This thesis explores the representation of conspiracy in the literature of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its engagement with conspiracy thinking, with particular reference to the work of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and George Sand (1804-1876). In providing the first sustained scholarly exploration of conspiracy and cultural production in nineteenth-century France, it situates the novel within wider discourses on European political history in the years leading up to the upheaval of 1848. Through close readings of Balzac and Sand's common investment in conspiracist modes of explanation, this study makes the case for a new generic category, the novel of conspiracy, around which literary poetics, historical imagination and political fantasy come to coalesce. Chapter one proposes a re-evaluation of the dialectic between models of surface and depth reading in Balzac's Une ténébreuse affaire (1841), arguing that the conspiratorial landscape of this proto-detective novel belies Balzac's fraught relationship to the severed referentiality of his narrative. As illustration of a Balzacian poetics of conspiracy, Une ténébreuse affaire, it is suggested, points forward in literary history towards the Flaubertian aesthetic of platitude. Chapter two looks to the political criticisms Jacques Rancière makes of Sand's patrician benevolence to inform its reading of Le Compagnon du Tour de France (1840), which depicts workers' secret societies and the underground networks of Restoration liberalism. Accusations of misguided idealism, this thesis shows, align Rancière's critique and the literary-critical narrative informing Sand's twentieth-century aesthetic devaluation with the reproach that she herself levels at the Carbonarist conspirators of her novel. Chapter three, finally, turns to the alternative origin myth of 1789 that Sand elaborates in Consuelo-La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1842-44). Her engagement with the founding text of the conspiracist tradition of explanation, it argues, provides the cornerstone for the interrogation of the tensions of a pre-Revolutionary Europe torn between Enlightenment and Illuminism. Framing the Balzacian and Sandian novel as emblematic of a wider discourse on the conspiratorial origins of 1789 has a two-fold advantage. On an immediate level, it nuances received critical ideas on these authors' relationships to history and literary genre (a realist Balzac incapable of looking back further than the Restoration whose demise he so lamented; an idealist Sand too caught up in a utopian future to envisage the historical past). In doing so, this study seeks to problematize the narrative of oppositionality behind the Balzac-Sand binary in terms of which the literary history of nineteenth-century France is habitually couched. Yet, more significantly, it also gestures towards the importance of the conspiratorial as a prism through which to approach the porosity of the very categories of 'literature' and 'history' in the nineteenth-century French context.

Este trabalho propõe a investigação da interface entre as identidades políticas e raciais envolvidas na revolta liberal da Sabinada (Bahia, 1837-1838). A análise basear-se-á na documentação produzida pelos próprios envolvidos e também nas fontes referentes à repressão do movimento, de modo que se ofereça um panorama comparativo entre a autoidentificação dos rebeldes e a identificação destes pelos seus adversários. A investigação proposta se insere no amplo debate a respeito da formação da identidade nacional brasileira, dada a partir do reordenamento das múltiplas identidades engendradas no processo de formação e desagregação do Império Português na América. / This work proposes to investigate the interface between political and racial identities involved in the liberal rebellion called Sabinada (Bahia, 1837-1838). The analysis will be based on the documentation produced by the people involved in it and also by the sources regarding the repression of it. The identities of rebels and legalists as seen by themselves and by their opponents will be compared. The proposed investigation becomes part of a broad debate concerning the Brazilian national identity, given after the rearrangement of multiple identities generated in the formation processes and the disintegration of the Portuguese Empire in America.

