In the late 1870's English society witnessed the rise of the aesthetic movement, a phenomenon which affected the art and literary worlds and which was characterized then and later as the pursuit of art for art's sake. The notoriety of the movement at the time obscured its exact limits and the origins of its ideas and values. The intellectual and literary side of the movement, especially the ideology of art for art's sake, attracted most notice and comment, yet the plastic arts of painting and industrial design were crucial to the theories of aestheticism and its impact on Victorian culture. This thesis examines those plastic arts, and the social and economic contexts in which they had a place, and their relationship to the aesthetic movement. The aim of this thesis is to describe the cultural context in which the aesthetic movement in the arts developed. The aesthetic movement came at a time when most critics would agree that Victorian design in the fine and industrial arts was at a low point, and did much to stimulate higher standards in both fields. The reasons for this failure and subsequent recovery have been incompletely researched and, I think as a result, incompletely understood. The social and economic changes in the fine and industrial art worlds form a large part of this study out of necessity and in dealing with the mechanism of the art markets, the changing status of the painter, the rise of the industrial designer and the growing activity of the middle-classes in the art world, I have attempted to demonstrate that the aesthetic movement was merely an offshoot of a larger cultural problem, a problem which the Victorians could not solve. Behind the aesthetic movement was the problem of reconciling the mechanism and mechanistic rhythms of modern society with art and the values which art represented, especially individualism, humanism and the knowledge of life sprung of faith rather than science. The solutions and compromises which earlier Victorians had accepted were no longer possible to many people in the 1870's. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

Two children, Dan and Una, sit in the woods and listen to a story of Britain's early history told to them by Sir Richard, a spirit conjured from the past for this instructive purpose. In this tale, Sir Richard gains treasure by defeating the "devils" that terrorize a village of African people. In many ways, this framed narrative sets up the expected hierarchy found in children's literature wherein the adult actively narrates a story and the child silently listens and learns. However, the children of Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill do something else--they question and challenge. At the end of the story, Dan declares, "I don't believe they were Devils" and backs up his disbelief by drawing on other books he has read. While much scholarship on children's literature reads child characters through the lens of adult desire and finds them voiceless and empty, I seek out moments wherein these imagined children, like Dan and Una, challenge adult dissemination of knowledge. Building upon recent scholarship that sees the child less as a straightforward projection of desire and more complexly as a site for conflicting ideologies and tensions, my dissertation enters into the critical conversation concerning the figure of the child and suggests a fresh, new approach to reading adult-child relations in children's literature. Urging readers to focus on the ways in which fantasy literature imagines and represents child characters' relationships to language--as readers, authors, storytellers, and questioners--I argue that whether deliberately or unselfconsciously these works imagine a child capable of interacting with language in order to seize power and thus unsettle the force of adult desire. Even as the characters themselves remain the products of adult creation, the relationship to language they model for their implied readers transcends a simple one-to-one correlation of adult authorial desire and a child reader's internalization. Each of my four chapters focuses on a pair of authors: Sarah Fielding and Mary Martha Sherwood, Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, Frederika Macdonald and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Rudyard Kipling and E. Nesbit. Instead of mere escapism and fancy, these portraits of childhood address debates surrounding the emerging genre of the novel, religious censorship, educational legislation, imperial ideology, medical discourses, and textbook publication. By juxtaposing these novels in pairs alongside these significant historical contexts, my project brings the child's voice, which we often ignore, to the surface. Like Dan and his declaration of disbelief, the readers imagined by these important works of fantasy refuse to sit in silence and instead play with words to question, create, and challenge.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第22131号 / 人博第914号 / 新制||人||218(附属図書館) / 2019||人博||914(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生文明学専攻 / (主査)教授 水野 眞理, 教授 桂山 康司, 准教授 池田 寛子, 教授 金子 幸男 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

