Comfort—with its various connotations of physical ease, wealth, independence, and service—is an important concept to Jane Austen, who uses comfort in her novels to both affirm and challenge accepted women’s roles and status in her culture. In the late eighteenth century, new ideas of physical comfort emerged out of luxury along with a growing middle class, to become something both English people and foreigners identified with English culture. The perceived ability of the English to comfort well gave them a reason for national pride during a time of great anxieties about France’s cultural and military might, and Austen participates in her culture’s struggle to define itself against France. Austen’s “comfort” is the term she frequently associates with women, home, and Englishness in her works. Austen’s depiction of female protagonists engaged in the work of comforting solaces modern readers, who often long for the comfort, good manners, and leisure presented in the novels. Surveys of two sample groups, 139 members of the Jane Austen Society of North America and 40 members of the online Republic of Pemberley, elicit data confirming how current readers of Austen turn to her works for comfort during times of stress or depression. Although some readers describe using Austen’s novels as a form of escapism, others view their reading as instructive for dealing with human failings, for gaining perspective on personal difficulties, and for stimulating their intellects. Austen’s fiction grapples with disturbing possibilities, such as the liminal position of powerless single women at the mercy of the marriage market and fickle family wishes, as much as it provides comforting answers. Comforts (decent housing, love in marriage, social interaction) are such a powerful draw in Austen’s works because women’s discomfort is so visible, and for many, so likely. Thus, Austen’s comfort challenges as much as it reassures her audience.

The diverse voices of African American poets from the nineteenth century have yet to receive their due. The critical gap is regrettable, because the nineteenth-century phase of the African American poetic tradition, although sparser and less philosophically unified than some later phases, nevertheless constituted a true tradition, connecting writers to one another and to writers of the coming century. Nineteenth-century black poets laid the groundwork for their artistic descendants both stylistically (by “signifyin’” on the tropes of their contemporaries) and thematically (by interrogating Euroamerican claims to exclusive political and moral authority), while building communal sites for literary and political activity such as the black press, the book club, the abolitionist circuit, and the university. In order to adequately theorize the nineteenth-century African American poetic tradition, we need a new critical narrative that would contextualize nineteenth-century African American poetry by emphasizing its interactions with various currents of literary and political enterprise in America and abroad. This study will gesture towards some of the possible outlines of such a narrative, while also suggesting a new set of hermeneutics for apprehending the achievements of early black poets, urging an examination of the early black poetic tradition in terms of performativity. A critical emphasis on performativity is particularly well-suited to the explication of nineteenth-century African American poesis for several reasons. Firstly, because the poetry so often centers around acts of repetition and revision, the primary texts are vulnerable to being misunderstood as imitative. By insisting that poetry’s meaning is generated through relationships between poets, texts, and various readers, the performative emphasis helps to spotlight the competitive and revisionary nature of much black poetry. Secondly, when African American poems are read as performances, their political dimensions come into sharp relief. This study examines the performances, personas, and prophecies of George Moses Horton, Frances Harper, Joshua McCarter Simpson, and Albery Allson Whitman in order to generate a deepened critical understanding of nineteenth-century African American poesis. / text

This report explores the ideological motivations behind Charlotte Brontë's inclusion of and alterations to gothic conventions in Villette (1853). By building on an account of the recent critical conversation concerning the conservative Enlightenment force of the gothic, this report seeks to explain the political significance of a specific, nineteenth-century mutation in the genre: Lucy Snowe as an experiment in the bourgeois paradigm. Lucy Snowe's sophisticated consciousness of genre manifests in her minute attention to dress, but the persistence of her personal gothic history means that Villette enacts political tension between individualistic "self-fashioning" and historical determinism as clashing models for the origin of identity. / text

This thesis analyses women's contribution to the development of a progressive middle-class identity in the period 1830 to 1860. Using Leeds as a case study, it argues that the ideals of civic virtue, service and the 'civilising mission' lying at the heart of this identity played an important role in the lives of women as well as men. The study begins by summarising the historiographical debates over women and the middle class, and the importance of gender in the construction of the 'public sphere'. Chapter Two sets out the historical background within the town of Leeds itself, concentrating on the emergence of 'middle-class' institutions and identifying the particular groups who were the driving force behind them. The remaining chapters systematically explore the activities of middle-class women in the public life of their town, concentrating on the subjects of education, philanthropy, politics and civic culture. Chapter Three looks at the idealisation of women's social and public roles in educational literature, before considering women's relationship to educational and cultural institutions. Chapters Four and Five reconsider philanthropy as an arena in which class and gender identities were constructed and played out, and through which civic-minded women could find an outlet for reforming impulses. In particular, chapter five analyses the importance of women's committees in the creation of independent space for female initiatives, despite male attempts at containment. Chapter Six examines women's activities in local and national politics, analysing the key role of the press in the interpretation of female political activities. Chapter Seven looks at the way in which elite women were able to claim public space as part of the audience at public rituals and ceremonies, returning to the importance of press explanations of this participation through the use of chivalric metaphors which portrayed women as the guardians of civic virtue.

