This thesis examines the emergence of the nation in the British Empire in the process of thinking about empire, economy and biology during the late-Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. A key aspect of this, Knapman argues, was concern over the dialectic of civilization and order as it related to the barbarian and the savage. The notion of the barbarian grounded the European nations in time and therefore constructing a sense of origin and particularism. Equally the savage and the barbarian placed non-European cultures in time. The thesis draws on a range of writers from eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such as Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, James Cowles Prichard, Robert Knox and many other lesser-known figures. This is related to an examination of the nation in British representations of Southeast Asia, including colonial officials such as Stamford Raffles, John Crawfurd, and James Brooke who produced encyclopaedic accounts of their experiences in Asia. The thesis argues that while the complex grammar of the British Empire divided the world into spheres of civilisation and barbarism, it retained a special place for barbarians within the core and thus allowed for the naturalisation of nations within the context of an empire of civilizing others.

This dissertation investigates nineteenth-century Canadian literary and general interest periodicals through the prefaces and other editorial missives written by the editors who created them. It seeks to demonstrate how these cultural workers saw their magazines as vehicles for promoting civic and literary development. While the handful of previous Canadian magazine dissertations take a “snapshot” approach to the genre by profiling a handful of titles within a region, this study attempts to capture the editorial impulse behind magazine development more widely. To do so, it examines multiple titles over a wider geographical and chronological span. To provide context for these primary documents, the dissertation begins with a chapter that summarizes the development of magazines as a genre and the history of publishing in nineteenth-century Canada. Subsequent chapters examine prefaces by theme as well as by rhetorical strategy. Themes such as nationalism, cultural development, and anti-Americanism emerge most prominently, alongside rhetorical techniques such as metaphor, imagery, analogy and personification. The dissertation also examines other sites of editorial interaction, most commonly the “correspondent’s columns,” where editors provided public feedback on topics ranging from versification to currency to prose style as a means of educating writers and readers alike. Finally, the dissertation relies on existing indexes to identify some of the most prolific contributors to the magazines, considering how these writers used the magazines to boost their literary careers. In the early century, these sources verify the productivity of canonical writers such as Susanna Moodie and Rosanna Leprohon, and call attention to obscure writers such as Eliza Lanesford Cushing, W. Arthur Calnek, James Haskins, and Mary Jane Katzmann Lawson. In the later century, the same approach is used again to examine the hive of writers who emerged to contribute to late century magazines like The Canadian Monthly and National Review and The Week, confirming the immense productivity of writers such as Agnes Maule Machar and drawing attention to now-obscure contributors like Mary Morgan. By recovering these overlooked editorial elements and figures, this dissertation draws scholarly attention to a more nuanced view of literary production and affirms the importance of magazines to literary development in nineteenth-century Canada.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between Finnish and non-Finnish by-names in the church registers of Nedertorneå in the nineteenth century. The investigation shows that the by-names are rather heterogeneous in character and a portion of them consists of elements from different languages. The by-names are divided into Finnish, non-Finnish and parental names, i.e. patronymics and metro-nymics. In order to study the development within the by-name stock in the rural communities of Nedertorneå and in the town of Haparanda, the numbers of Finnish and non-Finnish by-names and of parental names (including comibnations with these bynames), found within the population over the age of 20, are calculated at approximately 20-year intervals during the period 1825-1886. The investigation shows that the by-name stock in Nedertorneå is far more stable than in Haparanda. Individual changes of by-name from one selected year to the next are also taken up, together with certain causes and their possible effect on the changes in the byname stock for the population. By-name changes seem to be more common in Nedertorneå than in Haparanda. However, no real tendencies towards Swedicized forms emerge before the 1890s and the name changes tend rather to have social causes. Finally, an attempt is made to relate the number of Finnish and non-Finnish bynames (including combinations with these by-names) to certain population figures for men and women for the different selected years. The instability in Haparanda's byname stock depends on the faster population growth in the town. The value of various church registers for investigating by-names in the nineteenth century is also discussed. / digitalisering@umu

The Lacy Hotel was a part of the "Great Locomotive Chase", a significant historical event in Kennesaw, Georgia during the Civil War (AD 1861-1864), yet little is known of this site. The Lacy Hotel was a boardinghouse that operated for roughly six years until General William Tecumseh Sherman burned it in 1864. This research utilizes historical records along with archaeological fieldwork in order to provide a more detailed analysis of daily life within the Lacy household. Dominant ideologies influence the roles of women concerning their activities and choices of consumption within the household. Although the results show that the boardinghouse is not a typical household, the social dynamics and consumption are still constrained by the culture and ideology of the time period. In conclusion, this research offers a case study about the role of women on the eve of turmoil and contends that the boardinghouse is emblematic of broader changes within the rural South during the 19th century.

This thesis examines press framing of immigrant issues and epidemics in newspapers and periodicals, 1891 to 1893. During these years, immigration policies became more restrictive because of the Immigration Act of 1891, the opening of Ellis Island in 1892, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892, the New York City epidemics of 1892, the National Quarantine Act of 1893, and the nativist movement. Framing theory guided the following research questions: 1) How did articles in newspapers and periodicals frame immigrants and immigration issues in the context of epidemics from 1891 and 1893?; and 2) How did the press framing of immigrants and immigration issues in the context of epidemics from 1891 to 1893 reflect themes of nativism? This thesis contributes to the discourse about immigration because many Americans historically have learned about immigration issues from the press.

