<p> In 1846 and 1847, ether and chloroform were used and celebrated for the first time in Britain and the United States as effective surgical anaesthetics capable of rendering individuals insensible to physical pain. During the same decade, British novels of realism were enjoying increasing cultural authority, dominating readers' attention, and evoking readers' sympathy for numerous social justice issues. This dissertation investigates a previously unanswered question in studies of literature and medicine: how did writers of social realism incorporate realistic descriptions of physical pain, a notoriously difficult sensation to describe, in an era when the very idea of pain's inevitability was challenged by medical developments and when, concurrently, novelists, journalists, and politicians were concerned with humanitarian reforms to recognize traditionally ignored and disadvantaged individuals and groups in pain? By contextualizing the emergence of specific realist novels including works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, William Howard Russell, and Charles Dickens, within larger nonfiction discourses regarding factory reform, prison reform, and war, this dissertation identifies and clarifies how realist authors, who aim to demonstrate general truths about "real life," employed various descriptions of physical pain during this watershed moment in medicine and pain theory, to convince readers of their validity as well as to awaken sympathetic politics among readers. </p><p> This study analyzes Gaskell's first industrial novel, <i>Mary Barton </i> (1848), Reade's prison-scandal novel, <i>It is Never Too Late to Mend</i> (1856), Russell's Crimean War correspondence (1850s) and only novel, <i>The Adventures of Doctor Brady</i> (1868), and Dickens's second <i>Bildungsroman, Great Expectations</i> (1861), thereby revealing different strategies utilized by each author representing pain - ranging from subtle to graphic, collective to individualized, urgent to remembered, and destructive to productive. This study shows how audience expectations, political timing, authorial authority, and medical theory influence and are influenced by realist authors writing pain, as they contribute to a cultural consensus that the pain of others is unacceptable and requires attention. These realist authors must, in the end, provide fictionalized accounts of pain, asking readers to act as witnesses and to use their imaginations, in order to inspire sympathy.</p>

Anglo-Saxon legal concepts, particularly the principles of feud and dispute resolution, have a demonstrable influence on the themes and narrative structure of Beowulf. Beowulf's three main monster fights, with Grendel, Grendel's mother and the dragon, may be legally analyzed to determine why the hero has greater difficulties in each fight--in each, the hero's antagonist has a progressively stronger legal right to resistance, from the negligible legal position of Grendel up through the very ambiguous legal rights of the dragon in the final fight. An extremely important influence on each fight is the Anglo-Saxon concept of guardianship over place, or mund, which gives a legal dimension to the poem's emphasis on the sacrosanct and inviolable nature of the "close"--the great meadhall Heorot, or the gudsele ("battle-hall") of the Grendel kin or the eordsele ("earth-hall") of the dragon--and the relative justice of armed forays into such spaces.

The Philosopher's Seduction documents the experience of a non-professional-philosopher-female reader's encounter with a father of modern philosophy. I review and analyze the critical history of David Hume's "literary" essays which ostensibly appeal(ed) to a female readership; the gender politics of academic discipline, canon formation, and reader-response theory provide background and substance to my study. Hume's turn from the Treatise to the essay form, but especially to the "woman-appeal" mode, has been critically judged as a deviation from the practice of serious philosophy, to the mercenary and effeminate service of a feminine (both biologically and symbolically) public. These critics point to Hume's own excision of these texts from his subsequent essay editions, and to these essays' putative deficiencies in style and subject matter, as eminent grounds for their rejection by both author and critical traditional. This critical rejection of Hume's woman-appeal essays can be studied as a virtual catalogue of misogyny persisting to the present date in the relevant academic disciplines. Foregrounding my experience as a woman "of Sense and Education" (Hume's own phrase for his intended female readership) in reading Hume, I demonstrate how the shift in reader gender identity and, therefore, conventionally-predicated experience can entail a reversal of critical perspective on the woman-appeal essays. In fact, only by reading "as-a-woman" can one gain access to the philosophical core of these texts, to discover their epistemological centrality to Hume's entire system. In them Hume discloses, through such literary devices as anecdote, metaphor, and irony, how gender issues and in particular woman's situation in society underlie both his conception of philosophy ("understanding") and his moral philosophy. It is crucial to recognize how Hume's manipulation of gender issues along a philosophy-literature continuum reflects his self-consciousness and motivations as a "philosopher" and "belletrist"--two occasionally collaborating, occasionally conflicting literary roles--within his culture. Analogies between Hume's eighteenth- and late-twentieth-century female readers are difficult to discern and uneasy; yet, a common experience of "woman-appeal" and reading "as-a-woman" can be hypothesized against the backdrop of an enduring patriarchal (misogynist) economy. The Philosopher's Seduction reverses the terms of this economy by re-placing Hume's woman-appeal essays into the critical canon and in an epistemologically primary place. At the same time, this study traces an ambivalent coming-to-power of Hume's woman reader "of Sense and Education": in the context of these essays, a qualified invitee, or ultimately initiate, into the traditionally gender-exclusive practice of philosophy.

