Cette thèse examine des trajectoires imaginaires décrites dans l’œuvre de Charles Dickens et à partir d’elle. On y étudie le texte et les réincarnations de Great Expectations (1860-61), Oliver Twist (1837-39) puis The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), trois romans qui, depuis l’ère victorienne, pénètrent l’imaginaire collectif et alimentent des discours divers, toujours influencés par leurs conditions de production. Ainsi, cette thèse pratique des microanalyses de ses sources primaires tout en prêtant attention au contexte de chaque œuvre. Son corpus comprend des adaptations filmiques mais aussi des reprises plus indirectes, telles que des réécritures, séries télévisées ou jeux vidéo faisant apparaître des éléments identifiables comme « dickensiens ». Cet adjectif qualifie des objets imaginaires et des phénomènes culturels dont on s’attache ici à préciser la nature. En particulier, le dickensien et ses persistances sont étudiées au prisme de l’excentricité, un terme souvent utilisé pour évoquer la qualité truculente et insolite des écrits de Dickens. Mais ici, la définition de cette notion est approfondie : l’excentrique, toujours situé entre un centre et ses marges, sert à penser les ambivalences du dickensien. Au gré des contextes socio-culturels et esthétiques dans lesquels il s’incarne, l’imaginaire créé par Dickens nourrit des discours tantôt normatifs et maîtrisables, tantôt subversifs et déroutants. La cartographie chaotique dressée dans ce travail aboutit à une réflexion méthodologique : les persistances du dickensien forment des trajectoires discontinues et imprévisibles, qui contrarient les classements bibliographiques, périodisations et barrières disciplinaires / This thesis looks at the text and afterlives of Great Expectations (1860-61), Oliver Twist (1837-39) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), by Charles Dickens. Ever since the Victorian era, these three novels have penetrated our collective imagination and have fed into various kinds of discourses, which are always determined by their conditions of production and reception. Thus, this thesis both performs microanalyses of its primary sources and explores the context in which each work was published. Its corpus includes filmic adaptations as well as more indirect reincarnations, such as rewritings, TV series and videogames featuring elements identifiable as ‘Dickensian’. The latter adjective points to a variety of fictional objects and cultural processes, which are gradually circumscribed throughout this thesis. In particular, the Dickensian and its afterlives are defined in connection with the ‘eccentric’, a term often used to conjure up the colourful and sometimes queer quality of Dickens’s texts. Here, however, a broader definition of this notion is adopted: the eccentric, which always stands halfway between a centre and its margins, is used to examine the many ambiguities of the Dickensian. For, as they move into new aesthetic and socio-cultural contexts, the fictions created by Dickens feed into discourses which can be normative and/or subversive, stereotyped and/or disturbing. My cartography of Dickensian afterlives gradually appears as chaotic, which eventually leads me to reconsider some of my methodological assumptions: Dickens’s fictions move in irregular and unpredictable ways, which often upset bibliographical, periodical and disciplinary boundaries

No description available.

George MacDonald's last major work of fiction, Lilith, was published in 1895, but the first version of the romance was written in March of 1890. Lilith is an account of the unintentional journey of the protagonist into another world populated by both mythological figures drawn from the Judeo-Christian tradition and by horrific personifications of the psychological horrors of the protagonist's own mind. The story of Lilith describes the protagonist's experiences in this other world which bring him to the point of repentance. The manuscript of the first version, known now as Lilith A, is housed in the British Library along with seven other typed revisions and printer's proofs. Taken together, the A-H manuscripts of Lilith represent the complete production history textual evolution of what is arguably MacDonald's greatest literary work. The body of this paper contains the 161 page transcription of Lilith A produced from the original manuscript and a microfilm photographic reproduction provided by the British Library. The introduction of this paper outlines the history of Lilith A, describes it's similarities and differences with the published version, provides a bibliographic description of the manuscript, and outlines the editorial principles used in producing the transcript of the text. The introduction is followed by a transcription of the title page created for the manuscripts of Lilith by Winifred Louisa, Lady Troup, who was MacDonald's daughter and amanuensis. This title page is followed by the transcription of Lilith A. / Master of Arts