This thesis examines the witch imagery used during the nineteenth century in children’s literature, realist and gothic fiction, poetry and art, and by practitioners and critics of mesmerism, spiritualism and alternative spirituality. The thesis is based on close readings of nineteenth-century texts and detailed analysis of artwork, but also takes a long view of nineteenth-century witch imagery in relation to that of preceding and succeeding periods. I explore the means by which the image of the witch was introduced as an overt or covert figure into the work of nineteenth-century writers and artists during a period when the majority of literate people no longer believed in the existence of witchcraft; and I investigate the relationship between the metaphorical witch and the areas of social dissonance which she is used to symbolise. I demonstrate that the diversity of nineteenth-century witch imagery is very wide, but that there is a tendency for positive images to increase as the century progresses. Thereby the limited iconography of malevolent witches and powerless victims of witch-hunts, promulgated by seventeenth-century witch-hunters and eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers respectively, were joined by wise-women, fairy godmothers, sorceresses, and mythical immortals, all of whom were defined, directly or indirectly, as witches. Nonetheless I also reveal that every image of the witch I examine has a dark shadow, despite or because of the empathy between witch and creator which is evident in many of the works I have studied. In the Introduction I acknowledge the validity of theories put forward by historians regarding the influence of societal changes on the decline of witchcraft belief, but I argue that those changes also created the need for metaphorical witchery to address the anxieties created by those changes. I contend that the complexity of social change occurring during and prior to the nineteenth century resulted in an increase in the diversification of witch imagery. I argue that the use of diverse images in various cultural forms was facilitated by the growth of liberal individualism which allowed each writer or artist to articulate specific concerns through discrete images of the witch which were no longer coloured solely by the dictates of superstition or rationalism. I look at the peculiar ability of the witch as a symbolic outcast from society to view that society from an external perspective and to use the voice of the exile to say the unsayable. I also use definitions garnered from a wide spectrum of sources from cultural history to folklore and neo-paganism to justify my broad definition of the word ‘witch’. In Chapter One I explore children’s literature, on the assumption that images absorbed during childhood would influence both the conscious and unconscious witch imagery produced by the adult imagination. I find the templates for familiar imagery in collections of folklore and, primarily, in translations of ‘traditional’ fairy tales sanitised for the nursery by collectors such as Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. I then examine fantasies created for Victorian children by authors such as Mary de Morgan, William Makepeace Thackeray, George MacDonald and Charles Kingsley, where the image of witch and fairy godmother is conflated in fiction which elevates the didactic fairy tale to a level which in some cases is imbued with a neo-platonic religiosity, thereby transforming the witch into a powerful portal to the divine. In contrast the canonical novelists whose work I examine in Chapter Two generally project witch imagery obliquely onto foolish, misguided, doomed or defiant women whose witchery is both allusionary and illusionary. I begin with the work of Sir Walter Scott whose bad or sad witches touch his novels with the supernatural while he denies their magic. Scott’s witch imagery, like that of Perrault and Grimm, is reflected in the witches who represent women’s exclusion from autonomy, education and/or the literary establishment in the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Traditional fairy-tale imagery is particularly evident in Charles Dickens’ use of the witch to represent negative aspects in the development of society or the individual. In contrast Scott’s impulse to distance himself from the pre-urban world represented by his witches contrasts with Thomas Hardy’s mourning of the female earth spirits of Wessex, thereby linking fluctuating and evolving images of nature with images of the nineteenth-century witch. In Chapter Three I explore poetry and art through Romantic verse, Tennyson’s Camelot, Rossetti and Burne-Jones’ Pre-Raphaelite classicism, Rosamund Marriot Watson and Mary Coleridge’s shape-shifting, mirrored women, and Yeats’ Celtic Twilight: in doing so I find representations of the witch as the destructive seductress, the muse, the dark ‘other’ of the suppressed poet, the symbol of spellbinding amoral nature, and the embodiment of the Celtic soul. In the final chapter witch imagery is attached to actual practitioners of so-called ‘New Witchcraft’, yet they also become part of a story which seeks to equate neo/quasi science with the supernatural. I demonstrate a gender realignment of occult power as the submissive mesmerist’s tool evolves into the powerful mother/priestess. I note the interconnectedness of fiction and fact via the novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins and Edward Bulwer-Lytton; and identify the role of the campaigning godmother figure as a precursor of the radical feminist Wiccan. I believe that my thesis offers a uniquely comprehensive view of the use of metaphorical witch imagery in the nineteenth century.

