<p>In this dissertation I argue that the movement of panoramic literature under the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and its influence on the nineteenth-century urban novel must be re-imagined in the context of the proto-sociological movement of positivism. Existing criticism on panoramic literature typically views this movement as emerging from early-nineteenth-century urban upheaval. I focus here instead on early pre-sociological theory. Published concurrently with these panoramic texts whose popularity peaked in the early 1840s, the progressive theories of Auguste Comte (collected, in particular, in his Cours de philosophie positive from 1830-1842) promulgated a scientific, observational approach to the study of society. Throughout the five chapters of this project, I will posit that authors of urban novels, including Balzac, Paul de Kock and Zola, grappled with these theories actively, if implicitly at times, and that we can see this engagement most clearly in the passages employing the typological descriptions known as the tableaux de Paris, so central to panoramic literature.</p> / Dissertation

Focusing on the poetry published in the Cornhill, Once a Week, Good Words, and the Argosy, four of the most prominent illustrated literary periodicals of the 1860s, this dissertation contends that the popular poetry found in mid-century periodicals is not only essential to our understanding of the periodical press, but also that the periodical is integral to our understanding of Victorian poetics. Each chapter examines the poetry and poetics of a single periodical title and addresses several key issues related to the publication of poetry in the periodical press: the power and influence of illustrated poetry in contemporary visual culture, the intended audience of the literary periodical and the issues that raises for editors and poets, the sociology and networks of print, and the ways in which periodical poetry participated in contemporary debates about prosody. This dissertation thus offers an alternative history of Victorian poetry that asserts the centrality of the periodical and popular poetry. In other words, it argues that without a consideration of the vital importance of periodical poetry, Victorian poetry studies is quite simply anachronistic. / Graduate / 2015-04-22 / 0593 / 0391 / caley.ehnes@gmail.com

<p>"Utopian (Post)Colonies: Rewriting Race and Gender after the Haitian Revolution" examines the works of French women authors writing from just before the first abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1794 to those writing at the time of the second and final abolition in 1848. These women, each in different and evolving ways, challenged notions of race and gender that excluded French women from political debate and participation and kept Africans and their descendants in subordinated social positions. However, even after Haitian independence, French authors continued to understand the colony as a social and political enterprise to be remodeled and ameliorated rather than abandoned. These authors' rewritings of race and gender thus played a crucial role in a more general French engagement with the idea of the colony-as-utopia.</p><p>In 1791, at the very beginning of the Haitian Revolution--which was also the beginning of France's unexpected first postcolonial moment--colonial reform, abolitionism, and women's political participation were all passionately debated issues among French revolutionaries. These debates faded in intensity as the nineteenth century progressed. Slavery, though officially abolished in 1794, was reestablished in 1802. Divorce was again made illegal in 1816. Even in 1848, when all men were granted suffrage and slavery was definitively abolished in the French colonies, women were not given the right to vote. Yet, throughout the early nineteenth century, the notion of the colony-as-utopia continued to offer a space for French women authors to imagine gender equality and women's empowerment through their attempts to alter racial hierarchy.</p><p>My first chapter examines the development of abolitionism through theatre in the writings of Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793). At a time when performance was understood to have influential moral implications, de Gouges imagines a utopian colony to be possible through the power of performance to produce moral action. In my second chapter, I analyze how, during the slowly re-emerging abolitionist movements of the 1820s, Sophie Doin (1800-1846) and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) expose the individual emotional suffering of slaves in an effort to make the violence of enslavement visible. In the process of making this violence visible, Doin's <italic>La Famille noire suivie de trois nouvelles blanches et noires</italic> (1825-6) and Desbordes-Valmore's <italic>Sarah</italic> (1821), in contrast with Claire de Duras's <italic>Ourika</italic> (1823), mobilize respect for motherhood to bolster their abolitionist claims. My third chapter analyzes the colonial novels of Madame Charles Reybaud (1802-1870), a forgotten but once-popular novelist, who uses the idea of the colony to develop a feminist re-definition of marriage involving the emancipation of males from their own categories of enslavement. Influenced by the Saint-Simonian thought of the July Monarchy, Reybaud imagines a utopian colony organized by a feminized French humanitarianism that attempts to separate French racial identity from that of the "Creole" colonizer. My final chapter compares this French desire to yoke utopia to colony with nineteenth-century Haitian attempts to reveal the opposite synergy: the inseparability of the institutions of slavery and colonialism. Haiti's first novel, <italic>Stella</italic> (1859) by Émeric Bergeaud (1818-1858), opposes racial hierarchy and defends Haitian independence in the face of harsh discrimination from an international community whose economies still depended on colonialism and slavery. In contrast with the previous texts studied in this dissertation, <italic>Stella</italic> imagines Haiti to have the potential to become a utopian postcolony, a nation freed from the constraints of colonialism in such a way as to serve as a model for a future in which racial hierarchy has no power.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis contextualises Austen’s novel within the issues of political economy contemporary to its publication, especially those associated with an emerging credit economy. It argues that the problem of determining the value of character is a central one and the source of much of the novel’s irony: the novel sets the narrator’s model of value against the models through which the various other characters understand value. Through language that represents character as the currency and as a commodity in a credit economy, Mansfield Park engages with the problems of value raised by an economy in flux. Austen uses this slipperiness of language to represent social interactions as a series of intricate economic transactions, revealing the irony of social exchanges and the expectations they engender, both within and without the context of courtship. / Graduate

