This dissertation attempts to collect all the published and epistolary criticism on Tobias Smollett's novels from 1748 to 1821. The more than 465 references to Smollett's fictions reflect the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century attitudes toward his reputation as a novelist and his influence on and contribution to the novel. The survey begins with a brief reference to Smollett's first novel by a minor eighteenth-century personality, Mrs. Catherine Talbot. It ends with an extensive analysis of Smollett and his novels by a major nineteenth-century novelist and critic, Sir Walter Scott. Of the five novels he publishes, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) establishes his reputation as a novelist and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) confirms it. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), though a popular novel, is repeatedly censured for its immorality by detractors and admirers alike. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), revived briefly in the era of Gothic fiction, soon resumes its place among second-rate novels. The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762), never able to emerge from the shadow of Don Quixote, sinks into the oblivion of third-rate imitations. From the beginning, critics recognize Smollett as a novelist of genius and talent and consider his novels along with Fielding's works, as literary standards. Some commentators consider Smollett's works superior to Fielding's, others inferior. But most frequently Smollett is viewed equal in merit though different in art. Certainly, his contribution to and influence on the novel are as extensive as his literary counterparts. The many imitations of his humor, seamen, caricatures, and novels, both in part and as a whole, attest to his literary impact on the genre. As a delineator of men and manners, he extends Fielding's fictional realism with his descriptions of life in the navy and with his portraits of prostitutes and profligates. Though censured for his immorality and mislabeled as a comic novelist, Smollett's novels have outlived their critics and survived the test of time / acase@tulane.edu

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Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulations (1534) considers present events in the context of redemptive history within consolatory dialogue. More's dialogue operates within the parameters of Ciceronian-Platonist, Senecan, and Tacitean prose dialogue, older medieval models, and huma / acase@tulane.edu

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My major aim in this study will be to trace, by using the theory of hegemony, as ariticulated by Antonio Gramsci and further elaborated by Ernesto Laclou and Chantal Mouffe, the discourse of (inter)nationalism in four nineteenth-century British novels: Waverley (1814), Alton Locke (1850), Phineas Finn (1869), and Daniel Doronda (1876). I will intend to demonstrate how (inter)nationalism, as a form of consciousness generated hegemonically throughout the British society, was always present although not easily detected in the novelistic discourse of the nineteenth century During the nineteenth-century in Great Britain, the novel, as a dialogic discourse resistant to totalizing, played a crucial role in establishing the terms of liberal (inter)nationalism, that is, an uneasy negotiation between nationalism and internationalism. As the dominant textual form of the century, the novel was an interesting unity of contradictory ideologies that refused to be reduced to any particular dominant ideology. Thus, both Marxist and liberal political theories fail to represent themselves as the sole legitimate discourse of the British nation. Be it classified as a historical novel, such as Waverley, an industrial novel, such as Alton Locke , a political novel, such as Phineas Finn, or a realist novel of individual growth, such as Daniel Deronda, the British novel struggles both to construct and solidify British national identity and at the same time it broadens national divisions within. As a result, there becomes obvious a highly problematic and complex relationship between Englishness and Britishness in all the four novels My intention, however, is neither to claim the supremacy of the novel in the artificial creation of Britishness, nor the supremacy of any national identity within the British nation-state but to suggest that the nineteenth-century British novel just like the British nation itself both produced and was a product of a specific national climate of that century. I will attempt to analyze how the four novels, as they struggle to construct an international and multinational discourse, use the very nationalistic discourses that they attempt to escape Nationalism is practiced not only by the dominant nation, but also by the dominated ones. The nineteenth-century British novel, as the most 'national-popular' genre, reflects the contradictory process of nation-formation in which multiple national identities---English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish---were competing against each other while, at the same time, they were being more and more disseminated hegemonically into Englishness/Britishness I will explore the possibility that the British novel during the nineteenth century was in this sense determined by what I call an '(inter)national' consciousness. As the genre that provided a highly productive form of the 'national-popular' discourse that was introduced by Gramsci, the novel reflected this (inter)national consciousness. By discussing Gramsci and various theorists of ideology and nationalism such as Benedict Anderson, Anthony Birch, John Breuilly, Eric Hobsbawm, and Anthony D. Smith, I will demonstrate how hegemony, as a complex interplay of practical factors and discursive practices, turns into the major theoretical tool in the study of such a complex concept that I call '(inter)nationalism.' / acase@tulane.edu