Au croisement de la fantasy, ce genre de l’imaginaire qui a reçu ses lettres de noblesse avec J.R.R. Tolkien et jouit aujourd’hui d’une immense popularité, et des romans néo-victoriens, ces réécritures contemporaines du canon historique et littéraire du XIXe siècle apparues dans les années 1960, la fantasy néo-victorienne exhibe ses dragons à vapeur. Tributaire de différents genres et sous-genres, il s’agit d’une littérature paradoxale, prise entre progrès et regret, spéculation et nostalgie. Le contexte victorien renvoie la fantasy à sa première naissance dans les années 1890, et plus largement à l’émergence de la paralittérature et des littératures de l’imaginaire (roman policier, fantastique, horreur, science-fiction), héritières du roman gothique du XVIIIe siècle. Il est nécessaire de décrypter l’arbre généalogique de l’imaginaire pour comprendre les genres hybrides contemporains, tels que la fantasy urbaine et le steampunk, qui représentent à eux deux une partie majeure de la fantasy néo-victorienne. Cette dimension génétique est mise au service d’une poétique autant que d’une politique : il importe justement de définir la valeur du préfixe néo- et de distinguer les moments où le néo-victorianisme penche vers le néo-conservatisme. Quel engagement pour la fantasy néo-victorienne, cette littérature du présent qui interroge et transforme le passé victorien ? Des voyages à dos de dragon à l’héritage de l’Empire britannique, des bas-fonds de Londres aux mondes parallèles de l’uchronie, des zombies aux fanfictions, la recherche d’une poétique nous amène à problématiser l’importance de la fiction dans notre vision du monde. / Fantasy became an official genre of speculative fiction with J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, while the neo-Victorian novel emerged in the 1960s as a contemporary rewriting of the historical and literary canon of the nineteenth century: where the two meet, the steam dragons of neo-Victorian fantasy take flight. At the crossroads of several genres and sub-genres, it is a literature of paradoxes, caught between progress and regret, speculation and nostalgia. The Victorian era was the setting of fantasy’s first birth in the 1890s, and it also witnessed the appearance of several types of genre fiction and speculative fiction (the detective novel, the fantastic, horror and science-fiction) which grew out of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel. The family tree of speculative fiction needs to be laid out if one is to understand hybrid contemporary genres like urban fantasy and steampunk, which comprise most of neo-Victorian fantasy. The taxonomy itself serves to explore the poetical and political dimension: we strive to define the precise meaning of the prefix neo- and distinguish the moments when the neo-Victorian becomes neo-Conservative. What kind of commitment does neo-Victorian fantasy enact, as a type of literature anchored in the present, which interrogates and transforms the Victorian past? From travels on dragonback to the inheritance of the British Empire, from the depths of London to the parallel worlds of alternative history, from zombies to fanfictions, the search for a poetics leads us question the impact that fiction has on our worldview.

This thesis examines issues of female agency in the plays The Rover and The Widow Ranter by Aphra Behn, Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw, and Votes for Women! by Elizabeth Robins. The heroines of each of these plays work toward gaining agency for themselves, and in order to achieve this goal, they often stray from cultural norms of femininity and encroach on the masculine world. This thesis postulates that agency for women becomes a fluid notion, not statically defined. These plays show a fluctuating and evolving sense of feminine agency.

<p>This dissertation argues that the boundaries between capitalism and criminality have become increasingly blurred over the past two centuries, and it traces this development through the Victorian era into American modernity. Operating on the premise that popular literature reflects wide-spread concerns and anxieties of a common audience, each chapter focuses on one primary text as a cite for analysis through which we gain a window of insight into the popular perception of criminals and the role of criminality in developing capitalism. In an attempt to provide relevant context and establish a solid foundation on which to work, the dissertation begins with an introduction that outlines major developments in the British literary field, with a particular eye toward bourgeoning popular mediums, beginning in the eighteenth century and leading into the Victorian era. This foundational work establishes urban compression and rapid industrial development as major concerns for a Victorian audience and figures them as the backdrop on which the discourse of criminality will play itself out.</p> <p>The first half of the dissertation focuses on the Victorian era, whereas the latter half analyzes works of American literature in the early-twentieth century. Chapter one looks to <i>Oliver Twist</i> as the preeminent example of Victorian criminality, with particular emphasis on middle-class complicity in reinforcing the social structures and environmental determinism that Dickens identified as major causes of Victorian crime. Chapter two progresses to the late-Victorian era and discusses Anthony Trollope’s <i>The Way We Live Now</i>. Doing so allows approaching Victorian criminality from the opposite vantage point, seeing the advent of white-collar crime and fraud as now more significant than the formerly dominant concern of petty crimes as seen in <i>Oliver Twist</i>. These early chapters mark a progression of criminality that gradually enmeshes itself in the habits of ambitious capitalists, which I argue is paramount to the construction of the discourse of criminality and capitalism. Rather than isolated incidents, I forward these texts as representative of thematic shifts in the literary field and public consciousness.</p> <p>Such a progression is carried over into American modernism, which constitutes the focus of chapters three and four. In chapter three, systemic violence inherent in laissez-faire capitalism and cronyism become the focus of the discussion, as presented in Upton Sinclair’s <i>The Jungle</i>. This chapter presents Sinclair’s didacticism as a necessary and significant progression in popular social-critique literature, and it contends that the gradual shift away from the personalized narrative of Jurgis to the heightened awareness of his political awakening marks an important development that figures criminality as not only part of, but indeed integral to, capitalism and its smooth functioning. This is contrasted with chapter four which presents <i>The Great Gatsby</i> as a misinterpretation of the lessons presented in <i>The Jungle</i> and reverts back to individualism as a flawed solution to capitalism’s ills. Whereas <i>The Jungle</i> was critiqued based on socialist didacticism and so-called lack of artistry, <i>The Great Gatsby </i>experienced immense success for its artistry, despite the fact that it falls back into the trap of individualism, romanticizing the criminal and capitalistic success of its protagonist while ultimately slating him for sacrifice to reinforce the status quo.</p> <p>These four chapters, I argue, constitute four major stages in progression of the discourse on criminality and capitalism, but leave many questions still unanswered, particularly as regards how society should appropriately and adequately engage the issues contained within these texts. An epilogue is included at the end of this project as an attempt to look forward to expansion of this research and continue to trace this progression up to present-day texts of popular culture. In doing so, my research will engage the development of the criminally-capitalist antihero in popular culture and argue that such figures are representative of the crisis of contemporary capitalism that sees no legitimate (nor illegitimate) ways of succeeding in capitalism.</p>