This thesis examines the portrayal of gentleman collectors in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literature, arguing that they often find themselves challenged and destabilised by their collections. The collecting depicted contrasts revealingly with the Enlightenment practices of classification, taxonomy, and commodification, associated with the growth of both the public museum and the market economy. The dominance of such practices was bound up with the way they promoted subject-object relations that defined and empowered masculine identity. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer note that “[i]n the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty” (3). That being so, this study explores how the drive to classify and commodify the material world found oppositional, fictional form in gothicly inflected texts depicting a fascinating but frightening world of unknowable, alien objects and abject, emasculated subjects. The study draws upon Fred Botting’s contention that gothic extremes are a reaction to the “framework” of “reductive and normalising limits of bourgeois morality and modes of production” (89). Examining novels and short stories by Richard Marsh, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee, George Gissing, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Mary Cholmondeley, and Mary Ward, the thesis shows how gothicised instances of unproductive-masochism, pathological collecting, thwarted professionals, and emasculated heirs broke down the “framework” within which men and material culture were understood to interact productively and safely. Individual chapters dealing respectively with acquisition, possession, dissemination and inheritance, respond to the recent “material turn” in the humanities, bringing together literary criticism and historically grounded scholarship to reveal the collector and the collection as the locus 3 for concerns with masculinity and materiality that preoccupied a turn-of-the-century mindset.

A re-evaluation of the early fiction of Harriet Martineau (1802-76) is timely. In failing to interrogate the reciprocity between Martineau’s interpretation of personal experience and her fiction, scholars have not fully appreciated its purpose. Thus, modern criticism has accepted Martineau’s dismissive judgement of her earliest tales. Five Years of Youth (1831) has been labelled a pastiche of Jane Austen, and the Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-4), which established Martineau’s fame, have also been subject to bruising attack – as poor art, and ideologically mendacious. Most scholars see the novel Deerbrook (1839) as a conventional romance. Although Linda Peterson and Lana Dalley rightly identify in Martineau’s fiction the trope of domesticity and its political dimension, the argument of this thesis is more specific. Message and discourse, whether couched as political economy, children’s adventure or romance, were shaped by Martineau’s ‘heartland concepts’. The product of her subjectivity, these core values were a sense of duty (initially allied to a previously-unacknowledged soteriology of ‘safety’); a welcome offered to adversity as a stimulus to progress; an attack on superstition as an enemy to intellectual and moral progress; and household relationships which were inclusive of children and servants and stimulated community engagement. Martineau’s definition of community, predicated on a sense of belonging, initially reflected the networking of her Norwich household. It was subsequently redefined as wherever her own household could meet a local need. This interpretation is supported by an analysis of Martineau’s engagement with her adopted community of Ambleside, where, in putting into practice her fictional teachings, she demonstrated reciprocity in action.

This thesis examines nostalgia as a central literary trope of burgeoning modernisation in the mid-Victorian historical novel. Nostalgia began as a pathological form of homesickness and rapidly engaged with the perceived distancing from the past brought about by accelerated modernisation. This thesis suggests that literary representations of social, cultural and technological change echo nostalgic reactions of loss and longing. Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot are the primary focus of this study. Selected works by these authors are situated within the wider context of Victorian historical fiction which – following Walter Scott’s phenomenal success at the beginning of the century – became, as Franco Moretti put it, a ‘key genre’ in the Victorian era. Nostalgia’s first victims were soldiers and students displaced from home by new opportunities for mobility and new reasons to travel long distances and live away from home; it was a disease that responded to modernisation or, as Kevis Goodman has put it, ‘historical growing pains’. Nostalgia’s combination of historical and psychological dimensions, I argue, made it an aesthetic peculiarly suited to the historical novel. This thesis suggests that nostalgia was an important novelistic trope during the nineteenth century and argues that it quickly became enmeshed with the historical novel in a way that has seldom been acknowledged. Because of its medical origins, alongside its continued development as a poetic trope, nostalgia provided a language with which to intertwine emotional and psychological reactions to change with the fictional representation of real historical events. The thesis begins with a detailed account of nostalgia’s etymological history, scientific entanglements and early literary manifestations; the introduction establishes the theoretical and historical framework for the thematically organised chapters that follow. Chapter 1 explores the interlacing of personal and historical subject matter in Thackeray’s historical fiction. This chapter suggests that these interactions took place in Thackeray’s historical fiction through the mingling of nostalgic tropes in the person of his central protagonists. These figures frequently follow Scott’s Edward Waverley in being insipid spectator-participants who have been displaced from their homes and (directly or indirectly) mediate events from a perspective of nostalgic exile. Chapter 2 considers the transformation of landscape as a node of nostalgic representation. It explores the confusion of time and place in the original case studies collected by doctors studying nostalgia as a disease in relation to nineteenth-century representations of past landscapes. It suggests that part of the historicising potential of geographical places comes from this instinctive association of time with place. This overlap is exploited in the historical novel to represent changing times via changing places. Chapter 3 takes George Eliot’s Romola, frequently criticised both by contemporary commentators and subsequent critics for being too full of minutely researched objects, as a illustrative example of how things can become ‘memorative signs’ around which to build a narrative. This ‘clutter’ is reinterpreted as a system of souvenirs, artefacts and mementoes through which public history is reconstructed from excavated fragments of private life. Chapter 4 explores how mid-Victorian historical fiction tested the limits of its own nostalgic tropes. It uses Sylvia’s Lovers to probe the point at which forgetfulness overtakes the most carefully memorialised people and events. It discusses the ways in which these novels use nostalgia to represent a perilous closeness between memorialisation and erasure. It considers whether a trope premised on loss might require the threat of encroaching historical oblivion to complete its own metaphors. The thesis concludes with a coda looking forward to later nineteenth-century uses of nostalgia in historical fiction through a reading of Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet Major (1880) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886).