The existing literature on philanthropic effort during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has taken a number of different approaches to the subject. These include general works charting the development of the charitable sector, the exploration of voluntary organisations as a subsidiary topic to broader themes and regional studies adopting a range of perspectives. Most research in this latter category has been conducted on large towns and cities that generally have copious amounts of source material. In contrast, lesser provincial towns have received relatively little scholarly attention, despite the more manageable nature of their documentation. The aim of this thesis is to explore the growth of charitable organisations within Macclesfield, an East Cheshire industrial town that was dominated by the silk industry. This study concentrates on the period from 1750 to 1900, when the silk industry was dominant within the town and philanthropic activity was at its height. The town?s silk manufacturers were renowned for their charitable work and thus this research focuses on the extent to which this occupational group was critical in the development of Macclesfield?s voluntary institutions, the motives that lay behind their contributions, and their achievements. In order to see whether their involvement was typical of other businessmen, comparisons are drawn throughout with the charitable activities of contemporary entrepreneurs in a variety of urban settings.This study investigates the silk manufacturers? participation in Macclesfield?s voluntary institutions in the fields of religion, education, public services and public amenities, together with any additional charitable acts. The evidence from all these areas suggests that in most cases the silk manufacturers were heavily involved in funding and managing these institutions. Their obvious motives reflected altruistic, religious and educational beliefs, but there were also a variety of other concerns that could have been contributory in determining their support for particular institutions. The primary achievement of Macclesfield?s voluntary sector was to provide a network of services that, in conjunction with later state initiatives, improved living standards for inhabitants by the end of the nineteenth century.This thesis gives an insight into the development of charitable institutions in a medium sized industrial town and demonstrates how one group of businessmen were able to dominate this field. Many silk manufacturers were generous in their support of charitable causes in Macclesfield, but the scale of their support did not match that of some other notable philanthropic families, such as the Crossleys of Halifax. The charitable work of the silk manufacturers appeared to be broadly similar to that of entrepreneurs in other small and medium sized industrial towns where they could form a dominant occupational group in public life. In larger towns and cities, this strong manufacturer influence was less evident and a greater range of other people contributed significantly to philanthropic institutions. This type of approach supplements the existing material on philanthropic effort during the long nineteenth century and overlaps a number of related subject areas, such as urban ?lite activity and the growth of the welfare state.

This thesis attempts to study the architectural and the social changes brought by the multi-story apartment buildings which emerged in the nineteenth century istanbul, in especially Galata-Pera region. A brief introduction to the modernization attempts of the Ottoman Empire, and also to the traditional dwellings and daily life of the Ottoman households before the nineteenth century constitute the first sections of the study. The architectural and the urban developments such as the new building regulations, architectural styles and building types as well as the social and cultural changes that brought new cultural habits and life styles in the modernization period, are also studied in this context. A group of apartments with different plans, size and locations are chosen as a sample so as to point out and discuss the layout of the constituent spaces like the halls, foyers, corridors, substantial rooms and wet spaces. Respectively the changing meaning of the &lsquo / house&rsquo / and daily life are also pointed out. In relation to these, facade organizations, plans, functional and spatial features and the privacy of spaces in the sample apartment buildings and their flats, and the daily life and the privacy of the apartment residents are studied and discussed in comparison to the traditional Ottoman house and the contemporary Parisian apartments to present a comparative perspective. Consequently, &lsquo / similarities&rsquo / , &lsquo / differences&rsquo / , and &lsquo / innovations&rsquo / concerning the nineteenth century istanbul apartments are discussed and listed at the end of the thesis. Several tables which are designed to contribute to the arguments presented in the study are also added to the thesis.