This project considers ways mid-Victorian fictional autobiographies created new models for women's spiritual formation, testing Nancy Armstrong's theory that novels are antecedent to the cultural conditions they describe. I pair three mid-Victorian fictional texts Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh, and The Mill on the Floss with three later non-fictional autobiographies written by women near the end of the Victorian Era: Annie Besant (1847- 1933), Mary Anne Hearn (1834-1909) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904). These women came to spiritual maturity during the same time period in which the fictional heroines Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh and Maggie Tulliver became prominent in the popular imagination and informed the cultural dialogue about women's roles and spirituality. With the advantage of hindsight, Besant, Hearn and Cobbe are able to offer perspective on cultural and religious trends that these novelists predicted, and they are also able to show how the models presented in novels did or did not correspond with the realities of women's spiritual lives in Victorian England. To draw attention to ways that both the fictional and non-fictional autobiographies use the genre to convert readers to new beliefs about how and what women believe, I focus on the persuasive elements of the conversion narrative and read these texts through the lens of classical rhetorical appeals. By identifying the conversion experience as the common denominator in these diverse texts, I bring these examples of fictional and non-fictional autobiographies onto a level playing and demonstrate both the flexibility of the conversion narrative and the artistry of the non-fictional autobiographers in revising it. I find that the fictional autobiographers employ models of private introspection and substitute scenes of domestic reconciliation for traditional reconciliation with God; however, the three real-life autobiographers must reconcile their personal spiritual transformations with their public personae. Hence they replace the novels' domestic allegories of reconciliation with accounts appropriate to their own new spiritual identities, ranging from Evangelical Christian, to Theist, to Theosophist.

Este trabalho propõe a investigação da interface entre as identidades políticas e raciais envolvidas na revolta liberal da Sabinada (Bahia, 1837-1838). A análise basear-se-á na documentação produzida pelos próprios envolvidos e também nas fontes referentes à repressão do movimento, de modo que se ofereça um panorama comparativo entre a autoidentificação dos rebeldes e a identificação destes pelos seus adversários. A investigação proposta se insere no amplo debate a respeito da formação da identidade nacional brasileira, dada a partir do reordenamento das múltiplas identidades engendradas no processo de formação e desagregação do Império Português na América. / This work proposes to investigate the interface between political and racial identities involved in the liberal rebellion called Sabinada (Bahia, 1837-1838). The analysis will be based on the documentation produced by the people involved in it and also by the sources regarding the repression of it. The identities of rebels and legalists as seen by themselves and by their opponents will be compared. The proposed investigation becomes part of a broad debate concerning the Brazilian national identity, given after the rearrangement of multiple identities generated in the formation processes and the disintegration of the Portuguese Empire in America.

No description available.

Despite the recent scholarship that has been performed on Margaret Fuller, very little has focused on the varied body of poetry she composed during her brief life. By dividing her poetic works into three categories – those written to an early “lover,” those focusing on the theme of androgyny, and those written during her “mature period” of 1844 – one is better able to follow Fuller on the emotional and intellectual journey that served as the foundation for all of her writings. In addition, the study of Fuller’s poetry provides a clearer understanding of how this erudite woman transcended gender boundaries in her writings, as well as in the choices she made in her daily life, further emphasizing her reputation as a revolutionary woman of nineteenth century.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis examines the status of caricature in the literary culture of early-nineteenth- century Britain, with a focus on the novel. It shows how the early-nineteenth- century novel developed a variety of literary forms that negotiated and remade caricature for the bourgeois literary sphere. Case studies are drawn primarily from the published writings and manuscript drafts of Thomas Love Peacock, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Walter Scott. The first chapter elucidates the various meanings and uses of 'caricature' in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the term was more ambiguous and broadly applied than literary criticism and print history have acknowledged. I counter the assumption that the single-sheet satirical print was central to conceptions and practices of caricature in this period, giving examples of the textual, dramatic, and real-life 'caricatures' that were more often under discussion. The second and third chapters consider the unstable distinction between textual caricature and satirical characterisation in early-nineteenth-century literary culture. They explain how the literary construction of textual caricature developed from two sources: Augustan rulings against publishing satires on individuals, and caricature portraits as a pastime beloved of genteel British society. I argue that Peacock and Austen adapted forms of 'caricaturistic writing' that were conscious of the satirical literary work's relation to caricature. Subsequent chapters turn to the thematic uses of caricature in the early-nineteenth- century novel. In the fourth chapter, I uncover the significance of caricature to deformity in Mary Shelley's fiction, presenting evidence that her monsters' disproportion was inherited from the 'real-life' caricatures diagnosed in philosophical and medical texts of the eighteenth century. The final chapter traces ideas about caricature through the writings of Walter Scott, and finds that Scott conceived of exemplary graphic and textual caricatures as artefacts of antiquarian interest.