My dissertation charts the transatlantic nineteenth-century novel's subtle revisions to the traditional marriage plot, in terms of both narrative and form, identifying a gradual shift in the way marriage was fictionalized. I argue that incremental revisions to the marriage plot reconstruct positive representations of female marital experience into negative depictions that transform marriage into a form of institutionalization that leads to psychological and bodily trauma. I reveal the development of a collective trauma narrative that underscores the nineteenth-century woman's experience living inside society's oppressive marital culture. The novel serves as the body of cultural work that both represents and shapes women's marital experiences inside a society that legally forced them to surrender their identity, person, and property to their husband, as well as socially holding them to a much higher standard of propriety and obedience. In specific chapters, I create transatlantic pairings that trace the novel's troubled efforts to free itself and its heroines from the constraints of the marriage plot which reflect women's inability to do so in real life.

<p>This dissertation argues that the Victorian novel created a sensory self much like that articulated by Victorian physiological psychology: a multi-centered and process-oriented body that reacts to situations and stimuli as they arise by mobilizing appropriate cognitive and nervous functions. By reading Victorian fiction alongside psychology as it was developing into a distinct scientific discipline (during the 1840s-70s), this project addresses broader interdisciplinary questions about how the interaction between literature and science in the nineteenth century provided new ways of understanding human consciousness. I show that narrative engagements with psychology in the novel form made it possible for readers to understand the modern person as productively rather than pathologically heterogeneous. To accomplish this, fiction offered author and reader an experimental form for engaging ideas posed and debated concurrently in science. </p><p>The novels I read - by authors including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot - emerge as narrative testing grounds for constructions of subjectivity and personhood unavailable to scientific discourse. I attribute the novel's ability to create a sensory self to its formal tactics, from composites of multiple first-person accounts to strange juxtapositions of omniscience and subjectivity, from gaps and shifts in narrative to the extended form-in-process of the serial novel. My side-by-side readings of scientific and literary experiments make it clear that fiction is where we find the most innovative methods of investigation into embodied forms of human experience.</p> / Dissertation

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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.

While literary scholars have written extensively about sensibility in the past two decades, most of the studies have treated either the history of sensibility itself or how it interacted with a particular aspect of English culture and literature, such as sexuality or politics. My project instead examines how a single author, Maria Edgeworth, used sensibility in her writing over the course of her career. I analyze the use of sensibility in three of her novels: Belinda (1801), her first full-length novel; The Absentee (1812), her influential Irish national tale, written at the height of her popularity in the middle years of her career; and Helen (1834), her last novel. This analysis illustrates the changing attitude of both Edgeworth and English society to sensibility and its representations in literature. In Belinda, Edgeworth uses sensibility to demonstrate the virtue and superiority of the characters who possess it, and also to rehabilitate the concept itself. She differentiates between mere affectation and true sensibility by creating both positive and negative examples of sensibility in Belinda – characters clearly possess true sensibility, and those who only pretend to it. In The Absentee, Edgeworth adheres much more closely to the conventions of sentimental fiction than she had in her previous society novels. In my discussion of The Absentee, I demonstrate how Edgeworth uses the conventions of sentiment both to make Irish culture accessible to her English audience and to justify the Irish estate system which put Anglo-Irish landowners in a position of authority over native Irish tenants. My final section focuses on Edgeworth's last novel, Helen, which marks a return to the genre of the society novel with which she began her career. While Edgeworth still uses sensibility as a sign of virtue in Helen, she is also much more interested than previously in the interplay between education and inborn qualities of personality – the very qualities whose existence she was so skeptical of in her education manual, Practical Education, published two years before she began her career as a fiction writer.

This thesis examines the novels of George Sand (1804-1876) and analyses representative examples from her entire œuvre. Its overall aim is to re-evaluate Sand’s standing as a writer of intellectual interest and importance by demonstrating that she is engaging with a cultural and intellectual phenomenon of particular relevance to the nineteenth century: the link between different ways of seeing and knowledge or understanding, which I term ‘insight’. The visual dimension of Sand’s novels has so far been overlooked or reduced to a rose-tinted view of the world, and my study is the first to examine vision in her work. I argue that Sand demonstrates a continuous commitment to ways of engaging with the world in visual terms, incorporating conceptual seeing, prophetic vision, as well as physical eyesight. Contesting the prevailing critical view of Sand’s œuvre as one which declines into blandness and irrelevance after the 1850s, this thesis uncovers a model of expansion in her writing, as she moves from her focus on the personal in her early novels, privileging internal vision, to wider social concerns in her middle period in which she aims to reconfigure reality, to her final period in which she advocates the physical observation of the natural world. Rejecting the perception of Sand as a writer of sentiment at the expense of thought, this study argues that her writing constitutes a continuous quest for understanding, both of the physical world and the more abstract, eternal ‘vérité’. I show that Sand transcends binary divisions between science and art, the detail and the whole, the material and the abstract, and that she ultimately promotes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the world. This also enables me to reassess Sand’s poetics by arguing that her rejection of the mimetic model is founded on her conception of the world as multiple and constantly evolving.

