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This study seeks to identify the contribution of Julia Kavanagh within early and mid-Victorian literature and as a contributor to the concept of the contribution of a women's tradition to the developemnt of French and English arts and culture. It examines her progress as a popular novelist to changing tastes during her working career and her reputation among her contemporaries, including the niche she created for novels with a French background, based on her early life in, and later return to France. Her principal non-fiction works Woman In France in the 18th Century, Women of Christianity and French and English Women of Letters are considered as evidence of a developing thesis on the contribution of a distinct female contribution in these areas, with some discussion on the relationship between these ideas and Kavanagh's practice as a novelist. Four of Kavanagh's novels are discussed in detail; Madeleine (1848) and Rachel Gray (1856) are atypical and demonstrate a more personal interest in the lives of poor single women, and reflect the author's strong Catholic faith; Nathalie (1850) and Adèle (1858) on the other hand, demonstrate the impact and influence of Brontë's Jane Eyre on Kavanagh's output. The study seeks to identify the influence on Kavanagh's work of her French upbringing, and particularly of the abandonment of herself and her blind mother by her father, leaving Kavanagh to support them by her writings, with particular reference to Rachel Gray. The study also includes a close study of a portion of Adèle, and a review of characteristic themes in Kavanagh's fiction and non-fiction. The bibliography of Kavanagh's works is the most complete to date

<p>Predmet istraţivanja ove doktorske disertacije jesu metafore tela i prostora u stvarala&scaron;tvu savremene vel&scaron;ke spisateljice Sare Voters. Istraţivanje se usredsreĊuje na prvih pet romana iz njenog opusa, objavljenih u periodu od 1998. do 2009. godine. Romani Usne od somota, Srodne du&scaron;e i Dţeparo&scaron; spadaju u neoviktorijansku prozu, dok su romani Noćna straţa i Mali stranac sme&scaron;teni u period za vreme i nakon Drugog svetskog rata. Uloga protagoniste u njenim romanima najĉe&scaron;će se dodeljuje lezbejskim likovima, pa se njeno stvarala&scaron;tvo moţe shvatiti kao poku&scaron;aj da se navedene istorijske epohe rekonstrui&scaron;u tako da se omogući predstavljanje lezbejskih likova i lezbejske seksualnosti. Istovremeno, njeni romani doprinose &scaron;irem predstavljanju lezbejske tematike u savremenoj knjiţevnoj produkciji. Osnovni cilj istraţivanja jeste da se ispita uloga telesnih i prostornih metafora u obradi teme istopolne ljubavi, ali i znaĉaj ovih metafora za ĉitav niz drugih tema.<br />Istraţivanja tela i prostora predstavljaju izuzetno plodnu i dinamiĉnu oblast savremene kritiĉke teorije. Ovi pojmovi dospevaju u ţiţu kritiĉkog interesovanja u drugoj polovini dvadesetog veka, mada je njihovo prisustvo u oblastima nauĉnih istraţivanja znatno duţe, pa rasprave o telu i telesnosti nalazimo jo&scaron; u klasiĉnoj filozofiji. Prostor je pak sve do druge polovine dvadesetog veka prevashodno bio predmet matematiĉkih i geografskih istraţivanja, dok je u humanistiĉkoj tradiciji bio shvaćen tek kao pasivna i statiĉna pozadina istorijskih dogaĊaja. Istraţivanje polazi od istorijskog pregleda kljuĉnih teorijskih pristupa telu, poĉev od platonistiĉke dualistiĉke tradicije,&nbsp;preko kartezijanskog dualizma, sve do savremenih poststrukturalistiĉkih teorija, a teorijsko upori&scaron;te analize telesnih metafora ĉine teorije Mi&scaron;ela Fukoa i Dţudit Batler. Analiza romana se usredsreĊuje na motiv transodevanja, metaforu duha, ali i na skup konkretnih telesnih slika kojima se spisateljica iznova vraća. Potom se razmatraju savremena teorijska poimanja prostora, pri ĉemu se istraţivanje oslanja i na relevantna istorijska, knjiţevnoistorijska i sociolo&scaron;ka istraţivanja. Ovaj teorijski okvir sluţi da se ispitaju predstave kuće, zatvora, ludnice i britanske prestonice, te interakcija lezbejskih likova s ovim lokalitetima<br />&nbsp;</p> / <p>The aim of this doctoral thesis is to explore the corporeal and spatial metaphors in the fiction of Sarah Waters, a contemporary Welsh novelist. The critical focus of the thesis is on Waters‟s first five novels, published between 1998 and 2009. Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith belong to the neo-Victorian genre, while Night Watch and The Little Stranger are set in the period during and after the Second World War. In Waters‟s fiction, the role of protagonist is mostly reserved for lesbian characters and her oeuvre can be perceived as an attempt to rewrite the chosen historical periods in ways which provide for the representation of lesbian characters and lesbian sexuality. In addition, her novels make a significant contribution towards wider literary representation of lesbian issues in the contemporary context. The main goal of this research is to analyze the role of corporeal and spatial metaphors in the portrayal of same-sex relationships, class tensions and other relevant themes in Waters‟s work.<br />The issues of body and space are undoubtedly at the centre of contemporary critical interest and theoretical debates that surround them are diverse and wide-ranging. However, while the history of theoretical interest in the body dates back to the classical tradition, spatiality only came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century, when a surge of critical interest can be observed marking the beginning of the so-called spatial turn. The thesis therefore&nbsp;starts by providing a brief historical overview of the key theoretical approaches to the body, including the mind/body debate in the classical Platonic tradition, Cartesian dualism and contemporary poststructuralist theory. The theories of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are then used as the main theoretical framework for the analysis of corporeal metaphors, which focuses on the motif of cross-dressing, the spectral metaphor, as well as a range of recurrent corporeal images in Waters‟s writing. In the following chapters, the focus shifts to contemporary theoretical approaches to spatiality and relevant sociological, cultural and historical research, which are used to explore the representations of home, prison, asylum and urban space, as well as the interaction between the lesbian protagonists and their surroundings.</p>

While Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray depicts the quintessential literary portrait endowed with uncanny life and movement, dozens of such magic portraits are featured in Victorian fiction. From the ravishing picture of the title character in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret to the coveted portrait of a Romantic poet in Henry James's The Aspern Papers, imagined portraits in these texts serve as conduits of desire and fear--windows into passions and repressions that reveal not only the images' external effects but their relation to the unconscious of their viewers. My dissertation turns a critical eye on this gallery of ekphrastic pictures--those not actually visible to the reader but rather visualizable through verbal description--to argue that the meditations on representation and desire that these novels and stories perform not only anticipate but augment theories of the image and the gaze developed primarily since the advent of cinema. Though the dissertation benefits from film theory's models of visual exchange, the distinctions between these portraits and images in film open up fertile analytical terrain. Ekphrastic magic portraits provide a unique opportunity to delve into the intersecting realms of word painting and image perception, the optics of desire and subjectivity, to advance critical discourses in visual studies that are framed both historically and theoretically. Using psychoanalytic and narratological methodologies, particularly those relevant to feminist and queer image theory, "The Ekphrastic Fantastic" demonstrates how the fictional visual exchanges on display in magic portrait stories elucidate various power struggles regarding sexuality and narrative structuring. These literary pictures thereby provide new access to the social and artistic commentaries that often subtend Victorian fiction. Each chapter considers three primary texts and the branch of image theory most relevant to their deployment of magic portraits. Laura Mulvey's foundational essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," provides the point of departure in the first chapter, which looks at Charles Dickens's Bleak House, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. The second chapter addresses Margaret Oliphant's "The Portrait," Thomas Hardy's "An Imaginative Woman," and James's The Aspern Papers with further feminist insights from Vivian Sobchack and Teresa de Lauretis. The final chapter determines the relationship of principles of visual representation and narrative production of the Aesthetic movement to magic portraits in Walter Pater's "Sebastian van Storck," Vernon Lee's "Oke of Okehurst," and Wilde's Dorian Gray, particularly as they relate to the nascent medium of cinema and the theories that soon as well as later arose to account for the impact of its kinetic mirage. The arc of my argument emphasizes how, as the Victorian period advances, the portraits become increasingly animate and subversive in their challenges to patriarchal gender norms and narrative formulas. In this way, they become the mechanisms by which new models of psycho-sexual relations can be expressed and new social and narrative systems can emerge.