Driven by her anxiety to create an alternative world view to that offered her by the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century England, enabled by the decline of biblical authority encouraged by the expansion of scientific discovery and the rise of the Higher Criticism, and guided by the Bible's own internal reinterpretative tradition, Charlotte Bronte appropriates the authoritative voice of scripture in order to redirect its energies into new avenues so that she can script a life for herself which transcends the possibilities available to her in the external world. However, if she wishes to redress issues of exclusion and oppression which have their roots in the traditional, male-dominated interpretation of the Bible, then one of her most effective weapons is the Bible's own challenging word, which, though often suppressed by her culture, she reclaims and uses. What Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence" is certainly involved in her apparently willful misreading of the precedent tradition of biblical interpretation in order to clear out a space within which her voice can be heard. The influence of such a powerful and sacrosanct source as the Bible would undoubtedly produce in Bronte the anxiety of which Bloom speaks. However, rather than abandoning or completely rejecting it, she saw her work as a necessary renewing of the biblical tradition because the conventional methods of viewing it no longer fit the situation of women in the nineteenth century, including her own. From the dominant society's point of view, she commits what can be perceived as acts of "violence" on the Bible and a substantial body of its interpretation. Breaking its stories down into their component parts of character, plot, and setting, she then reassembles them in startling and exciting ways using the process of bricolage. This study traces Charlotte Bronte's reinscription of the Bible through her four novels, paying special attention to her use of three strategies: (1) gender reversal, (2) undermining of God's role in controlling human history, and (3) recasting "otherworldly" locales in this worldly settings.

Stevie Smith's work not only prefigures a key debate in contemporary feminism between essentialists and social constructionists, but also the more current debates that have developed as the constructionist position continues to be explored. She takes an anti-essentialist position as her inaugural point and explores the limits of agency in redefining gender identities against established cultural signification. Novel on Yellow Paper is best understood in the context of autobiographical fiction, a genre which maintains that identities are always to some extent fictional and, therefore, subject to self-invention. Smith challenges the notion of a fixed, female essence by utilizing a strategy of multivocality. Pompey, the protagonist, adopts a variety of voices which situate her as a product of literary and social discourses and prevent her cooption into a stable subject suitable for matrimony. In Over the Frontier, however, self-construction seems less ideal. It carries the potential for self-destruction. Smith reveals the failure of androgyny as a solution to the woes of femininity and shows that a woman impersonating a man exposes the category "man" as a subject-position inhabitable by either sex. Smith's hat poems serve as clear examples of the risks and possibilities involved in refashioning gender. Hats serve as vestimentary signs that either reify or reformulate traditional gender identities. Beneath Smith's hats are bodies, not The Body, capitalized, abstracted, and theorized solely as a text inscribed by history and culture, but particular bodies which, in their differences, bear the marks of socialization. In her poetry, she most often tropes female bodies as prisons; in order to escape essentialist definitions associated with those bodies, she revises fairy tales to imagine physical transformations that transport women into other bodies and alternative sexualities. Similarly, the drawings that accompany her poems subvert poetic statements which appear to endorse "proper" feminine concerns and traditional, masculine literary values.

Social mobility was a feature of life in early modern England, and its effect on the gentry was the material for a number of plays written in the first decades of the 17th century: Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, Massinger's The Maid of Honour and The Bondman, and Middleton's The Changeling. In these plays the dramatists examine the moral questions of fitness for membership in the elite. They use received notions of sexual desire and gender hierarchy together with a narrative of social mobility to question and to legitimate this mobility. Social aspiration and sexual desire could be put into a productive dramatic relationship because in contemporary thought they were connected at a fundamental ethical level. Their theatrical conjunction put sex into discourse in Foucault's sense and deployed it in new ways. The first three plays investigate the possibility of a more inclusive elite which would be open, through marriage, to virtuous outsiders. Though the social mobility of the protagonists does not threaten the hierarchy, the erotic energy which is inseparable from their aspiration has a disruptive potential which calls their project into question. Nothing less than a transformation of the desiring self is required to legitimate their ambition. In the downward mobility represented in The Changeling there is no transformation of the self; uncontrolled desire leads to chaos in the social order, and the play constructs a cleavage between the respectable and the morally reprehensible parts of society. Though the plays endorse the control of desire as the touchstone of acceptance into the elite, the theatrical representation of this desire in the struggle to deserve status functions in a productive rather than a repressive way. It creates a secular sexual discourse which became an integral part of the entertainment provided by the commercial theater. Moreover, this representation of desire is deployed to change the way society is perceived. The audience is persuaded to envisage an elite reformed by the inclusion of people of merit from outside it, and to accept the corollary of this--the separation and exclusion of the morally reprehensible.

