Civic Subjects examines the ways in which poets laureate William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson negotiated the terrain between poetics and politics during the long reign of Queen Victoria a period during which the monarchy was both contested (especially by popular republicanism) and in a state of transition. The first chapter traces important moments in the history of the office in Britain, both in order to establish the traditions handed down to Wordsworth and Tennyson and to clarify the offices complex relationships to poetics, to reading publics, to the monarchy, and to the elected government. Despite the remarkable differences between the laureates examined, both have a common task: to balance the political claims of a monarchist institution against the responsibilities each feels to his own politics and poetics. Civic Subjects therefore examines circumstances where such negotiations become visible: Wordsworths insistently private laureate relationship with Queen Victoria; Tennysons early experiments in constructing a laureate voice in the Crimean War-era volume Maud, and Other Poems; and the role of Tennysons verse written to mark royal events (deaths, marriages, and anniversaries). Overall, Civic Subjects argues that the laureateship can illuminate both the contested power of poetry in public political life and the constant, sometimes violent, renegotiation of concepts of British citizenship. The structure of laureateship, wherein one poet is called upon to be a ventriloquist for the monarchy and for the people, simultaneously, makes legible the difficult ideological work of maintaining a coherent national narrative especially during a period in which the role of monarchy in national life is repeatedly brought under fire, debates about the constitution of a proper political subjectivity are constantly embattled, and the poets laureate themselves hold strong views of their own on the politics of poetics. / English

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This project begins by asking why so many realist novels of the Victorian period also exhibit tropes borrowed from the eighteenth-century gothic romance—its locales, characters, and thematics. While theorizations of realism and of the gothic are plentiful, most studies consider them to be essentially opposed, and so few attempts have been made to explain why they frequently coexist within the same work, or what each figural mode might lend to the other. This dissertation addresses this deficit by arguing that gothic hauntings interpolated into realist fictions figure socio-economic traumas, the result of uneasy, uneven historical change. Realism's disinterested, empiricist epistemology made it ideal for examining relationships between individuals and social processes, especially the marketplace and public institutions against and through which the modern subject is defined. The gothic's emphases on hidden forces and motives, therefore, became the ideal vehicle for novelists to express anxieties surrounding the operation of these social and economic processes, especially the fear that they are somehow rigged or malevolent. The gothic mode is by definition historiographical, and its haunting returns stage conflicts between the values of a despotic past and those of an ostensibly enlightened present. Realism, often understood as the investigation of social reality, also develops within its narrative a causal model of history. This is required for the sequence of events it narrates to be understandable in their proper contexts and indeed for whole meaning(s) to emerge out of the sum of disparate incidents depicted. Gothic materialist texts, therefore, are obsessed with time and its changes and especially how aspects of competing forms of bureaucracy and modes of capital and exchange determine and confront the modern subject.

Hospitals throughout the nineteenth century remained the one of the main channels for the Victorians’ voluntary zeal, but from the 1850s onwards tensions emerged as charity became ill-suited to meeting all the hospitals’ financial needs. An historiographical survey shows that metropolitan hospitals have been seen as an institution funded and administered through philanthropy, but these views are insufficient. By looking at seven hospitals in London between 1850 and 1898 a different view is suggested. Hospital governors were adept at manipulating philanthropic interests through their innovative fundraising tactics, playing on a wide range of motivations for benevolent action. Administrators used feelings from guilt to gratitude to promote support, suggesting that philanthropy and contributions cannot be constrained by any simple approach. Using the hospitals’ financial records, charitable contributions are placed in the overall context of funding in an institution that drew its income from a wide variety of sources. Over time these sources of funding changed their relative relation to one another in a process of financial diversification. Expenditure, expansion, the financial demands of different hospitals, local charitable resources, competition for funds, and popular perceptions of individual institutions all created pressures on finances that made diversification desirable. Financial diversification, however, took place in a context where the hospitals’ voluntary ethic was not affected. Hospitals experienced administrative expansions as they adopted more medical functions, but management remained on voluntary lines and administrators continued to be drawn from London’s wealthy business and social elite. Within this changing managerial structure doctors competed for authority and asserted their influence through a series of internal conflicts which often stressed the importance of medical science. A comparative investigation of the Whitechapel Union shows that a similar process of change occurred. Financial and administrative diversification was therefore more the consequence of institutional healthcare rather than a development limited to the voluntary hospitals.

