Through a study of Twilight literary texts, fangirls' online discourse, and cinematic adaptations, I theorize the rhetorical dimensions of "neo-Victorian melodrama," a pervasive mode of discourse in girl culture. These rhetorical functions include the validation of girls' emotional lives, especially affective responses to coming-of-age experiences. Through the confessional revelation of interiority, neo-Victorian melodrama promotes empathy and intimacy among girls and functions to critique restrictive constructions of contemporary girlhood, which has inherited Victorian discourses related to female youth. Theorizing these rhetorical dimensions helps advance an appreciation for girls' rhetorical activities and their cultural preferences. These preferences have often been derided by ageist and sexist critiques of Twilight, a phenomenon initiated by Stephenie Meyer's young adult vampire romance. In order to determine the rhetorical dimensions of neo-Victorian melodrama in girl culture, I use generic rhetorical criticism. Specifically, Meyer's Twilight Saga appeals to contemporary girls through melodramatic moments shared with Charlotte Brontë's nineteenth-century Jane Eyre. Fangirls' online discourse certifies this appeal while also demonstrating how melodrama qualifies girls' own speech practices. Thus, generic criticism is complemented by ethnographic approaches to fandom. In addition, a focus on narrating voiceover, a sound convention with a legacy in girls' media, helps make sense of the Twilight cinematic adaptations' translation of neo-Victorian melodrama from page to screen. The rhetorical dimensions of neo-Victorian melodrama in girl culture are consistent with previous feminist theoretical insights related to the revelation of affect, intimacy, and personal experience for the purpose of community building. While feminist rhetoricians have addressed women's rhetorical practices, they have not theorized girls to the same extent, nor have they used generic criticism to account for melodrama's redemptive or progressive potential. Likewise, while scholars of literature, film, and media studies have advanced an appreciation for women's preferences for melodrama, these feminist scholars generally have not treated girls' preferences for the melodramatic mode. And while feminist critics in girls' studies have theorized girls' productive cultural contributions, as well as their complex reading and viewing strategies, such scholarship has not accounted for girls' preferences for melodrama. My study at once builds on and remedies the gaps in this theoretical foundation. / text

To many readers, the Victorian novel is synonymous with moral insight and Victorian criticism with moral philistinism. While the novel remains celebrated for its complex treatment of decision-making and sympathy, the evaluative judgments of Victorian critics have been dismissed as thematically reductive and imprecise. However, this study argues that the virtue terms that pervade Victorian discourse--words like "natural," "manly," "lucid," and "sincere"--invest sentence-level stylistic properties with ethical value because they embody aesthetic character. Rather than focus on the novel's action, characters, or themes, these "stylistic virtues" ascribe moral significance to "literariness" itself.

The Company Man argues that corporate ways of organising communities permeated British imperial culture. My point of departure is the obsession shared between Anglo-Indian writers and imperial policymakers with the threat of unmanageable agency, the employee who will not follow orders. By taking up Giambattista Vico's claim that human subjects and human institutions condition each other reciprocally, I argue that Anglo-Indian literature is properly understood as one of a series of disciplinary apparatuses which were developed in response to that persistent logistical problem: how best to convince plenipotentiary agents to work in the interest of a mercantile employer, the East India Company. The Company Man reconsiders the way we think and write about Victorian imperial culture by taking this institutional approach. For one thing, the dominant position of the Company highlights the limitation of our continuing dependence on the nation as a critical hermeneutic. Additionally, I show how the prevalence of ideas like duty, service, and sacrifice in colonial literature is more than simply the natural output of a nation looking to sacralise everyday practice in the wake of their famous "Victorian loss of faith." Rather, I place these ideas among a structure of feeling, which I call aristocratic virtue, that was developed by imperial policymakers looking to militate against the threat of rogue agents. The subject material under consideration includes novels, short stories, poems, essays, memoirs, personal correspondence, and parliamentary speeches. These texts span a century but are clustered around four nodal points, which illustrate moments of innovation in the technologies of regulation and control. My opening chapter examines how the idea of an overseas empire first acquired virtue in the minds of the British public. The second explores how the Company grafted this virtue onto its corporate structure in its training colleges and competition exams. The third shows how Anglo-Indian literature continued to disseminate the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and noble suffering long after the Company ceded control to the Crown. The final chapter shows how this corporate culture reflects in that most canonical of imperial novels, Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901).