Relieved that the beneficent spirit of his dead mother has ceased possessing him, the narrator of Margaret Oliphant's 'The Portrait' confesses that 'flesh and blood is not made for such encounters.' Though flesh and blood may indeed not be 'made for' encounters with the unreal, Gothic fiction repeatedly forces human beings and the world they inhabit into such confrontations. This study focuses on key questions that Victorian Gothic short stories raise when they locate the site of these encounters in the home. Constructing the home as a sanctuary from the competitive world outside it, Victorian domesticity located the means of maintaining that separation in women's supposed authority in the realm of emotions and morality. While domesticity thereby contained the middle-class woman in a limited mundane place, it also granted her a kind of power there, a power uncovered as a source of irrevocable tension in Gothic short stories predominantly featuring a home My analyses of five stories--Dickens's 'The Haunted Man,' Gaskell's 'The Old Nurse's Story,' LeFanu's 'Carmilla,' Hardy's 'The Fiddler of the Reels,' and 'The Portrait'--examine the conflicts at work in the juncture of Gothic and domesticity. In these stories, women characters who are denied domestic power open the home up to the destructive force of unregulated emotions, while women wielding authority become imbued with a disturbing unearthliness. With neither the absence nor the presence of women's power in the home insuring its invulnerability against forces of the 'unreal' and 'unnatural'--forces representing class conflicts as well as sexual tensions--an alien, unsettling presence permeates the middle-class home, destabilizing it as a haven of the known and safe. The Gothic short story thus defamiliarizes domesticity and its place: both its literal place in the Victorian home and its figurative place in the ideologies that prescribe values and norms according to gender / acase@tulane.edu

This project examines food and literature in the construction and consumption of British imperial identity. Focusing on the subtle shifts in the rhetoric of both literature and legislation between the years 1773 and 1939 (from the Regulating Act of 1773, which curbed the East India Company's rule of India and initiated government involvement, to the Independence of Ireland and World War II), I investigate how food and the novel work to consolidate and sustain what Benedict Anderson has termed an imagined community, a heterogeneous, composite identity strategically constituted against elastic definitions of Otherness, whether of race, class, gender, or geography. The first part of this project examines what effect the repeal of the Corn Laws had upon the creation of a mythologized past and competing versions of Englishness as illustrated in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and Disraeli's Sybil. I then look at the 'intoxicating ingestion' of Otherness, particularly as regards the figure of India/the Indian, depictions of which shift from seductive siren in Owenson's The Missionary to inane simpleton in Thackeray's Vanity Fair to sinister, if misunderstood, alien in Collins' The Moonstone. From the demonization of the Indian, I examine the 'monsterization' of the Irishman in a series of texts, such as Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, arguing that Otherness is signified through not only racialization of the colonized, but also what---or even whom---one eats. Finally, the second part of this project looks at how nationalism is internally defined in terms of class and gender. While the novels of Dickens and Trollope reveal the presence of occluded class lines rendered visible and negotiable through the dining habits of the 'ordinary' gentleman, generic disruptions in the novels of Gaskell, Bronte, and Braddon betray uneasiness regarding the location of not only woman and her often ungovernable appetites, but also women's writing in the reproduction of national identity. I conclude by suggesting that the implications of my analyses are not restricted to nineteenth-century Britain, but are still relevant to contemporary imaginings and contestations of national identity / acase@tulane.edu

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The failures and disappointments in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's family life affected his poetry in several significant ways. His inability to achieve lasting happiness as a son, brother, husband, and father contributed to his idealization of domestic love and to his dependence on surrogate brothers, sisters, and mothers. His childhood trauma and later domestic frustrations apparently led to a preoccupation with Cain themes and other familial conflicts; however, he was usually reluctant to present detailed examinations of such themes in his poetry, and in several of his narratives, disturbing parallels to his private disappointments may have been one cause of his surrender to his habitual tendency toward fragmentary compositions When Coleridge did not leave a work as a fragment, he often seems to have used other means of screening himself from distressing implications of fratricide and domestic turmoil; severely editing the text, portraying conflicts symbolically, masking characters' identities, manipulating contrasts between violence and supportive love, adopting a pose of religious righteousness, or leaving a work unpublished. In several early poems, he praises domestic heroes and contrasts the unity of God's family with protrayals of tyrants who destroy their victims' families. In the conversation poems he focuses selectively on the most rewarding aspects of his relationship with his wife, his son Hartley, and the Wordsworths. After the collapse of his marriage, he found that he had virtually nothing to communicate in poetry concerning his own family. Most of his love poems to Sara Hutchinson remained unpublished, while some of the published lyrics conceal her identity and speak of her as if she were his wife. 'Christabel,' 'The Wanderings of Cain,' and 'The Three Graves'--narratives that closely reflect Coleridge's domestic frustrations--remained fragments, while in 'The Ancient Mariner' he deals with fratricide symbolically instead of literally. He was able to complete the plays Osorio and Zapolya, but apparently only at the cost of de-emphasizing the potentially meaningful Cain themes and contrasting the villains with numerous other characters who essentially represent domestic virtue. Other plays, which would have treated domestic violence more directly, remained unwritten projects / acase@tulane.edu