This study contrasts four distinct discursive responses to (or even accidental remarks on) the Victorian concept of individual and/or social improvement, or progress, set forth by the preeminent social critics, writers, scientists, and historians of the nineteenth century, such as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Macaulay Matthew Arnold, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer. This teleological ideal, perhaps the most prevalent ideology of the long nineteenth century, originates with the Protestant Christian ethic during and in the years following the Reformation, whereupon it combines with the Enlightenment notions of rational humanity's boundless potential and Romanticism's fierce individualism to create the Victorian doctrine of progress. My contention remains throughout that four nineteenth-century writers for children and adults subvert the doctrine of individual progress (which contributes to the progress of the race) by chipping away at its metaphysical and narratalogical roots. George MacDonald allows progress only on the condition of total selflessness, including the complete dissolution of one's free will, but defers the hallmarks of making progress indefinitely, due to his apocalyptic Christian vision. Lewis Carroll ridicules the notion of progress by playing with our conceptions of linear time and simple causality, implying as he writes that perhaps there is nothing to progress toward, no actual telos on which to fix our sights. Oscar Wilde characterizes moral development as nothing short of self-inflicted cruelty, consigning his most scrupulously moral-minded characters to social subversion or untimely death (the dark reflection of MacDonald's compulsory selflessness). And finally, Rudyard Kipling toys with historical substitutes for conventional progress, such as repetitive cycles, deviating from historical unidirectionality and linear development. He often realigns his characters with their intractable fates at the conclusions of his narratives, echoing Carroll's suggestion that perhaps our goals are delusional. I conclude that while each individual author fails to holistically undermine the doctrine of progress, taken collectively, these four fantasists represent a heretofore unexamined repudiation of the Victorian era's most enduring metaphysical conceits.

This project traces the wide and varied uses of patriotic (and, at times, jingoistic and xenophobic) humor within the Victorian novel. a culture’s humor, perhaps more than any other cultural markers (food, dress, etc.), provides invaluable insight into that nation’s values and perceptions—not only how they view others, but also how they view themselves. in fact, humor provides such a unique cultural thumbprint as to make most jokes notoriously untranslatable. Victorian humor is certainly not a new topic of critical discussion; neither is English ethno-cultural identity during this era lacking scholarly attention. However, the intersection of these concerns has been seemingly ignored; thus, my research investigates the enmeshed relationship between these two areas of study. Not only do patriotic sentiment and humor frequently overlap, they often form a causational relationship wherein a writer’s rhetorical invocation of shared cultural experiences creates humorous self-awareness while “inside” jokes which reference unique Anglo-specific behaviors or collective memories promote a positive identity with the culture in question. Drawing on and extending the work of James Kincaid’s Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, Harold Nicolson’s “The English Sense of Humor,” and Bergson’s and Freud’s theories of humor as a social construct, I question how this reciprocated relationship of English ethnic identity and humor functions within Victorian novels by examining the various ways in which nineteenth-century authors used humor to encourage affirmative patriotic sentiment within their readers.

This thesis explores the limited economic, professional, and political opportunities for women in the Victorian era and how these roles are perpetuated through literature. Often, the lack of opportunities confined women to two choices: the angel or the monster. While there has been significant research on this binary, Virginia Woolf’s cry to “kill the angel of the house” has not been rectified. To discuss the binary, I have analyzed Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” to discuss how these female writers reflect their authorial anxieties through Gothic tropes and a close identification with their heroines. Additionally, I have analyzed Thomas Hardy’s Tess of D’Urbervilles and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets to discuss how these male authors take a naturalistic approach to critique the fallen woman trope. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (MA)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The Return of the Native, and, to a lesser degree, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, served as the "darkling plain" upon which Hardy tried to pose and to solve his theories of the universe, its meanings and its duties toward man. The "darkling plain" in Hardy's works is represented by Egdon Heath and the country surrounding this heath.

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In this essay, the concept of gender equality is explored in terms of progressive heroines in neo-Victorian literature. In order to elucidate in what way a progression has been made, the comparative analysis is predicated upon second wave feminism. A description of the Victorian heroine is made in order to decide if the neo-Victorian heroine has progressed in relation to gender equality. Jane Eyre is explored extensively in order to expand on how a strong heroine can be defined. Elizabeth Steele will represent the neo-Victorian heroine from the novel Blood in the Skies (2011). Her characteristics are defined as being more in likeness with male features, and this would imply that neo-Victorian authors aim at reinventing the Victorian literature in order to adhere to the second wave feminist equality and ”sameness” ideal. The Steampunk/neo-Victorian work Blood in the Skies features a heroine who is portrayed as a strong and independent woman corresponding to the feminist definition of progression in terms of gender equality, in contrast to the typical female protagonist found in Victorian fiction. The results show that Elizabeth can be defined as a strong and independent woman, which corresponds with the feminist definition of gender equality. Heroines in neo- Victorian literature seem to have the same opportunities as men have, and this is shown by the freedom of choice exerted by Elizabeth in the novel.