This thesis deals with the intersection of art and Victorian gender. The first chapter will deal with the Victorian era in England from the 1840s to 1900s. This chapter will serve as background information to familiarize the reader with Victorian London, the birth place of the Pre-Raphaelites. By examining the subject of industrialization in England and seeing how it changed and influenced society as a whole, the Pre-Raphaelites’ motives for formation become evident and their artistic style is understood in context. The next chapter takes a close look at the art that the Pre-Raphaelites were producing, examining both its subject matter and its literary basis in comparison to the historical setting. By using art as historical evidence, it shows the Pre-Raphaelites’ own personal investment in the subject of Victorian gender relations. Finally, the third chapter examines the wives of the Pre-Raphaelites as a case study for how these real Victorian woman acted and behaved, outside of the expectations and social constraints of the era. Since these were the women most closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and their lives were generally well-documented, they make excellent subjects to follow to determine what sort of agency they had in comparison to their stereotypes and male counterparts. Overall, this thesis seeks to tie together the ideas of Victorian gender norms and Pre-Raphaelite art to create a more nuanced and complete history of the Pre-Raphaelites as people and artists.

Modernism is often connected to the public sphere due to its associations with urbanity and technological changes. But interiority and private life was as important to modernity and, in particular, in Virginia Woolf’s writing. This essay explores the protagonists’ access to and experience of privacy in Woolf’s novels To the Lighthouse (1927) and Mrs Dalloway (1925), which both centre on women in a domestic environment. The reading combines modernist reactions against Victorian domesticity, which was structured on the private/public dichotomy and which limited women’s access to privacy, and combines it with modernist views of interiority, informed, more specifically, by Freud’s model of the unconscious and the spatial features of it. Privacy and interiority are imagined with spatial metaphors, but privacy is not necessarily connected to physical place and being alone, but rather having the ability to control the social situation and to choose what one reveals about oneself. Both novels re-imagine privacy and its ties to physical as well as mental space. This essay argues that To the Lighthouse is centred on a traditional Victorian home which reflects how its protagonist experiences interior privacy, and Mrs Dalloway explores a more modern domesticity that challenges Victorian organisation of the home and in turn, women’s access to privacy and solitude. With modernity public life was made available for women to a larger extent, but just as public life is coded by power relations, so is private life, which determines what sort of life could be lived by, for example, women.

The aim of this essay is to show the significant effect censoring Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray had on the protagonist’s moral standing. I compare the original uncensored version of The Picture of Dorian Gray with the censored version. The uncensored version, published by the Belknap Press and edited by Nicholas Frankel, has only been available to the public for three years. My comparison proves that a great deal has been changed in terms of content between the two versions of the novel. This essay will outline and discusses the changes made in order to make the text acceptable in terms of late Victorian moral conventions. It also illustrates the changes by comparing quotes. The function of the censorship applied to the novel is to make Dorian seem more callous and immoral in the 1891 book version, since only then can Oscar Wilde’s story approach the standards of late Victorian morality. Indeed, a significant change has been effected in the character Dorian Gray’s morality between the two versions of the novel. / Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att visa vilken betydande effekt censureringen av Oscar Wildes The Picture of Dorian Gray hade på huvudkaraktärens moraliska ståndpunkter. Jag jämför den ocensurerade versionen av The Picture of Dorian Gray med den censurerade versionen. Den ocensurerade versionen som publicerades av Belknap Press och redigeradesav Nicholas Frankel, har bara varit tillgänglig för allmänheten i tre år. Min jämförelse visar att en stor del av innehållet har förändrats mellan de båda versionerna av romanen. Den här uppsatsen visar samt diskuterar förändringarna som har gjorts för att texten ska bli mer acceptabel i förhållande till senviktorianska moraliska konventioner. Uppsatsen illustrerar förändringarna genom att jämföra citat. Poängen med att censurera den här romanen var att få Dorian att verka mer hjärtlös och omoralisk  i bokversionen från 1891. Bara då kunde Oscar Wildes berättelse närma sig den viktorianska moralen. Man kan se en tydlig förändring av karaktären Dorian Grays moral mellan de två versionerna.

