Volcano, his major achievement, permits Lowry to devour Aiken's hovering presence while descending into his alcohol-induced "dark night of the soul." Mexico's infernal beauty operates as the psychological correlative for a people whose birth into the modern age has been fraught with violence, separation anxiety, and lapses into utter solitude. Further, his central characters are burdened by the psychological weight of their pasts--unresolved conflicts stemming from traumatic childhood and adolescent experience. Geoffrey Firmin, particularly, is victimized by the "witty legionnaires" of paranoia and his self-destructive alcoholism, assuredly a sign of chronic suicide. / Finally, Dark As the Grave and Through the Panama explore the psychological entanglements that writing inflicts on personal happiness. While turning to literary solipsism, Lowry feels himself being overtaken by his fiction, and though he had hoped his writing would help him justify himself to himself, instead, his obsessive, perfectionist demands transform it into a vehicle of self-destruction. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-02, Section: A, page: 0502. / Major Professor: David Kirby. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1989.

For nearly 150 years the poet John Skelton ($c$1460-1529) has been credited with significantly enriching the English language. The claim, which apparently began with Isaac Disraeli in 1840 and has continued to the present day, is very likely overblown. / To examine the validity of Skelton's contribution, a computerized concordance of the poet's English works was generated and then compared against earlier work on Skelton's language; against entries in the Oxford English dictionary, the OED supplement, and the Middle English Dictionary; and against numerous books and articles on OED additions and antedatings. This examination resulted in a list of some 2,627 words and senses that Skelton may have introduced into English. / However, after I compared the 1,457 "new" words and senses that appear in Skelton's English translation of Diodorus Siculus against Poggio's Latin from which the translation was made, it was discovered that surprisingly few (only fifteen percent) of Skelton's "new" Diodorus words came from Poggio's Latin, leading to the speculation that many of these "new" words were probably not new at all. Also, it was noticed that a majority (sixty-four percent) of Skelton's 2,627 "new" words were only new senses of older words, and that most (sixty-three percent) of the remaining new words were formed merely by prefixation, suffixation, or combination rather than by borrowing from foreign tongues. Furthermore, over half of Skelton's new words are obsolete. / A final chapter examines Skelton's new words for patterns that may help reveal his character and birthplace: Skelton appears to have been interested in insults, birds, music, the craft of poetry, drink, and clothing, but not very interested in religion; his attitude toward women seems to have been largely one of contempt; and he may well have been born in the far north of England. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 50-03, Section: A, page: 0693. / Major Professor: Harry Caesar Morris. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1988.

The Morality Vice character, in various manifestations, can be traced from an origin in the medieval drama through the drama of the Restoration. His or her defining characteristics are the use of disguise, the ability to manipulate, the tendency to address the audience directly, the desire to serve the devil by corrupting others, and the participation in a drama that is socially critical and/or morally didactic. / Originally an allegorical character participating in an externalized psychomachia, like Titivillus in the anonymous Mankind, the Vice metamorphosed during the late medieval and Renaissance periods into a unified representative of one or more of the Seven Deadly Sins, like Pride or Wrath in The Castle of Perseverance, appearing both in the comedies and the tragedies. On the Jacobean stage the Vice-figure took on more clearly human characteristics; significant examples of the early 17th century Vices are Shakespeare's Iago, Jonson's Volpone and Mosca, and Tourneur's Vindice. Beginning at this time, the Vice often functions as an instrument of the playwright's social criticism. During the Restoration, the Vice-figure, male or female, takes the form either of the bawd or the manipulator. Representative of the Restoration Vices are Dryden's Lyndaraxa and Zulema in the tragedy The Conquest of Granada, as well as Congreve's Fainall and Marwood in the comedy The Way of the World. / The peculiar quality of the Vice-figure is a charisma which conceals malevolence. Thus this character embodies form and function in the drama by leading the audience empathetically through the psychomachia, the mirror of the moral quandary at the heart of man. The Vice-figure's tenacity can be explained by the fact that the Vice role elucidates human moral behavior. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-09, Section: A, page: 3066. / Major Professor: Bertram H. Davis. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.