Connections between George Eliot and Immanuel Kant have been, for the most part, neglected. However, we have good reason to believe that Eliot not only read Kant (as well as many who were directly influenced by Kant), but substantially agreed with him on critical and moral issues. This thesis investigates one of the issues on which Kant and Eliot were most closely aligned, the need for duty in morality. Both the English novelist and the German philosopher upheld a vision of duty that could command absolutely while remaining consonant with human freedom and grounding a sense of moral dignity. This vision runs throughout the works of both writers, but is first developed and takes on a particular urgency in the works examined in this thesis, ranging from some of their early publications to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Eliot’s Romola. The first chapter discusses duty in the wider context of debates about Divine Command Morality, in which the good is defined by its accord with the will or command of God, and which both Kant and Eliot resisted in formulating their own moral visions (while maintaining the language of law and command). This chapter also discusses evidence we have for Eliot’s familiarity with Kant and establishes critical context for this paper. The second chapter discusses religion – in particular, religious enthusiasm – as a necessary background for duty, which exists in the absence of theological certitude, even as it seeks to preserve something of religion’s capacity to command and its popular scope. Kant’s path to the first Critique led through works foundational for, but also sometimes at odds with the priorities and conclusions of critical science, and Eliot’s first novel was preceded by a critical career that paints a quite different picture of religion than the sympathetic portrait of Dinah Morris. The third chapter deals with three dimensions of duty in Kant and Eliot, autonomy, reflection and respect, primarily through Kant’s second Critique and The Mill on the Floss. In the conclusion, I turn to Romola to illustrate the conflict and indeterminative power inherent in this conception of duty.

An analysis of the correspondence between Charles Lyell and Gideon Mantell from 1821 to 1852, in conjunction with other manuscript material, highlights the contrasting backgrounds and geological careers of the two men. It is also characterised by two underlying themes: the nature and timing of their geological work; and the influence of various social factors on their career plans and desire to achieve high social and scientific status. In turn, these points raise several wider issues and inter-related questions concerning the following aspects of English geology in the first half of the nineteenth century. When, why and how did an elite group of geologists emerge in England during this period? Who were its members and what were their characteristics in common? What was the nature and scope of the geological work carried out by the identified elite? In what way did it differ from Mantell's? What social and other barriers did Mantell encounter in his search for scientific and social status? What were the critical factors? In this thesis these issues are examined on a decade-by-decade basis, in three main chapters, as a prelude to examining the central question of why Mantell, unlike Lyell, did not achieve the status of an elite geologist. First, an elite group of English geologists is identified through a series of prosopographic and 'screening' analyses of all members of council of the Geological Society of London (GSL). Geologists who did not meet the prescribed criteria are taken into account. Thirteen geologists are identified in the penultimate and final stages of screening over the four decades. Mantell was the only provincial identified, but he did not attain a position in the final list, which consisted exclusively of a distinctive group of 'gentleman-specialists'. Second, the concept of a geological 'domain' is introduced to analyse the nature and scope of the geological work carried out by the identified group. A critical finding is that all members identified in the final 'screening' list established a 'domain' in one of four categories of the concept and were recognised as the leading authority or exponent of the domain they had fashioned. Finally, the impact and relative importance of specific social and other factors on the careers of Lyell and Mantell are examined. When the findings from each decade of the three chapters are brought together it is shown that by the end of the 1820s it was necessary for a future elite geologist to be so 'positioned' in terms of basic geological experience, location, income and available time that he was able to identify and subsequently fashion an appropriate geological 'domain'. 'Gentleman-specialists', such as Lyell, who were able to follow this strategy, constituted a clearly defined elite that dominated the GSL in the 1830s and 1840s. Mantell's failure to achieve elite geological status stemmed from the fact that he placed too much emphasis on fashioning his image and social status, rather than his scientific career. In doing so, he let the opportunity slip of establishing a major domain - British fossil reptiles - in the early 1830s.

This thesis seeks to examine the nineteenth-century art collections and architectural style of the original buildings at the University of Sydney in order to demonstrate ways in which visual material may be employed to shape public perception of an institution. I shall argue that the architectural style of the original university buildings was specifically chosen with particular aims which extended beyond the mere establishment of a tertiary institution for the colony. I will also argue that the style shaped the character of the institution, contributed to the maintenance of law and order in the colony, linked the colony more firmly than hitherto to the mother country and provided social benefits for the founders of the institution. The instant history and character thus imposed upon the institution was reinforced by the assembly of a portrait collection in emulation of other collections of portraits at leading institutions of the colony and the mother country, including the Oxbridge universities. Once the building proclaimed that the institution was comparable with the great universities of the world, the subjects of the portraits at the university could be placed in the class of founders of a great historical institution, thus at the same time enhancing the reputation of the institution and the individuals. The construction of an indentity through visual images was extended by the benefactions of Sir Charles Nicholson, the principal donor of works of art to the university in the nineteenth century. I argue that his intentions in relation to his collections were didactic but were also concerned with the entrenchment of the imperial hegemony over the colony, and again with the enhancement of his personal repuatation. This analysis shows how, by a complex of personal ambition and aspiration for the colony, the style of the buildings and the art collections formed were used to establish the colony as civilized and the new university as a bastion of English tradition.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 36-37).