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This thesis examines nostalgia as a central literary trope of burgeoning modernisation in the mid-Victorian historical novel. Nostalgia began as a pathological form of homesickness and rapidly engaged with the perceived distancing from the past brought about by accelerated modernisation. This thesis suggests that literary representations of social, cultural and technological change echo nostalgic reactions of loss and longing. Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot are the primary focus of this study. Selected works by these authors are situated within the wider context of Victorian historical fiction which – following Walter Scott’s phenomenal success at the beginning of the century – became, as Franco Moretti put it, a ‘key genre’ in the Victorian era. Nostalgia’s first victims were soldiers and students displaced from home by new opportunities for mobility and new reasons to travel long distances and live away from home; it was a disease that responded to modernisation or, as Kevis Goodman has put it, ‘historical growing pains’. Nostalgia’s combination of historical and psychological dimensions, I argue, made it an aesthetic peculiarly suited to the historical novel. This thesis suggests that nostalgia was an important novelistic trope during the nineteenth century and argues that it quickly became enmeshed with the historical novel in a way that has seldom been acknowledged. Because of its medical origins, alongside its continued development as a poetic trope, nostalgia provided a language with which to intertwine emotional and psychological reactions to change with the fictional representation of real historical events. The thesis begins with a detailed account of nostalgia’s etymological history, scientific entanglements and early literary manifestations; the introduction establishes the theoretical and historical framework for the thematically organised chapters that follow. Chapter 1 explores the interlacing of personal and historical subject matter in Thackeray’s historical fiction. This chapter suggests that these interactions took place in Thackeray’s historical fiction through the mingling of nostalgic tropes in the person of his central protagonists. These figures frequently follow Scott’s Edward Waverley in being insipid spectator-participants who have been displaced from their homes and (directly or indirectly) mediate events from a perspective of nostalgic exile. Chapter 2 considers the transformation of landscape as a node of nostalgic representation. It explores the confusion of time and place in the original case studies collected by doctors studying nostalgia as a disease in relation to nineteenth-century representations of past landscapes. It suggests that part of the historicising potential of geographical places comes from this instinctive association of time with place. This overlap is exploited in the historical novel to represent changing times via changing places. Chapter 3 takes George Eliot’s Romola, frequently criticised both by contemporary commentators and subsequent critics for being too full of minutely researched objects, as a illustrative example of how things can become ‘memorative signs’ around which to build a narrative. This ‘clutter’ is reinterpreted as a system of souvenirs, artefacts and mementoes through which public history is reconstructed from excavated fragments of private life. Chapter 4 explores how mid-Victorian historical fiction tested the limits of its own nostalgic tropes. It uses Sylvia’s Lovers to probe the point at which forgetfulness overtakes the most carefully memorialised people and events. It discusses the ways in which these novels use nostalgia to represent a perilous closeness between memorialisation and erasure. It considers whether a trope premised on loss might require the threat of encroaching historical oblivion to complete its own metaphors. The thesis concludes with a coda looking forward to later nineteenth-century uses of nostalgia in historical fiction through a reading of Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet Major (1880) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886).

Orientador: Antonio Roberto Esteves / Banca: Maria Eunice Moreira / Banca: Miguel Zioli / Banca: Luiz Roberto Velloso Cairo / Banca: Cátia Inês Negrão Berlini de Andrade / Resumo: Érico Veríssimo legou à biblioteca da literatura brasileira uma obra ficcional copiosa. Contudo, o fecho de sua contribuição encontra-se no campo do memorialismo, com o livro, em dois volumes, Solo de clarineta. Poderíamos chamá-lo de um fecho imperfeito, uma vez que a morte, energicamente, interrompeu seu intento de seguir escrevendo, com a sua prolixidade peculiar, acerca dos fatos vividos. Frente a esse quadro, objetivando elaborar uma tese propositiva, subdividimos nossa abordagem em três partes. A primeira reúne o "álbum de família" e o "álbum de viagem", procurando fazer um sobrevoo que conjugue algumas das recordações de Érico sobre sua vida na companhia de pessoas e lugares. A segunda concentra-se em sua biblioteca, orquestrando leituras de formação, de confirmação e contribuições do próprio escritor às estantes da literatura brasileira. A terceira e última parte procura estabelecer uma comparação entre os escritos de memória e os escritos de ficção, para isso, por meio da metáfora do espelho, aproxima ao limite o que se encontra separado em definitivo pela película de vidro refletora, que podemos chamar de discurso da arte. Por meio dessa divisão em três partes, procuraremos promover um movimento de emparedamento do memorialista no romancista. Desse modo, nossa discussão se encaminha para a defesa do argumento de que, ao final de sua carreira, Veríssimo se transforma, via memorialismo, em personagem de si mesmo, procurando com isso lhe proporcionar uma imortalidade, via literatura, que a sua própria constituição biológica só lhe poderia negar / Abstract: Érico Veríssimo gave to the brazilian literature library a large fictional work. However his last contribution is a book of memories in two volumes named Solo de clarineta. We could consider it as an imperfect end because his death, that was not the author's desire, is responsible for interrupting the active of the writer. Faced with this situation, aiming to develop a propositional theory, we subdivided our approach in three parts. The first gathers the "family album" and the "travel album", trying to make an overflight that gets together some recordation of Érico about his life in the company of people and places. The second part focuses on the library of the author, with his readings of formations, his readings of confirmations and his own contributions in the bookcase of Brazilian literature. The third and last part tries to establish a comparison between the memory written and the fictional written. For this, using the mirror's metaphor, this thesis will try to approach things that are apart, that are separated by a reflective glass film, which we can call art speech. Through this division in three parts, the thesis tries to do a movement of tying the memorialist in the novelist. This way, our discussion sustain the argument that, in the end of his career, Veríssimo wanted to be transformed in a character of himself, trying with this to get the immortality, by literature, condition that his biological constitution couldn't provide / Doutor

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Comparative Literature Department, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-56).

Thesis (doctoral) - Freie Universität, Berlin, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 277-298).

This master's thesis in literary creation is composed of two parts. The first one, a literary critic approaches the confrontation between memory and oblivion, in the novelistic work One hundred years of solitude from Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez through various themes. Primarily, we explain how this duality is seen through hereditary memories, loneliness, activity and inertia. In the next chapters, we show how this duality is also connected with death, collective and individual memories which contributes to make history and identity, with transformation of the past by careful scrutiny of the writing and sleep themes, and finally, to the memory awakened by associations coming from a sensual perception of the past, along with the significance given to objects and through the omnipresence of repetition. / The second part of this master's thesis untitled Nuits blanches is composed of 6 short stories each casting a women battling her anguish and demons, and who throughout a moment, day or night, loses or thinks she's losing her reason.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, May 2007.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.