This doctoral thesis examines the role of animals in nineteenth-century science and Victorian Gothic fiction of the latter half of the century. It is interdisciplinary in its exploration of the interrelationship between science writings and literary prose and it seeks to place the Gothic animal body in its cultural and historical setting. This study is interested in the ways in which Gothic literature tests the limits of the human by using scientific ideas about disease, evolution, species confusion, and disability. In analysing the animal trope in Gothic scientific fiction, this thesis conceptualises the ways in which the Gothic mode functions in relation to, while setting itself apart from, contemporary scientific theories about humankind‘s place in the natural world. Chapter 1, 'Man‘s Best Fiend: Evolution, Rabies, and the Gothic Dog‘, focuses on the dog as an animal whose ability to carry and communicate deadly diseases to humans exemplified the breakdown of the animal-human boundary. I read late-nineteenth-century vampire and werewolf narratives as literary manifestations of social hysteria associated with dogs and rabies. In Chapter 2, 'Shaping Evolution: Amphibious Gothic in Edward Bulwer-Lytton‘s The Coming Race and William Hope Hodgson‘s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, I examine the role of the frog in Victorian science as the background to Gothic fiction‘s portrayal of the Gothic body as an amphibious being. The next chapter explores the spider‘s function in Victorian natural history as the background to its role as a protean and unstable Gothic trope in fiction. Chapter four, 'Geological Underworlds: Mythologizing the Beast in Victorian Palaeontology‘, looks at ways in which the dinosaur in science influenced the literary imaginations of Gothic writers Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker. Under the title "Monsters Manufactured!": Humanised Animals, Freak Culture, and the Victorian Gothic‘, the final chapter concludes the study with a discussion of freak culture, making key links between unusually-shaped people in society and human/animal hybrids in the Gothic fiction of H. G. Wells, Richard Marsh, and Wilkie Collins.

In this thesis I examine the evolving social and personal attitudes about marriage and love as depicted in George Eliot's Middlemarch by arguing that Eliot anticipates modern marriages by critiquing traditional Victorian marital values. For the purposes of this analysis, the applicable aspects of modern marriage are sexuality, shifting gender roles, and a dismissal of social class as the major factor in choosing a partner. In order to achieve this end, I apply close textual analysis as well as a New Historical approach to examine how Middlemarch is conditioned by its historical context.

The politics of Jane Austen’s novels have long been a topic of scholarly interest. Many scholars see Austen’s heroines as women embedded in the typical, conservative marriage plot while others see them as proto-feminist figures of intelligence and power. Her heroines have now become famous for their moral and intellectual lives, but many scholars argue that all of Austen’s heroines must be brought down through the correction of a superior male character in order to atone for their freedom of manner early in the novel and secure a suitable mate. In “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies this as “the Girl Being Taught a Lesson” tradition of Austen scholarship. In this thesis, I argue that the scene of the girl being taught a lesson is actually a cover for the more progressive correction that the heroine gives to her family, friends and, most importantly, her male counterpart. We see that these intelligent women do not need to be taught a lesson in order to correct flaws in their characters. On the contrary, these women correct themselves through careful self-analysis and self-correction and use their intelligence and knowledge to teach other characters. In my three chapters, I argue that Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Emma Woodhouse in Emma, and Anne Elliot in Persuasion act as moral centers in these Austen novels. We see particular emphasis on these women’s corrections of the male characters in Elizabeth’s continual correction of Mr. Darcy, particularly in her rebuff of his proposal, in Emma’s correcting Mr. Knightley’s opinions of Harriet Smith and in teaching him to respect her impressive intellect, and in Anne’s teaching Captain Wentworth to respect her decision to give him up and to acknowledge, once again, her superior sense, intellect and moral character. These women are not contained by marriage; instead, they teach their male counterparts before marriage and show that they will continue these lessons after their respective unions. I show that these three heroines teach and correct those around them, offering a new perspective on female intellectual work and its importance within marriage and in improving society, one character at a time. / Thesis / Master