Orphans of British Fiction, 1880-1911 Abstract William David Floyd Orphans of British Fiction, 1880-1911 focuses on the depiction of orphans in genre fiction of the Victorian fin-de-siecle. The overwhelming majority of criticism focusing on orphans centers particularly on the form as an early- to middle-century convention, primarily found in realist and domestic works; in effect, the non-traditional, aberrant, at times Gothic orphan of the fin-de-siecle has been largely overlooked, if not denied outright. This oversight has given rise to the need for a study of this potent cultural figure as it pertains to preoccupations characteristic of the turn of the century. The term “orphan” may typically elicit images of the Dickensian type, such as Oliver Twist, the homeless waif with no family or fortune with which he or she may discern identity and totality of self. The earlier-century portrayals of orphanhood that produced this stereotype dealt almost exclusively with issues arising from industrialization, such as class affiliation, economic disparity and social reform and were often informed by the cult of the ideal Victorian family. Beginning with an overview of orphanhood as presented in earlier fiction of the long nineteenth century, including its metaphorical import and the conventions associated with it, Orphans of British Literature, 1880-1911 goes on to examine the notable variance in literary orphans in genre fiction at the turn of the century. Indicators of the zeitgeist of modernism’s advent, turn-of-the-century orphans functioned as registers of burgeoning cultural anxieties particular to the fin-de-siecle, such as sexual ambiguity, moral and physical degeneration and concerns about the imperial enterprise. Furthermore, toward the century’s end, the notion of the ideal family fell under suspicion and was even criticized as limiting and oppressive rather than reliable and inclusive, casting into doubt the institution to which the orphan historically aspired and through which the orphan state was typically rectified. As a result, in contrast to the sentimental street urchin of early and middle century fiction, fin-de-siecle orphans are often unsettling, irresolute, even monstrous and violent figures.

This thesis examines the important role of female same-sex relationships in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Whilst drawing directly upon Sharon Marcus's recent book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, a revisionary queer reading of inter-dependent same-sex female intimacy and mainstream middle-class heteronormative ideals, my own study extends the parameters of Marcus's work by focussing on alternative contexts and previously overlooked same-sex female relationships. This thesis argues that the culturally endorsed model of Victorian female homosociality identified by Marcus was subject to disruption and transformation both within and beyond the institutions of marriage and the family. It concludes that various forms (rather than one definitive model) of homosocial desire shaped nineteenth-century female bonding. In the first chapter I explore the unstable social status of working middle-class women, and identify instances of employer/employee female intimacy organised upon a disturbance or reversal of social hierarchy. In the second chapter I demonstrate how the ideal of female amity was inevitably undermined in the literary marketplace, and that whilst women writers were engaged in constructing and disseminating this ideal in their novels, they were also embroiled in a series of professional jealousies with one another which served to undo the very ideal they were promoting. In the second part of this chapter I highlight the pluralism of mainstream homoerotic femininity by examining Dinah Mulock Craik's fictional representation of homoerotic surveillance manifest in a culturally endorsed adolescent female gaze. In the third chapter I challenge Marcus's claim that well-known independent nineteenth-century lesbians were fully accommodated into mainstream 'respectable' society by demonstrating that some of these women informed Eliza Lynn Linton's homophobic portrait of radical feminist separatism. I also explore in this chapter Linton's fictional representation of sororal eroticism, and argue that (notwithstanding mother/daughter bonds) Linton, like many of her contemporaries, regarded sisterhood as the primary bond between women. I also evidence in this chapter that Linton's portrait of 'sororophobia' is comparable with cultural ideals regarding the important function that female friends had in facilitating one another's marriage.

Victorians frequently conflated body and text by using terms of medical diagnosis to talk about literature and, in turn, literary terms to talk about the body. In light of this conflation, this dissertation focuses on the intersection between narrative form and disability in nineteenth-century fiction and interrogates how the shape of Victorian fiction both informed and reflected the era’s developing notions of disability. Examining this intersection of body and text in several genres and across seven decades, from Frederic Shoberl’s 1832 English translation of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” (1893) from the Sherlock Holmes series, I show how the structural forms of these works reveal that disability’s conceptualization during the Victorian era was frequently dialogic, incongruously understood as both deviant and commonplace. My research thus contributes to our understanding of disability’s complex development as a concept, one that did not immediately or irrevocably marginalize people, but rather struggled to negotiate the limits, capabilities, and meanings of bodies in a rapidly changing culture. / Graduate / 2020-04-19

This study is primarily concerned with the formulation of Thackeray's theory of the novel through a thorough investigation of his various reviews and critiques of Victorian fiction which appeared in periodicals and by a careful examination of his letters, By evaluating the numerous comments on particular works of fiction and on the art of "novel-spinning" in general which came from Thackeray's pen, this study investigates the various Thackerayan ideas as to how novels should be written with regard to the function of the novel, the formulation of plot and character, realism and morality, the presentation of description, and the style in which novels were to be written. This investigation concludes that Thackeray's theory of the novel was that novels were to be written in a simple, straightforward style and were to present "living" characters who performed realistic, believable actions within tightly unified, logical plots in such a manner as to provide entertainment and to reaffirm the Victorian moral code.

