acase@tulane.edu

Nineteenth-century formulations situate work as an important factor in the complicated calculus of identity. Unlike signifiers of identity such as gender and class, work seems to present a special case in that it is something one does, not a category one inhabits. Thus work seems to offer a way to willfully manage identity and access agency, thereby counteracting Victorian theories of identity-as-agency. Rather than being restricted to one's gender and its concomitant powers, for example, one might change class status or adopt a position normally occupied by the opposite sex through her or his work. Yet for both Victorian thinkers and contemporary theorists, the relationships between identity, work, and agency are matters of considerable debate This project uses Victorian and contemporary theories of agency to examine the question of how work and identity relate to agency in The Moonstone, Daniel Deronda, The Law and the Lady, and Our Mutual Friend . I argue that work needs to be 'unsexed': against the idea of work-as-volitional-agency, I demonstrate that where work is understood to endow a subject with the power to volitionally produce agency, it actually ensconces that subject in a different, essentialized identity category. Further, I suggest that the complementary insights of critical theory and Victorian literature problematize the assumption that agency automatically accrues to a category of identity, whether one inhabits said category biologically, racially, or whether one enters that category via work. Thus I deploy the term 'unsexing' to signify the Victorian notion that one might volitionally change her or his identity via work, but also, and more importantly, to complicate any automatic correspondence between work and agency. Thus to 'unsex' becomes a metaphor for detaching identity from agency, including identity which arises out of work. By unsexing work, I disassociate work from the notion that it offers a subject the possibility to remake herself or change her identity in any way that construes a guarantee of agency / acase@tulane.edu

One of the most important literary conventions of the eighteenth century was the perception of a reading audience endowed with differing capacities to apprehend virtue. This hierarchy included reprobates as well as readers who needed only to reinforce a partially intact moral sense. Additionally, writers posited readers whose sensibilities already were completely perfected. Writers of sentimental novels often adopted techniques such as fragmented narratives to cater to this myriad of readers. Consequently, narrative hiatus, which often is seen merely as an attempt to represent emotion, became commonplace. An alternative interpretation is that narrative interruption was used to cater to the needs of the superior members of the reading hierarchy, who, it was believed, would welcome the abrogation of narrative in favor of the consideration of virtue it occasioned. By creating a subtext in Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Samuel Richardson began a tradition using interruption of the narrative as a means of catering to superior readers. Subsequent novelists, having inherited from Richardson the supposition that the perfected reader should be taken into account, also attempted to manipulate their narratives, but their inept attempts to copy Richardson's techniques produced increasingly fragmented novels. These works remain important because they demonstrate the extent to which authors tried to cater to their superior readers. Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality, which included inset stories designed to sway the minds of inferior readers, depended on a fragmented structure that allowed the discerning reader to abandon interest in the narrative's progress in favor of exploring a religious ecstasy. Similarly, Henry Mackenzie, using a secular agenda in The Man of Feeling, also attempted to abrogate his narrative. Eventually, the convention of the fragmented text was dismantled when Jane Austen concentrated on creating perfected fictional figures instead of attempting to cater to all members of the reading hierarchy. Consequently, Persuasion represents an important transition from the eighteenth-century authors' attempts to create text for the paragon reader and a step toward the nineteenth-century's fascination with the isolated, solipsistic experience of fictional figures who possessed a fully discerning sensibility / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation examines representations of the horse in Victorian literature and culture and reads it as a social and historical construct that simultaneously bears and bucks dominant ideologies of gender and class. Because traditionally, horses act as enduring markers of cultural value, representations of horses in Victorian literature often reveal their complicity with dominant patriarchal, classist, and nationalist ideologies. I argue, however, that as a cultural icon, the Victorian horse is ideologically conflicted: it operates not only to consolidate social, economic, and political power, but works to confound these discursive categories as well, functioning as a figure of displacement for anxieties regarding industrialism and technology, ruptures in the social fabric caused by class conflict and mobility, shifting constructions of masculinity and femininity, the crisis of identity formation within an environment of mass cultural production and consumption, and the heady but uncertain energies of national 'progress' and imperial expansion. While attempts to define 'horse' in the Victorian period underscore its ideological instability, rendering it in multiple guises that a single interpretation cannot entirely control, I claim that the horse in the Victorian age operates as an unsettling intermediary between nature and culture at large, laboring as a repository of desire and despair in a society responding to astonishing social, economic, political, and technological alteration. I examine representations of horses and horse culture in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers and Dombey and Son, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Aurora Floyd, and Vixen, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, and George Moore's Esther Waters, in addition to works of Victorian nonfiction and the visual arts. I read the horse's body as a text within the text, and one that informs and is informed by the discourses of power and resistance circulating at given cultural and historical moments. Moreover, in this project of interpreting the ideological meanings inscribed upon the horse's body, I treat all texts as narratives operating contingently within a nexus of other discursive practices. Therefore, my critical approach is new historical, and I draw on the recent work of cultural and gender studies and feminist theory to formulate and present my thesis / acase@tulane.edu