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In this thesis I contend that evolutionary scientific discourses were integral to the work of "New Woman" writers of late Victorian literary culture in Britain. In the cultural debates that raged over the new gender politics and their relationship to social and moral values at the fin de siècle, the questions raised about femininity, modernity and the "woman question" were also central to the "new sciences" of sexology, eugenics, psychology and anthropology. This thesis investigates the issue of whether the new sciences offered an enabling set of discourses to New Women through which to produce new artistic, professional and personal feminine identities and to campaign for feminist goals. An understanding of the field of cultural production informs this discussion; I argue that science functions as cultural and symbolic capital in literary production of the period, and consider the dynamics between constructs of value, status, and the feminine in the literary market-place and their relationship to scientific narratives. This analysis is developed through the illumination of the relationship between New Woman novelists and poets, female aesthetes, and other forces in the field, in discussion of the thematic concerns and literary strategies of those participating in these debates: amongst others, Mona Caird, "Iota" (Katherine Mannington Caffyn), Victoria Cross(e) (Annie Sophie Cory), Sarah Grand (Frances Elizabeth McFall), Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Alice Meynell, May Kendall, Constance Naden, and the anti-New Woman male writer, Grant Allen. An examination of a variety of literary forms and genres, in addition to the novel — the principal focus for much scholarship on the New Woman — such as the feminist periodicals, poetry, journalism and the short story, is central to the thesis and enables identification of shared literary strategies and techniques as well as consideration of readers and critical contexts. The roles and representation of "woman" in this period were produced within biological determinist concepts of sex and Nature. The study concentrates on ways in which essentialist dichotomies of cultural and biological reproduction redefined notions of literary and artistic "genius", motherhood and female citizenship, as they intersect with "race" and sexuality in imperial contexts. Women's critique and construct of these subjectivities differed; study of the women's journals reveals a consumer culture saturated in discourses of health and hygiene, negotiated by a divided community of readers. Focus on theories and representation of the child in late Victorian culture finds that Alice Meynell's writing challenged evolutionary psychology, and relates Sarah Grand's child genius to emergent Galtonian eugenics. I argue that late nineteenth-century feminism was intimately involved in imperialism and eugenics, and suggest that current feminist scholarship must confront and analyse these investments. In this thesis I find that boundaries between the groups' identities are fluid; points of intercourse and affiliation are revealed, such as the ways in which scientific constructs of "race", as in Mona Caird's use of the Celtic, are deployed in order to comment on literary value. I have highlighted the ambivalences at work in these appropriations, and suggest that the New Woman text was not always polemical, nor did it reject "high art" values, and that the female aesthetes also express feminist convictions. I contend that for many feminist writers, participation in these late nineteenth-century debates was a necessary and productive critical intervention, with radical, if not always progressive, implications.

This dissertation examines how Victorians used the word “queer” as associated with senses of “counterfeit” and “eccentricity” in selected Victorian novels. The word was popularly used, by Victorian writers of both genders and in various and diverse circumstances, to mean the unfamiliar, the unconventional, the incomprehensible, and the non-normal. Unlike the contemporary uses of the word, which are oriented toward a relatively particular meaning, the non-normal sexual, Victorian uses of the word had been fluid, unstable, and indeterminate, yet referring to or associating with the non-normal aspects in things and people. Knowing how the Victorians used the word helps us to understand that a concept of marginality can be extended to the extent of tolerating Otherness in marginalized positions and minority identities. Victorian novels including Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863), Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek (1854), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) demonstrate how the word “queer” is indeterminately used and also represent how queer marginality is appreciated or rejected, and tolerated or discriminated against. As queerness is defined as the status of counterfeitabilty, a counterpart of authenticity, queer subjects are described to provoke a feeling of repulsion and tend to be criminalized or pathologized. On the other hand, as queerness is defined as the status of eccentricity, queer subjects are sympathized and defended in the narrative. Manifestations of eccentricities in queer subjects are occasionally reprimanded, but admired for queer subjects’ uncommon or distinguished individuality. Victorian novels demonstrate that queer marginality can be employed as a self-fashioning identity or social status for any non-normal individual to deal with social pressure of conformity.

This paper explores lesbian and gay teachers’ understandings of how their sexuality interacts with the Victorian secondary state school culture in which they work. With the aim of investigating the relationship between heteronormative schooling cultures and queer teachers, six same-sex attracted teachers were interviewed. The interviews were analysed, using discourse analysis, in order to examine teachers’ understanding of their school culture and its intersection with their sexual identity. The analysis and discussion showed a divide between teachers who chose to be out to students and those who did not. Most of the participants felt that their level of openness about their sexuality linked closely to their personality and that this dictated how much of their identity they wished to be on display at school. This often had a flow-on effect to how they managed other issues, such as addressing homophobia in their school. Participants were concerned about being labeled a pedophile or being seen as trying to recruit students to homosexuality and were therefore conscious of not looking or acting too stereotypically gay. This suggests that lesbian and gay teachers expend more energy and are more conscious of their demeanor than straight teachers in the heteronormative school cultures in which they operate. Despite there being legal protection for lesbian and gay teachers in government schools, on the ground there is still tension within schools about opening a dialogue with students about sexuality.