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Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The major purpose of the research in this thesis is to add to the available knowledge on advanced violin playing of the Romantic Period by, firstly, investigating the historical and technical knowledge and, secondly, adding some of my own findings. The project consists of a thesis, five recordings of live performances by the candidate and a guide to those performances. The development of violin techniques in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the role of the instrument in expressing the musical ideals of the age were chosen to study because there is a general lack of literature on the subject written by players who have performed the music chosen by the researcher. Furthermore, studies of this literature have left some important questions unanswered. One such question concerned how the development of the violin allowed musicians to better express the music in that era. Another question is what kinds of techniques were developed and how they related to the expression of the music. The thesis includes a study of the historical background of the Romantic period, as well as instrument development in this period. Analyses are made of the music considering techniques only where they are new techniques which considers the expressive reasons lying behind the new styles of writing. Treatises, violin methods, as well as modern studies are examined and compared in order to determine the development of violin techniques specifically in the period. This study is an investigation of both the written literature and the experiences of playing Romantic violin pieces in five concert situations, conducted over a time span of four years. The first concert presented a programme of German composer Robert Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor Op. 105; with French composer Camille Saint-Saёns’ Havanaise Op. 83; and also Fritz Kreisler-‘Pugnani’s’ Praeludium und Allegro. The second concert presented a programme of Schubert’s Sonata in A major Op. 162 and Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 2 in D major Op. 94a. The third concert presented a programme of Brahms’ Sonata No. 3 in D minor Op. 108 with Tchaikovsky’s Three Pieces Op. 42. It also included Ravel’s Tzigane. The fourth concert programme presented Beethoven’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D major Op. 70, commonly called “The Ghost”. The fifth concert presented a programme of Brahms’ Sonata No. 1 in G major Op. 78 and also the Sonata No. 2 in A major Op. 100. In addition his Sonatensatz (Scherzo) in C minor was performed. For each of these concerts, the researcher made written reports detailing the reasons behind the choice of each piece, the place of the piece in the context of the research and an examination of the effectiveness of the concert recital programme. The reports included notes on the mastery of the different new violin techniques required to play the piece with an historic awareness. As evidence of this, each concert was recorded onto compact disc audio format. The reports were used as a basis for the accompanying Guide to Performance. This is a work of critical analysis and aims to give a record of the progress of the research through performance. It documents the gradual discovery of how the historical theory can be realised in practice and provides a rationale for the techniques and strategies adopted in the creative component. The appendices include lists of repertoire and composers of the period, a chart of significant events from the period relating to the violin, and a chart of some of the key genealogical relationships in violin pedagogy. The investigation of violin techniques of Romanticism produced a number of major results. One important finding suggests that there are solutions to the difficult technical passages, which require an understanding of the historical context and literary background. In summary, this research produced findings which are of significance to violin educators and advanced violin students.

Abstract This thesis is about the relationship between a body of nineteenth-century American literature and the science of thermodynamics that was emerging between the 1820s and 1870s, changing the way people thought about the physical universe and the possibilities and limitations that it presented for human action. Its basic premise is that thermodynamic energy, as it emerged in the nineteenth century as a quantifiable phenomenon, was not a self-revealing natural fact, but the “hybrid” product of a “cultural field” that included literature among other of its essential points of mediation. Through readings of works by Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Mark Twain, Robert Montgomery Bird and Thomas Josiah Dimsdale, it argues that literature throughout this period was very much occupied with questions and concerns that were reflected in the scientific and technological investigations that led to the creation of the laws of energy. Specifically, it argues that energy’s conservative and/or dissipative tendencies, which, besides representing objective descriptions of energetic behaviour, also reflected real possibilities and limitations for human action, were a major concern of writers at this time. Their work, it is argued, reveals humanly and historically meaningful aspects of what, in the laws of thermodynamics, would become ahistorical scientific facts, proving that literature and science, belonging to a greater “cultural field,” follow parallel lines of investigation indicative of larger cultural problematics.

This thesis undertakes an excursion into the network of science, art, and popular culture at the end of the 19th century to examine the interrelations between these various strands in relation to the emerging cinema and its so-called spiritual dimension. Instead of an ontology of the image, or a cultural (metaphorical) analysis of spirits, phantoms or spectres as immaterial manifestations, this thesis proposes an ontology of the spectators' perception through which the spiritual dimension, frequently associated with audio-visual media, should be sought within the perceptual processes of the mind. It takes the cinema spectators' experience into the centre of this investigation and argues for their active participation in and understanding of the cinema as philosophical dispositive from the very beginnings of its inception. It looks into the interconnections between the various constituencies that shaped the projecting image technologies and their reception at the time. In particular the context of a broader intellectual framework and concerns about time, movement, memory and consciousness, reveal a thickness and complexity especially in the interrelations of the oeuvres of Jules-Etienne Marey and Aby Warburg. Henri Bergson's system of thought, germane to these concerns, will be elaborated in detail and used to build an onto logical/anthropological model of the cinema spectator in order to suggest how the contradictory forces of the rational and the 'irrational' can help us understand the spiritual dimension of the emerging cinema. The cinema dispositifm this approach appears as a paradigm to exemplify the productivity of this nexus and provides a platform for further research into issues such as consciousness, precognition, intuition and psychic phenomena. The spectator in this anthropological/ontological discussion treated in a conceptual way and grounded in a historical context appears in a fuller dimensionality that allows us to accommodate the so-called spiritual dimension beyond the dichotomy of the material and immaterial, the body and the mind. This model of the cinema spectator that this thesis proposes can be defined as an embodied, immanent and above all actively participant agent, which can be extended into a wider discussion of the perception, uses and interpretations of technology.

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.