This dissertation discusses the complex representation of foreigners in sixteenth-century English drama. It relates literary evidence to contemporary implicit and overt allegations that vices brought to England by both immigrant aliens and returning English travelers were corrupting, infecting, or "alienating" England and the English. My thesis argues that, during the Elizabethan period, the English experienced an increasing awareness of their own "national" identity vis-a-vis immigrant aliens and ideas of the alien "other" in literary representation. Such awareness spawned an English obsession with preserving an imaginary core of "English identity" against alien encroachments. The "alienation" of the English is both physical and psychological. Aliens buy up property and evict innocent English tenants; they ruin English artisans by importing fashionable trifles and using inferior materials in order to undercut the domestic market price; and they pass on their evil, alien ethics and heterodoxy. The English who remain unaffected by the alien find themselves needing to "colonize" their own country as they feel increasingly identified as the strange "other" in an "alienated" society. The English response varies from calls for expulsion of the aliens to petitions for mass English repentance. Through an investigation of general trends and specific literary and cultural events, this study finds that English community, although self-assured and proud, effectively loses this battle with the alien. By the end of the sixteenth century, despite the efforts of preachers, polemicists, and prophets, who publish and perform at length in an attempt to reform the wayward island nation, the English are "alienated." By locating a discussion of the emergence of "national identity" in the sixteenth century, this dissertation provides a foundation for, and encourages rehistoricized reading of, the (post-) colonial studies that engage with English identity in the seventeenth century. Before it was possible for the English to think of (re)defining themselves by means of their seventeenth-century "discoveries," they were creating an idea of Englishness in response to the incoming alien; English identity thus becomes an attribute of the colonial travelers that was radically altered--rather than invented anew--in the process of exploration and exploitation.

<p> This Humanistic Social Science Dissertation is an exploration of the continuing belief in fairies as real in spite of over a millennium of sociopolitical and religious pressures aimed at the extinguishment of fairies. In this qualitative, phenomenological study, the belief narratives of eight subjects' encounters with fairy beings are examined.</p><p> For the purpose of this dissertation, the word fairy is based on but not limited to fairy scholar Katherine Briggs' definition and classification, which includes all spirits of the supernatural realms, except for angels, devils, or ghosts (i). Thus, "fairy" includes sylphs, subtle or intermediate beings, light fairies, nature elementals, pixies, leprechauns, elves, changelings, and brownies to name but a few. The fairy beings encountered by the interviewees are reflected against Celtic folklore established in classic works like Reverend Robert Kirk's 1691 manuscript (47) and Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz 1911 thesis.</p><p> Depth Psychology and science provide two additional lenses to explore fairy phenomena and belief since this dissertation seeks to investigate the relationship between reality and imagination, and between tradition, experiential knowing, and belief. Moreover, counterevidence and arguments to the prevailing cultural wisdom and beliefs that fairies and imaginal beings are impossible are examined. This study approaches the interviews from a perspective of cultural mythology and phenomenology with both emic and etic interests. The subjects experienced a moment of gnosis with fairy encounters and subsequently believed with unshaking resolve that fairies are real and true. In this context, C.G. Jung's concepts of the archetype and Henri Corbin's theories regarding the psychoid realm are helpful in understanding the Celtic Otherworld and Land of Fairy.</p><p> A constituent invariant model was developed to organize the data, and facilitated the emergence of key themes, including corroborated sightings, surprising shadows, and messages from nature beings. The belief in fairies continues and is part of an evolving, contemporary, and nature-based mythology that is very much alive.</p>

No description available.

<p> While studies of fantastic literature have often focused on their structural and genre characteristics, less attention has been paid to the manner in which they address social issues and concerns. Drawing on theoretical, taxonomic, and historical approaches, this study argues that 19th-century England represented a key period of transformation during which fantastic literature evolved away from its folkloristic, mythic, and satirical origins and toward the modern genres of science fiction, feminist fantasy, and literary horror. </p><p> The thesis examines the subversive and transformative function of the fantastic in nineteenth-century British literature, particularly how the novel <i> Frankenstein</i> (1831), the poem &ldquo;Goblin Market&rdquo; (1862), and the novel <i>Dracula</i> (1897) make deliberate uses of the materials of fantastic literature to engage in social and cultural commentary on key issues of their time, and by so doing to mark a significant transformation in the way fantastic materials can be used in narrative.</p><p> <i>Frankenstein</i> took the materials of the Gothic and effectively transformed them into science fiction, not only through its exploration of the morality of scientific research, but more crucially through its critique of systems of education and the nature of learning. "Goblin Market " transformed the materials of fairy tales into a morally complex critique of gender relations and the importance of women's agency, which paved the way for an entire tradition of such redactions among later feminist writers. <i>Dracula</i> draws on cruder antecedents of vampire tales and the novel of sensation to create the first modern literary horror novel, while addressing key emerging anxieties of nationalism and personal identity. </p><p> Although historical connections are drawn between these three key works, written at different points during the nineteenth century, it does not argue that they constitute a single identifiable movement, but rather that each provided a template for how later writers might adapt fantastic materials to more complex literary, social, and didactic ends, and thus provided a groundwork for the more complex modern uses of the fantastic as a legitimate resource for writers concerned with not only sensation, but significant cultural and social concerns.</p>