In my dissertation, a study of John Dryden's Fables Ancient and Modern, I establish the Fables as an integrated, unified epic poem that focuses on the comic subject of love instead of the traditional tragic subject of epic poetry--war. Critics have generally overlooked this crucial step in the poetic tradition, declaring the 'death' of epic poetry in the Eighteenth Century but not seeing Dryden as a pivotal figure in the movement of the narrative tradition away from poetry to prose, specifically from the epic to the novel. The Fables forms so important a bridge because Dryden rejects the heroic tradition and its martial emphasis in favor of the 'domestic' impulse we have long recognized at the center of Richardson's novels. At the end of his career, after completing a monumental translation of Virgil, Dryden abandoned his plan to write an English epic because his considerable writings in and about the heroic led him to conclude that epic poetry on war was no longer feasible. Therefore he moved from this serious, heroic mode to the comic by 'domesticating' the hero and heroine and changing the subject from war to love. The twenty translations and original poems composing Dryden's Fables show variations on the Venus/Mars relationship that becomes Dryden's epic focus. In the critical Preface to the Fables Dryden discussed the original order of composition but then rearranged the poems with an intricate structural framework that produced a narrative based on interconnected sequentiality rather than a single, great action. Dryden's shift in epic sensibility strongly affected the next great Augustan poet, Pope, who, like Dryden, turned to the translation of a classical author rather than undertake an original epic and followed this success with a more overtly comic epic creation--the Dunciad. Henry Fielding proclaims his commitment to this change in the critical Preface to Joseph Andrews, when he calls his novel a 'comic epic poem in prose.' / acase@tulane.edu

Closure is recognized as a major force in defining a narrative and determining its effectiveness. This study attempts to explore two questions, one theoretical, the other critical: Why is it that there seems to be a disjuncture between the conclusion of every narrative and its meaning? How can we understand the meaning of a particular narrative, its moral implications, without reducing it to a thematic or theoretical hobbyhorse, on the one hand, or a technical exercise on the other? The study will reveal, I believe, that the ethic of Narrative--and of a narrative--is uncovered--and recovered--during and through the method of closure The foundation of the theory proposed here is that the tension between experience and meaning, between living in time and achieving value beyond time becomes most intense and most resolved during closure. This foundation recognizes that on one level narrative structures that which by its nature cannot be organized according to the logic of our understanding. Narrative allows us to force histories--personal, psychological, cultural, even ideological--into a perception of why, to read forward into intelligible patterns the causes ultimately obscured by the whirlwind, or whatever metaphor we apply to the overwhelming presence of existence which humbles the conceit of our experience. As Chaos theory shows how order breaks down into a randomness within which lies an undefinable order, so too does Closure theory attempt to show how plotting breaks down into a failure of narrative within which lies a higher plot Of course, any theory of narrative must, to be viable, be critically applicable, must bring us closer not only to Narrative, but to Texts. The first three chapters may be labeled theory, the last three criticism or practice. In brief, chapter one outlines the theory, chapter two considers its implications for how narrative works, how closure 'controls' plots and genres, and chapter three surveys the closure of a particular plot, or genre, the marriage-ending. Chapters four through six examine particular narratives. Pamela, Evelina and Mansfield Park, moving in each case from Narrative to Text, so that the theory becomes more and more concealed in and subordinate to the reading / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

The conflict between body and mind, dust and deity, is a well-established theme which appears in a variety of guises in Byron's poetry. One recurring element in the body of Byron's work that reflects this dichotomy is the phenomenon of time, which can be viewed as both an objective power and subjective experience. This study examines the thematic importance of the many facets of time to Byron's poetry, asserting time's destructive power over the dust as well as the deity's power over time, the mind's power to alter or transcend time. / Chapter One provides background information about time, emphasizing its importance to humanity's exploration of ourselves and our world. Time was becoming a much more intrusive force in human life during Byron's era, as rapid change and developing studies in history, philosophy, and science were undermining uniform notions of time and expanding the role of the individual mind. Chapter Two examines biographical information presenting an overwhelming picture of Byron as a man contending with time in its many finite forms and infinite implications. Chapter Three begins the exploration of the poetry, focusing on time as an objective, external power of destruction. In Chapter Four, the focus turns from time as an agent to the human mind as it acts upon time. Chapter Five discusses the intersections of time and eternity, as finite dust strives for the infinite. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 3141. / Major Professor: Eric Walker. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.