Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: Janet Swaffar and Katherine Arens. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Not available / text

Thesis (M.A.) -- Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1987. / Typescript. Bibliography : leaves 188-197. Also available online.

Note:

This thesis discusses the relationship between money and character in the novels of Charles Dickens, concentrating mainly on the later novels, from Dombey & Son onwards. Money is extremely important in Dickens's social criticism, and he is always conscious of money-related motives in his conception of character. However, despite its importance and omnipresence, money ought not to be elevated into the key explanatory principle in Dickens's thought. Dickens has been valued for different qualities over the years. Many who value him as an entertainer with a powerful poetic imagination tend to undervalue his social criticism and moralising, and to treat those aspects as non-essential or as belonging to a different side of his life and work. On the other hand those who value him as social and moral critic have combined this with exaggerated claims of thematic coherence. This thesis suggests that we can dispense with such claims while still regarding Dickens's novels as serious contributions to the moral and social debates of his day. A close consideration will be given to most of the later novels, with the intention of placing the money themes alongside other themes, so as to emphasise the many-sidedness of Dickens's social and moral criticism. Other themes explored in the thesis include marriage and the home, and hypocrisy and self-deception. The thesis seeks to do justice to Dickens's thorough-going ambivalence towards money, and to his capacity for revisiting characters and themes from one work to another. The bias of the thesis is towards the personal and individual, but money is inevitably a social topic. Much consideration is therefore given to Dickens's fictional and non- fictional responses to contemporary social problems and attitudes, and also to material not written by Dickens but published by him in Household Words and All the Year Round.

This thesis analyses the significance of socio-historical conceptions of money in relation to the development of American literary modernism from 1896 to 1944. Taking as its starting point Jean-Joseph Goux's contention that there was a correlation between the end of gold-backed money in France and the birth of French modernist literature, this study considers how far this claim is tenable in the American case. In 1896, the key debate surrounding the presidential election was over whether money should be backed by gold or silver specie, which became a major public issue. Faith in the gold standard was challenged, raising the possibility that the source of monetary value was negotiable. Subsequent policy changes, financial panics, the Depression and the World Wars all affected public conceptions of money, until the Bretton Woods Agreement instituted an international gold standard supported by the gold-backed U.S. dollar in 1944, effectively re-establishing a firm relationship between gold and money. Since the 1990s, New Economic Criticism has sought to understand the ways in which money and literature converge throughout history. Although several studies of money and American literary realism have been undertaken, the relationship between money and American literary modernism specifically has largely been overlooked in scholarship. Analysing the works of Robert Herrick, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos, this thesis contends that a certain strand of American modernism developed as a series of reflections upon the relationship between money, value and realistic representation, in which the limitations of realism are exposed. Calling for a re-historicisation of the relationship between money and literature, this study argues that particular socio-historical moments in the story of American money emphasised the fluidity of money, sending social conceptions of value into flux in a society in which money functioned as the general equivalent by which all values were measured. These moments when accepted face values were called into question offered American writers the language and structure by which to consider and challenge the limitations of existing literary forms by comparing money with literature. Both paper money and literature, forms of representation which function via the inscription of words upon paper, contain an inherent duality; they have both a material value, in terms of their composition from paper and ink, and a deeper capacity to represent a certain value in the society in which they circulate. Modernism is concerned with such a duality, emphasising the materiality of the text and exposing the text's status as a representation that can never equal the reality that it represents. The authors discussed here confronted the discrepancy between written language as a reflection of the real world and words as material constructs in themselves through the metaphor of money, manifesting in both textual theme and structure, where the boundaries of realist representation are broken down via the use of unconventional forms. Utilising the method of close textual analysis and situating the texts examined within the wider socio-historical contexts of which they were born, the thesis focuses upon four different moments in the story of U.S. money and literature. This historically contingent approach facilitates the argument that these literary texts function as sites at which to examine and come to terms with contemporaneous social issues, helping to broaden both the purpose and structure of American literature in the early-twentieth century.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007.

This dissertation critically examines why mid-Victorian fiction often dismisses or complicates monetary transactions and monetary charity, even as it negatively portrays differences in social status and wealth. I argue that the novel uses representations of failed charity to reconstruct, however briefly, a non- monetary and non-economic source of value. Further, I examine how the novel uses techniques of both genre and style to predict, form, and critique alternate, non-economic, social models. While tension surrounding the practice of charity arises in the late eighteenth century, the increasing dominance of political economy in public discourse forced Victorian literature to take a strong stance, for reasons of both ethics and genre. This stance is complicated by the eighteenth-century legacy that sees charity as a kind of luxury. If giving to the poor makes us feel good, this logic suggests, surely it isn’t moral. Thus, while much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature remains dedicated to the ethics of charity, the practice becomes immensely complex. By discussing the works of Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, this project exposes a wide variety of responses to this deep cultural anxiety. These authors are, ultimately, strongly invested in redefining the meaning of benevolence as a valid form of social action by moving that benevolence away from monetary gifts and toward abstractly correct moral feelings, though their individual solutions vary widely. / text

Orientador: Elide Rugai Bastos / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-16T14:51:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Cordeiro_SaraReginaRamos_D.pdf: 2308227 bytes, checksum: 42cf83bc37ec21bf5a996346688c5ea5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010 / Resumo: Com a emergência da sociedade burguesa de mercado no século XIX o dinheiro passou a desempenhar um papel fundamental na nova configuração, uma vez que a manutenção e expansão de tal sociedade pressupõem a regularidade nas trocas e, conseqüentemente, uma economia monetária desenvolvida a ponto de assegurar essa regularidade. Alguns romancistas, em particular os realistas franceses, demonstraram em seus romances a emergência dessa sociedade motivada pelo lucro, tendo o dinheiro como elemento central de suas narrativas. A Comédia Humana de Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) é considerada o maior registro literário da sociedade francesa desse período e muitas de suas tramas são atravessadas por relações mediadas pelo dinheiro. Mais tarde, sociólogos como Karl Marx (1818-1883), Georg Simmel (1858-1918) e Max Weber (1864-1920) desenvolveram suas análises numa perspectiva crítica à sociedade de mercado, destacando o dinheiro como elemento racionalizador das relações e desagregador dos laços tradicionais. Nesse sentido, este trabalho pretende mobilizar as categorias analíticas da sociologia clássica para analisar parte da obra de Balzac a fim de verificar como o romancista via a relação que os indivíduos de sua época estabeleciam com o dinheiro e quais os principais impactos dessa relação na moderna sociedade / Abstract: The raising of a bourgeois market society in the nineteenth century resulted in the great importance that money started to play in the new social arrangement, since the maintenance and expansion of that society predicted the regularity in exchanges and, as a consequence, a monetary economy developed to the point that insured this regularity. Some novelists, particularly French realists ones, showed in their novels the emergence of this market society motivated by profits, having money as the central element of their stories. The Human Comedy, by Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) is considered the biggest literary register of the French society of that period and many of its plots are crossed by relations mediated by money. Afterwards, sociologists like Karl Marx (1818-1883), Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Max Weber (1864-1920) developed their studies in a critical perspective from the market society, contrasting money as the rational element of relations and disintegrator of traditional ties. Therefore, this paper aims to mobilize the analytical categories of classical sociology in order to analyze part of Balzac?s work with the intention of examine how the novelist used to see the relationship that individuals of his time established with money and what was the main effects of this relationship in that new society / Doutorado / Sociologia / Doutor em Sociologia