<p>This dissertation argues that the Victorian novel created a sensory self much like that articulated by Victorian physiological psychology: a multi-centered and process-oriented body that reacts to situations and stimuli as they arise by mobilizing appropriate cognitive and nervous functions. By reading Victorian fiction alongside psychology as it was developing into a distinct scientific discipline (during the 1840s-70s), this project addresses broader interdisciplinary questions about how the interaction between literature and science in the nineteenth century provided new ways of understanding human consciousness. I show that narrative engagements with psychology in the novel form made it possible for readers to understand the modern person as productively rather than pathologically heterogeneous. To accomplish this, fiction offered author and reader an experimental form for engaging ideas posed and debated concurrently in science. </p><p>The novels I read - by authors including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot - emerge as narrative testing grounds for constructions of subjectivity and personhood unavailable to scientific discourse. I attribute the novel's ability to create a sensory self to its formal tactics, from composites of multiple first-person accounts to strange juxtapositions of omniscience and subjectivity, from gaps and shifts in narrative to the extended form-in-process of the serial novel. My side-by-side readings of scientific and literary experiments make it clear that fiction is where we find the most innovative methods of investigation into embodied forms of human experience.</p> / Dissertation

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

In this study, I consider five of the most eminent children’s novels of the Golden Age period, 1860-1920, The Water-Babies by Rev. Charles Kingsley, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, to illustrate that the central concern of all of these novels is what it means to be a child self engaged with the world and growing up. It is my contention that, if we are to embrace what Marah Gubar terms a “kinship model” of children’s literature scholarship that sees the child and adult as in relationship to one another, a new vocabulary is necessary to discuss child and adult selfhood. In this project, I propose using Charles Taylor’s postsecular theory as a foundation for this new language, thus offering the terms porous and buffered as a new way of understanding the relationship between a child and the adult she becomes.

This dissertation investigates the cultural connections made between race and color in works of fiction from the Victorian and Edwardian era, particularly how authors who are also artists invent fantastically colored characters who are purple, blue, red, and yellow to rewrite (and sometimes reclaim) difference in their fiction. These strange and eccentric characters include the purple madwoman in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the blue gentleman from Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872), the red peddler in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), and the little yellow girls of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Yellow Face” (1893) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). These fictional texts serve as a point of access into the cultural meanings of color in the nineteenth century and are situated at the intersection of Victorian discourses on the visual arts and race science. The second half of the nineteenth century constitutes a significant moment in the history of color: the rapid development of new color technologies helps to trigger the upheavals of the first avant-garde artistic movements and a reassessment of coloring’s prestige in the art academies. At the same time, race science appropriates color, using it as a criterion for classification in the establishment of global racial hierarchies. By imagining what it would be like to change one’s skin color, these artist-authors employ the aesthetic realm of color to explore the nature of human difference and alterity. In doing so, some of them are able to successfully formulate their own challenges to nineteenth-century racial discourse.