Thesis advisor: Maia McAleavey / My dissertation explores how nineteenth-century novelists imagined rational thinking as a cognitive resource distributed through physical, social, national, and even imperial channels. Scholars studying nineteenth-century discourses of mind frequently position rational thinking as the normalized given against those unconscious and irrational modes of thought most indicative of the period's scientific discoveries. My project argues, in contrast, that writers were just as invested in exploring rational thinking as multivalent procedure, a versatile category of mental activity that could be layered into novelistic representations of thinking by "thinking with games": that is, incorporating forms of thinking as discussed by popular print media. By reading novels alongside historical gaming practices and gaming literatures and incorporating the insights of twenty-first century cognitive theory, I demonstrate that novelists Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling experimented with models of gaming to make rational thinking less abstract and reveal its action across bodies, objects, and communities. If Victorian mind-sciences uncovered "thinking fast," games prioritized "thinking slow," a distinction described by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his recent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2013). Scenes of games often slow thinking down, allowing the author to expose the complex processes of rational, cognitive performance. Furthermore, such scenes register the expanded perspective of recent cognitive literary studies such as those by Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine, which understand thinking, at least in part, as externalized and social. In effect, by reading scenes of thinking along the lines proposed by strategic gaming, I demonstrate how novels imagined social possibilities for internal processing that extend beyond the bounds of any individual's consciousness. Of course, games easily serve as literary tropes or metaphors; but analyzing scenes of gaming alongside games literature underscores how authors incorporated frameworks of teachable, social thinking from gaming into their representations of rational consciousness. For strategy games literature, better play required learning how to read the minds of other players, how to turn their thinking inside out. The nineteenth-century novel's relationship to games is best understood, I suggest, within the landscape of popular games literature published at its side - sometimes literally. An article on "Whistology" appears just after an installment of The Woman in White in Dickens's All the Year Round; the Cornhill Magazine published a paean to "Chess" amid the serialization of George Eliot's Romola. As a genre, strategy manuals developed new techniques for exercising the cognitive abilities of their readers and, often along parallel lines, so do the novels I discuss. Prompting the reader to think like a game player often involved recreating the kinds of dynamic, active thinking taught by games literature through the novel's form. My dissertation explores how authors used such forms to train their readers in habits of memory, deduction, and foresight encouraged by strategy gaming. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the importance of class in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and its impact on how the characters perceive one another. Taking a closer look at the attitude the characters, John Reed, Jane Eyre and Mrs. Reed have towards each other and how the influence of the Victorian society came about. Through a Marxist perspective one can see the similarities between the society that Jane Eyre was written in and the society taking place within the novel. Where the accessibility of money determined what class one belonged to as well as how to behave accordingly by it. By analyzing the members of higher social standing, John and Mrs. Reed, one can see how they conform to the norms of the social class that they belong to which expresses itself in the way they both perceive and treat Jane in the novel. Jane however has an entirely different outlook. As she searches for a class to belong to, she realizes that her background is the main reason for her receiving the treatment that she does from John and Mrs. Reed.

Although the Bible retained substantial cultural currency throughout the Victorian period (1837–1901), new approaches in biblical criticism challenged accepted ideas about its divine inspiration and theological unity. This dissertation shows that the pressures exerted by this biblical criticism prompted Victorian writers to undertake an imaginative recovery of wisdom literature. Adapting wisdom literature’s characteristic forms in their own works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose, these writers constructed dynamic frameworks of revelation and authority. My study analyzes a series of strategically chosen case studies from the 1840s to the 1880s: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s A Drama of Exile (1844), George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), George Eliot’s Romola (1862–63), John Ruskin’s The Queen of the Air (1869), and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). This selection brings together writers who self-identified as Christian but whose eclectic ideas set them apart from their contemporaries, as well as those who rejected Christianity but nonetheless engaged thoughtfully with biblical texts in their own writing. By demonstrating that these writers used wisdom literature to productively re-imagine the experiences of questioning and doubt, this dissertation contributes to the interdisciplinary project of reassessing religion and secularization in the nineteenth century. More specifically, my focus on biblical wisdom literature aims to revise and supplement the critical paradigm of the Victorian sage, which has come to define scholarly understanding of biblical allusion and literary authority in this period. Where previous studies have focused on the sage’s prophetic rhetoric, this dissertation argues that adaptations of wisdom literature generated an alternative mode of writing, one characterized by an artistic and heuristic poetics. / Graduate / 2021-08-11

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