Thesis advisor: Judith Wilt / This project argues that the concept of haunting pervaded Victorian society, imagination, and thought and reflected anxieties regarding destabilized conceptions of the self and the world. It spans the nineteenth century from Mary Shelley to Henry James in order to claim that the living can invite and employ haunting in ways useful to self discovery or recovery. Rather than view haunting as a primarily one-directional relationship in which the haunter imposes itself on the haunted, I suggest that haunting can be invoked by the haunted in order to integrate new perspectives, conceptions, information, and situations vital to advancing self-perception and understandings of the surrounding world. Consequently, this study introduces a term I call "hauntedness," which amounts to the state of feeling or being haunted. Through this word, I hope to confer greater agency to the notion of being haunted than the more passive, acted-upon "to be haunted" can sometimes convey. Haunted Mind and Matter employs concepts from Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and "Différance" to complicate the question of haunting and enter the critical debate about Victorian haunting in particular. The works of Derrida and critics like Julian Wolfreys, following Sigmund Freud, reveal haunting as not restricted to bonds with spectral ghosts; it exists in every person and discourse. Using the term "haunt" in a multifaceted, flexible manner can challenge notions of the self and what is human through biological, social, and other constructs. The introduction examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in my view an inverted ghost story, to exemplify this text's employment of the term "hauntedness." The project then explores uses of terms related to haunting in texts in which mental, historical, and social haunting are infused with strong gothic and Romantic imagery: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898). I claim that these works both reveal the powerful presence of haunting in Victorian thought and society and show characters generating productive, reverberating uses for the haunting they experience in order to progress into the future. Haunted Mind and Matter demonstrates what the lens of haunting can reveal about character and social context in fiction. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis advisor: Rosemarie Bodenheimer / By focusing on the predominance of semi-conscious and unconscious states in both nineteenth-century British literature and psychology, this dissertation outlines the recognizable and multi-faceted relation existing between literature and psychology. Besides their obvious prevalence in sensation novels later in the period, these states, which I call ecstatic states, appeared in many of the most prominent, canonical novels of the nineteenth century. Prominent Victorian psychologists, such as Robert MacNish, John Abercrombie, James Cowles Prichard, and Forbes Winslow among others, connected ecstatic states, including fiction reading, to insanity, since these states exhibited an underlying component of self-loss in which the boundaries of the conscious self--time, will, and identity--dissolved. They were a troubling, yet common phenomenon of the mind that preoccupied the entire spectrum of middle class Victorian intellectual life--businessmen, novelists, literary critics, and psychologists--and these states are still fascinating neuroscientists today. This study shows how the Victorian medical practice of moral management sought to control these states by calling for the regulation and often the confinement of the imagination. What began as a method used solely in the insane asylum came to undergird much of Victorian life, including the many hostile reactions to the addictive and class-leveling powers of the novel. My dissertation emphasizes how certain Victorian novelists not only took up the role of psychologists themselves but also resisted and revised accepted psychology within their novels. Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot reacted in distinctive ways against the oppressive tenets of moral management. My readings of the novels Jane Eyre, Villette, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, The Mill on the Floss, and Romola show how it is the unrelenting regulation of the imagination that creates the various forms of mania and becomes ultimately devastating to the self. For these novelists, the dismantling of conscious thought and will, so alarming to the advocates of moral management, formed the crux of personal growth, moral choice, and ethical responsiveness. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This dissertation uses the concept of erotic conduct to rethink theatre’s role in Victorian society and its influence on the novel more specifically. Though uncommon today, the term “conduct” was widely used by Victorian commentators seeking to identify what facets of erotic experience were most important to social life and the formation of individual character. Instead of parsing the pathologies of desire, as Michel Foucault would lead us to expect, commentators directed their attention to volitional—and often habitual—behaviors that took pleasing erotic sensations as their primary end. Such conduct transpired in all spaces of everyday life, but this project turns to a diverse set of archival sources to make the case that it was conduct at the theatre that held the greatest fascination. A mass culture of an exceptional magnitude, situated in discrete physical spaces, the Victorian commercial theatre provided ample opportunities for both fleeting and enduring encounters between people who weren’t married or even necessarily of the opposite sex. This dissertation shows how new varieties of sexual character emerged at the theatre, where they were either tacitly permitted or flamboyantly indulged: the imperious actress; the ardent female spectator; the cruising sodomite; and the female dandy. Drawing on a breadth of archival research, "Eccentric Conduct" makes the case that just as the theatre affected the erotic habits of many Victorians, so did it influence the storytelling habits of many Victorian novels. Explicit depictions of performers and theatergoing have led many critics to characterize the Victorian novel as anti-theatrical, eschewing the fleshly and meretricious matter of live performance in favor of representing the superior qualities of privacy, domesticity and moral continence associated with the bourgeois home. This project counters this view by uncovering the subtler yet more pervasive influence theatre had on the characters, vocabulary, images and narrative devices of realist fiction. Novelists most often deployed theatrically-derived storytelling habits when seeking to represent pleasures inconsistent with the institution of patriarchal marriage. Instead of imitating the disciplinary conduct of the police or patriarch, to which the novel is often compared, novels by Eliot and Hardy sought to convey and thus promote the pleasures they also represented. In order to make theatre’s effect on the metalanguage of Victorian fiction intelligible, I reconstruct the conduct to which novelists elude by juxtaposing artifacts such as theatergoing diaries, scrapbooks, trial records and cabinet photographs alongside the “actress novel” genre, Middlemarch, Teleny, The Heavenly Twins, and Jude the Obscure.