This thesis examines the portrayal of authorship in Byatt’s novels with a particular focus on her use of character-authors as a site for the destabilisation of dominant literary and cultural paradigms. Byatt has been perceived as a liberal-humanist author, ambivalent to postmodern, post-structuralist and feminist literary theory. Whilst Byatt’s frame narratives are realist and align with liberal-humanist values, she employs many different genres in the embedded texts written by her character-authors, including fairy-tale, life-writing and historical drama. The diverse representational practices in the novels construct a metafictional commentary on realism, undermining its conventions and conservative politics. My analysis focuses on the relationship between the embedded texts and the frame narrative to demonstrate that Byatt’s strategies of representation enact a postmodern complicitous critique of literary conventions and grand narratives. Many of the female protagonists and minor characters are authors, in the broad sense of cultural production, and Byatt uses their engagement with representation of women in literature to pose questions about how cultural narratives naturalise patriarchal definitions of femininity. That Byatt’s female characters resist patriarchal power relations by undermining the cultural script of conventional femininity has been under-explored and consequently critics have overlooked significant instances of female agency. Whilst some branches of postmodern and feminism literary theory have conceptualised agency differently, this thesis emphasises their shared analysis of the discursive construction of subjectivity, as it illuminates Byatt’s disruption of literary conventions. My focus on the embedded texts and the discursive construction of authorship in Byatt’s fiction enables me to address the numerous paradoxes and inconsistencies in the novels as fertile sites that undermine Byatt’s presumed politics.

Partant de la définition que donne Patrick Brantlinger du gothique impérial victorien, ce travail aborde la manière dont l’Egypte, à travers le prisme de l’archéologie, est devenue un objet littéraire dans les dernières années du XIXe siècle. À mi-chemin entre science et aventure impériale, l’archéologie – et, plus particulièrement, l’égyptologie – est vite devenue un motif gothique, comme en témoignent les nombreux romans et nouvelles qui composent le genre de la mummy fiction. En examinant les écrits de Bram Stoker, Henry Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle et Sax Rohmer, entre autres, cette thèse considère la manière dont le motif archéologique a parcouru différents genres populaires, depuis le roman d’aventures jusqu’au fantastique, avant d’être approprié par le roman policier. L’étude de ces textes révèle combien l’histoire antique de l’Egypte, liée à un imaginaire magique, fascinait autant qu’elle effrayait dans la mesure où elle semblait ébranler les certitudes de la science moderne. Dans le même temps, l’histoire politique contemporaine de l’Egypte – et son statut ambigu au sein de l’Empire britannique – générait également une certaine angoisse, qu’alimentait la crainte du déclin et de la dégénérescence de l’Empire et de la civilisation britannique. La représentation fictionnelle de l’antiquité égyptienne – et de la figure de la momie en particulier – traduit la peur grandissante avec laquelle les Britanniques considéraient un Empire qui, à la manière des momies égyptiennes, menaçait de se soulever et de se venger du colonisateur. C’est ainsi que l’archéologie peut être lue comme une métaphore des relations et des angoisses impériales tandis que la momie incarne ce que l’on peut interpréter comme un refoulé impérial arraché aux profondeurs de l’inconscient collectif britannique au moment même où Freud développait les méthodes de la psychanalyse. / Taking Patrick Brantlinger’s definition of late-Victorian imperial Gothic as a starting point, this dissertation considers how Egypt became a literary object in the late nineteenth century through the prism of archaeology. Pertaining as much to science as to imperial adventure, archaeology – and Egyptology in particular – soon entered fiction as a Gothic trope, as is evinced by the great number of novels and short stories that form the genre of mummy fiction. By focussing on texts by Bram Stoker, Henry Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle and Sax Rohmer, among others, this work examines how the archaeological motif travelled through various popular genres, from the adventure novel to the fantastic, before being taken up by writers of detective fiction. The study of these texts reveals that Egypt’s ancient history, full of magical potential, was an object of fascination as well as fear insofar as it seemed to shatter the certainties of modern science. Meanwhile, the modern political history of Egypt – and its ambiguous position within the British Empire – also engendered a certain anxiety, fuelled by a more general concern about the decline and degeneration of the Empire and British civilisation. The depiction of Egyptian antiquity in fiction – and the figure of the mummy in particular – conveys the growing unease with which the British viewed an Empire which, quite like Egyptian mummies, threatened to rise and wreak its revenge upon the coloniser. Thus, archaeology came to stand for a metaphor of imperial relations and anxieties while the mummy embodied what can be read as an imperial repressed excavated from the depths of the collective British subconscious at the time when Freud was developing the method of psychoanalysis.