In my examination of the Concept of Gentility in the Victorian Novel, I do not claim to give an exhaustive literary critique of the novelists' books from the viewpoint of 'Gentility'. This study, however, is no less concerned with Victoriar authors' personal involvement in the concept of gentility than with the gentility of the characters portrayed in their books. In considering Victorian novelists' delineation of the 'Gentleman' in their novels, I have taken into full consideration each novelist's family background, his education, his social, economic, or even his religious status. One of the fruitful vantage points of understanding the idea of the gentleman in the English novel - and especially in the Victorian novel - is, in fact, the conflict between the seemingly easy escape from the class of one's birth and the endless rebuffs as one made this attempt. English writers, again the Victorians in particular, can easily be said to have shared in a specific gentility-consciousness, the key to which is the sense of intransigence in the terms of the opposition between the inner personal and subjective and the outer public and objective. A novelist, for instance, might declare himself the enemy of snobs, and yet be a real snob himself. In any case, my objective, behind juxtaposing Victorian authors' own characters with some of the characters found in their books is to throw ample light on the class identity of the 'genteel' people portrayed, and hence to reach a fuller understanding of the novelists' own quest for genteel status. I also aim in this study to show the writers' own understanding of 'Gentility', and 'the various attempts they made at reconciling leisure and industry, blood and money, gentility or respectability and vulgarity, humanitarianism and individualism, and even Anglicanism and Dissent. This task is accomplished through a depiction of the most relevant events and relationships that bear upon the Concept of Gentility - portrayed in the novelists' books.

No description available.

This essay is focused on Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, interpreting the poem against the background of a Petrarchan tradition. In this text I show how Tennyson’s work exhibits several parallels to the traditional elements of Petrarchism, both in terms of the themes it explores and of itsmore formal aspects. Among these commonalities are such things as a persistent focus on a distant object of affection, a sense of conflict or tension between earthly and divine love and a overall chronology and progression which ties the sequence together into an almost narrative structure. Besides these similarities, I also explore how In Memoriam differs from its Petrarchan model, andhow its differences are born of the particular circumstances in which it was written. Thus I also show how Tennyson manages to adapt an older literary tradition to the needs of his own time.

No description available.

This dissertation examines the modes, means, and merit of the literary production of short stories in London periodicals between 1850 and 1870. Shorter forms were derided by contemporary critics, dismissed on the assumption that quantity equals quality, yet popular and respectable novelists, namely Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, were writing and printing them. Navigating discourses about literature and writing to delineate and ascertain the implications of the contextual position of certain short stories, this study characterizes a previously unexamined genre, here called the Market Story. Defined by their relationship to a publishing industry that was actively creating a space for, demanding, and disseminating texts based on their potential to generate sales figures, draw attention to a particular organ, author, or publisher, or gather and hold a captive audience, Market Stories indicate their authors’ self-aware commentary on the relativity of literary and generic value, and ultimately constitute a discourse on value. Following an outline of the historical field in which market stories were produced, Chapter One reads Trollope’s six “Editor’s Tales” as intensely comic and interrogative of extant conceptions of cultural and literary value; Trollope glories in the exposure and dismantling of seemingly-reliable externality. Chapter Two considers “Somebody’s Luggage” as Dickens’s argument for the contrivance of literary genre insofar as it constructs an exaggerated system of exchanges whereby the short story generates unprecedented income. Chapter Three moves to Gaskell’s “Cranford Papers” to argue that their diligent tracing of the careful consumption of small wholes and cultivation of irregular habits constitutes an insistence on the plurality of appropriate models of consumption and value. Shifting the discussion from content to form, Gaskell’s text throws the shape of the market story into relief. Finally, Chapter Four considers Oliphant’s “Dinglefield Stories” as a figurative argument that generic and literary value is always inextricably contextualized. As literary works and cultural products, these stories embody the tensions between the utilitarian and the ‘purely’ artistic that underwrote much nineteenth-century discussion of art and culture, and these authors were unmistakably aware of the external conditions enabling and affecting the production and valuation of literary work.

This dissertation examines the modes, means, and merit of the literary production of short stories in London periodicals between 1850 and 1870. Shorter forms were derided by contemporary critics, dismissed on the assumption that quantity equals quality, yet popular and respectable novelists, namely Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, were writing and printing them. Navigating discourses about literature and writing to delineate and ascertain the implications of the contextual position of certain short stories, this study characterizes a previously unexamined genre, here called the Market Story. Defined by their relationship to a publishing industry that was actively creating a space for, demanding, and disseminating texts based on their potential to generate sales figures, draw attention to a particular organ, author, or publisher, or gather and hold a captive audience, Market Stories indicate their authors’ self-aware commentary on the relativity of literary and generic value, and ultimately constitute a discourse on value. Following an outline of the historical field in which market stories were produced, Chapter One reads Trollope’s six “Editor’s Tales” as intensely comic and interrogative of extant conceptions of cultural and literary value; Trollope glories in the exposure and dismantling of seemingly-reliable externality. Chapter Two considers “Somebody’s Luggage” as Dickens’s argument for the contrivance of literary genre insofar as it constructs an exaggerated system of exchanges whereby the short story generates unprecedented income. Chapter Three moves to Gaskell’s “Cranford Papers” to argue that their diligent tracing of the careful consumption of small wholes and cultivation of irregular habits constitutes an insistence on the plurality of appropriate models of consumption and value. Shifting the discussion from content to form, Gaskell’s text throws the shape of the market story into relief. Finally, Chapter Four considers Oliphant’s “Dinglefield Stories” as a figurative argument that generic and literary value is always inextricably contextualized. As literary works and cultural products, these stories embody the tensions between the utilitarian and the ‘purely’ artistic that underwrote much nineteenth-century discussion of art and culture, and these authors were unmistakably aware of the external conditions enabling and affecting the production and valuation of literary work.

No description available.

No description available.

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

No description available.