The Victorian publishing industry has been frequently analysed, debated and discussed within the fields of book history, publishing history, media studies and literary studies, yet there is a gap within academic business research on the publishing industry from the approach of organisational studies, in particular from the perspective of new institutionalism. This research examines how the business practices of organisations in the British publishing industry - which I refer to as literary businesses - developed in the Victorian era, by exploring the formation of these practices in relation to wider societal influences. My research analyses how authors, publishers and literary agents instigated and reproduced business practices in the industry, examining why these practices became accepted and legitimised. This historically oriented research is constructed around primary and archival sources, in particular trade periodicals, personal letters and business documents.

Includes nineteenth-century axioms and rules of color, and illustrated stenciling procedure. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / This dissertation examines the monologues of The Ring and the Book to describe and evaluate the role of the speaker-environment relationship in structuring the poem. Although this relationship has been studied in the shorter works of Browning, little critical attention has been devoted to its role in his major work, despite the poet's extensive comments in Book I on his dramatic method of "resuscitating" dead voices [TRUNCATED]. / 2031-01-01

A lonely damsel's imprisonment within a castle or convent cell; the eavesdropping of a prisoner next door; the framed image of a woman with a mysterious past. These are familiar themes from 1790s gothic novels, which exploded onto the scene with milestone works like Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis' The Monk. They are also key features, however, of canonical nineteenth-century poems, from Tennyson's "Mariana" to Browning's "My Last Duchess." In this dissertation, I argue that tropes of the gothic novel became disseminated in poetry of the Victorian era, manifesting as formal features that have not heretofore been recognized by scholars as essentially gothic. While most scholars recognize gothic poetry only in a small subset of poems that include ghosts, graveyards or superstition, I contend that gothic tropes became definitive of what we now regard as quintessentially "Victorian" poetic forms: the dramatic monologue, women's sonnets, and Pre-Raphaelite picture poems. "Framed, Imprisoned, Overheard" explores feminist arguments and interdisciplinary crossings between painting and poetry, focusing on both canonical and lesser-known poems of major Victorian poets. Close reading fiction by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft, and poems by Charlotte Smith, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti and G. M. Hopkins, I offer a revisionist history that looks beyond the small subset of poems about ghosts or other "gothic" themes, demonstrating how innovations in 1790s sensation fiction contributed to the evolution of major Victorian verse forms.