This thesis discusses discourses surrounding the urban prostitute in mid-nineteenth century Paris and London. During the nineteenth century, sexuality became a topic of increasing concern and an outpouring of literature on deviant sexuality and ways to regulate it appeared from moral commentators, social scientists, and physicians. Different historical moments saw the prevalence of different approaches taken, whether it was through the moral counsel of religious pamphlets, or through the methodological approach implemented by medical journals and social surveys. My study will trace the evolution of sexual discourses on prostitutes as well as how their authors influenced attempts to regulate these women. My primary argument is that sexual discourses of this period were organized around definitions of normality and deviancy, the understanding of what constitutes respectability, and the desire to control marginalized populations. The discursive literature on prostitution that appeared during this century thus provides an indication of how power manifests itself in unseen ways and how the power of words can shape definitions of sexuality and deviance.

This dissertation explores the nature of marriage, violence, and region in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Based on more than 1,500 divorce cases, it argues that marriages were often characterized by open enmity, not companionate harmony. Violence and cruelty between spouses generally erupted as part of ongoing struggles for power in the household and in the relationship. As the only book-length study of marital cruelty for a southern state, this work challenges much of what historians have argued about the relationship between violence and region. It finds that, contrary to what is generally understood about the American South, marriages in Texas and Virginia were not exceptionally violent, at least not compared with those in Wisconsin. The presence of marital cruelty was most pronounced in environments suffering from gender role instabilities. As the statement above shows, this dissertation takes seriously the use of gender as a lens through which to analyze marital discord. Correcting the historical perception of women’s violence as trivial, rare, or defensive, this dissertation contends that antebellum wives were indeed capable, and often willing, to commit a wide variety of cruelties within marriage. This work presents the first multi-state comparative study of marital discord focusing on the United States. Exploring nineteenth-century marriages from “way, way below” allows us to move beyond ideals to examine the messiness and unhappiness that characterized many conjugal unions.

Virginia Woolf once remarked that, “[t]here is no reason to think that the form of the epic ... suit[s] a woman any more than the [masculine] sentence” (Woolf 84). This thesis represents an attempt to explore what the epic genre, as imagined and written by women, might look like in regards to the verse of fellow women poets Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Despite the persistent critical misconception that women’s poetry of the Romantic and Victorian periods is comprised mainly of light, lyric verse and tends to lack that “great effort” – for example, the epic poem – which often appears in the work of their male contemporaries, this thesis will argue conversely that Hemans and Barrett Browning do assume certain aspects of traditional epic poetry – a genre “almost coterminous” with masculinity (Schweizer 1) – in their work, while also managing to transform the genre in order that their work might successfully embody a more feminine perspective. The first chapter of the thesis examines the ways in which these two women poets are able to bridge the private and public spheres by transforming the quintessential role of the female poet as record-keeper into that of the poet as prophet and visionary in their political poetry. The two following chapters will highlight the ways in which both Hemans and Barrett Browning remodel the epic form in order to draw attention to the female voice (chapter two) and to examine new and unconventional prototypes of female heroinism, for example the pioneering female artist and the militant mother (chapter three). With strong ties to a masculine tradition of epic, yet incorporating aspects of femininity hitherto foreign – perhaps even inimical – to the traditional conception of the genre, female epic, while admittedly something of a hybrid, arguably represents a distinctive genre in its own right and one which certainly merits more critical attention in the future.

This thesis involves both editorial practice and literary analysis. In order to establish an editorial framework for the electronic scholarly edition of Dr. Ralph Barnes Grindrod's pamphlet <em>Slaves of the Needle</em>, I examine current issues in electronic textual editing. In the electronic scholarly edition, approximately twelve of the pamphlet's thirty-five pages are transcribed and encoded using TEI-based code. The second aspect of my master's thesis concerns the depiction of seamstresses in nineteenth-century British literature. <em>Slaves of the Needle</em> provides a non-fiction counterpart to the fictional seamstresses of mid-nineteenth-century literature. Using <em>Slaves of the Needle</em> as a basis for evaluating the accuracy of mid-nineteenth-century characterizations of seamstresses, I show that authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ernest Jones, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna were familiar with the working conditions of seamstresses. By conducting a close reading of certain representations of the seamstress in both fiction and non-fiction, I develop a theory of why the depiction of some aspects of the seamstress story are more accurate than others.

Virginia Woolf once remarked that, “[t]here is no reason to think that the form of the epic ... suit[s] a woman any more than the [masculine] sentence” (Woolf 84). This thesis represents an attempt to explore what the epic genre, as imagined and written by women, might look like in regards to the verse of fellow women poets Felicia Hemans and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Despite the persistent critical misconception that women’s poetry of the Romantic and Victorian periods is comprised mainly of light, lyric verse and tends to lack that “great effort” – for example, the epic poem – which often appears in the work of their male contemporaries, this thesis will argue conversely that Hemans and Barrett Browning do assume certain aspects of traditional epic poetry – a genre “almost coterminous” with masculinity (Schweizer 1) – in their work, while also managing to transform the genre in order that their work might successfully embody a more feminine perspective. The first chapter of the thesis examines the ways in which these two women poets are able to bridge the private and public spheres by transforming the quintessential role of the female poet as record-keeper into that of the poet as prophet and visionary in their political poetry. The two following chapters will highlight the ways in which both Hemans and Barrett Browning remodel the epic form in order to draw attention to the female voice (chapter two) and to examine new and unconventional prototypes of female heroinism, for example the pioneering female artist and the militant mother (chapter three). With strong ties to a masculine tradition of epic, yet incorporating aspects of femininity hitherto foreign – perhaps even inimical – to the traditional conception of the genre, female epic, while admittedly something of a hybrid, arguably represents a distinctive genre in its own right and one which certainly merits more critical attention in the future.