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a ficção de Camilo Castelo Branco e Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, escritores muito populares em Portugal e no Brasil, respectivamente, entre as décadas de 1840 e 1880, período em que publicaram suas expressivas produções, que englobam romances, contos, poemas e peças de teatro, que foram, de certa forma, obliteradas pela historiografia literária ao longo do século XX. A fim de abranger uma parte significativa de suas produções ficcionais, foram selecionadas obras que, num primeiro momento, poderiam representar os principais subgêneros do romance oitocentista: os romances sentimentais Amor de Perdição e A Moreninha; as narrativas de viagem Vinte Horas de Liteira e A Carteira de Meu Tio; as narrativas fantásticas O Esqueleto e A Luneta Mágica; os romances históricos O Demônio do Ouro e As Mulheres de Mantilha; e os romances (pré-) naturalistas O Senhor Ministro e As Vítimas-Algozes. A partir da leitura destas obras, é possível depreender aspectos convergentes entre os autores, como a subversão de algumas convenções romanescas, a quebra de expectativas de leitura e o desvio das temáticas recorrentes e dos procedimentos narrativos mais usuais no século XIX. Sendo assim, o estudo parte da hipótese de que, por terem sido protagonistas da ascensão do romance em Portugal e no Brasil, periferias do capitalismo na expressão utilizada por Roberto Schwarz , países que, além disso, partilhavam a mesma língua e um fundo cultural comum, esses escritores compartilharam contextos socioculturais, de certa forma, similares. Se por um lado, a fim de atender ao mercado consumidor, precisavam manter os laços com a literatura em voga, por outro procuravam distanciar-se dela, num movimento de adesão e repulsa aos modelos romanescos. / The objective of this work is to analyze the fiction of Camilo Castelo Branco and Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, very popular writers in Portugal and Brazil, respectively, among the 1840s and 1880s, a period in which they published their expressive productions, which include novels, short stories, poems and plays, that were somehow obliterated by literary historiography throughout the 20th century. In order to cover a significant part of their fictional productions, works that, at first, could represent the major subgenres of 19th century novel were selected: the sentimental novels Amor de Perdição and A Moreninha; the travel narratives Vinte Horas de Liteira and A Carteira de Meu Tio; the fantastic narratives O Esqueleto and A Luneta Mágica; the historical novels O Demônio do Ouro and As Mulheres de Mantilha; and the (pre-)naturalist novels O Senhor Ministro and As Vítimas-Algozes. From the reading of these works, it is possible to deduce converging aspects between these authors, as the subversion of novelistic conventions, the break of reading expectations and the deviation from the recurring thematic and the narrative procedures most commonly used in the 19th century. Thus, the study starts from the hypothesis that, because they were protagonists of the rise of the novel in Portugal and Brazil, peripheries of capitalism in the expression used by Roberto Schwarz , countries that also shared the same language and a common cultural background, these writers shared, in some ways, similar socio-cultural contexts. On one hand, in order to serve the consumer market, they needed to maintain ties with the literature in vogue, on the other they sought to distance themselves from it, in a movement of attraction and repulsion by the novelistic models.

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.

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a ficção de Camilo Castelo Branco e Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, escritores muito populares em Portugal e no Brasil, respectivamente, entre as décadas de 1840 e 1880, período em que publicaram suas expressivas produções, que englobam romances, contos, poemas e peças de teatro, que foram, de certa forma, obliteradas pela historiografia literária ao longo do século XX. A fim de abranger uma parte significativa de suas produções ficcionais, foram selecionadas obras que, num primeiro momento, poderiam representar os principais subgêneros do romance oitocentista: os romances sentimentais Amor de Perdição e A Moreninha; as narrativas de viagem Vinte Horas de Liteira e A Carteira de Meu Tio; as narrativas fantásticas O Esqueleto e A Luneta Mágica; os romances históricos O Demônio do Ouro e As Mulheres de Mantilha; e os romances (pré-) naturalistas O Senhor Ministro e As Vítimas-Algozes. A partir da leitura destas obras, é possível depreender aspectos convergentes entre os autores, como a subversão de algumas convenções romanescas, a quebra de expectativas de leitura e o desvio das temáticas recorrentes e dos procedimentos narrativos mais usuais no século XIX. Sendo assim, o estudo parte da hipótese de que, por terem sido protagonistas da ascensão do romance em Portugal e no Brasil, periferias do capitalismo na expressão utilizada por Roberto Schwarz , países que, além disso, partilhavam a mesma língua e um fundo cultural comum, esses escritores compartilharam contextos socioculturais, de certa forma, similares. Se por um lado, a fim de atender ao mercado consumidor, precisavam manter os laços com a literatura em voga, por outro procuravam distanciar-se dela, num movimento de adesão e repulsa aos modelos romanescos. / The objective of this work is to analyze the fiction of Camilo Castelo Branco and Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, very popular writers in Portugal and Brazil, respectively, among the 1840s and 1880s, a period in which they published their expressive productions, which include novels, short stories, poems and plays, that were somehow obliterated by literary historiography throughout the 20th century. In order to cover a significant part of their fictional productions, works that, at first, could represent the major subgenres of 19th century novel were selected: the sentimental novels Amor de Perdição and A Moreninha; the travel narratives Vinte Horas de Liteira and A Carteira de Meu Tio; the fantastic narratives O Esqueleto and A Luneta Mágica; the historical novels O Demônio do Ouro and As Mulheres de Mantilha; and the (pre-)naturalist novels O Senhor Ministro and As Vítimas-Algozes. From the reading of these works, it is possible to deduce converging aspects between these authors, as the subversion of novelistic conventions, the break of reading expectations and the deviation from the recurring thematic and the narrative procedures most commonly used in the 19th century. Thus, the study starts from the hypothesis that, because they were protagonists of the rise of the novel in Portugal and Brazil, peripheries of capitalism in the expression used by Roberto Schwarz , countries that also shared the same language and a common cultural background, these writers shared, in some ways, similar socio-cultural contexts. On one hand, in order to serve the consumer market, they needed to maintain ties with the literature in vogue, on the other they sought to distance themselves from it, in a movement of attraction and repulsion by the novelistic models.