The writing style of a number of authors writing in English was empirically investigated for the purpose of detecting stylistic patterns in relation to advancing age. The aim was to identify the type of stylistic markers among lexical, syntactical, phonemic, entropic, character-based, and content ones that would be most able to discriminate between early, middle, and late works of the selected authors, and the best classification or prediction algorithm most suited for this task. Two pilot studies were initially conducted. The first one concentrated on Christina Georgina Rossetti and Edgar Allan Poe from whom personal letters and poetry were selected as the genres of study, along with a limited selection of variables. Results suggested that authors and genre vary inconsistently. The second pilot study was based on Shakespeare's plays using a wider selection of variables to assess their discriminating power in relation to a past study. It was observed that the selected variables were of satisfactory predictive power, hence judged suitable for the task. Subsequently, four experiments were conducted using the variables tested in the second pilot study and personal correspondence and poetry from two additional authors, Edna St Vincent Millay and William Butler Yeats. Stepwise multiple linear regression and regression trees were selected to deal with the first two prediction experiments, and ordinal logistic regression and artificial neural networks for two classification experiments. The first experiment revealed inconsistency in accuracy of prediction and total number of variables in the final models affected by differences in authorship and genre. The second experiment revealed inconsistencies for the same factors in terms of accuracy only. The third experiment showed total number of variables in the model and error in the final model to be affected in various degrees by authorship, genre, different variable types and order in which the variables had been calculated. The last experiment had all measurements affected by the four factors. Examination of whether differences in method within each task play an important part revealed significant influences of method, authorship, and genre for the prediction problems, whereas all factors including method and various interactions dominated in the classification problems. Given the current data and methods used, as well as the results obtained, generalizable conclusions for the wider author population have been avoided.

My thesis examines the concept of sweetness as an aesthetic category in nineteenth-century British culture. My contention is that a link exists between the idea of sweetness as it appears in literary works and sugar as an everyday commodity with a complex history attached. Sugar had changed from being considered as a luxury in 1750 to a mass-market staple by the 1850s, a major cultural transition which altered the concept of sweetness as a taste. In the thesis I map the consequences of this shift as they are manifest in a range of texts from the period, alongside parallel changes in the aesthetic category of sweetness. I also assess the relationship between the material history of sweetness and the separate but related concept of aesthetic sweetness. In focussing on the relationship between sugar and sweetness in the Victorian period this thesis examines an area of nineteenth-century life that has previously never been subject to detailed study. Although several critics have explored the connection between sugar and concepts of sweetness as they relate to abolitionist debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my focus differs in that I assert that other material histories of sugar played as significant a role in developing discourses of sweetness. Throughout this study, which spans the period 1780-1870, I draw on a range of sources across a variety of genres, including abolitionist pamphlets, medical textbooks, the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Wilkie Collins, the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, and the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. I conclude that literary cultures in the nineteenth century increasingly use discourses of sugar to relate to the mass market and explore the commercialisation of literature, at a time when a growing commodity culture was seen as a threat to literary integrity.

Recent scholarship has examined the lived experience of unmarried women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, both in cities and in the countryside. Typically, scholarship in this field has focussed on women's social identity whether spinster, widow or lesbian and addressed how these types of women were variously used in fiction and the press to contest or uphold the gendered status quo. This thesis problematises the distinct characterisation of these social identities by examining works which seek to unify female social identity at the fin de siècle through a common modern experience: the conflict between individual and collective life. All of the female subjects examined in this thesis whether author, artist, or fictional character, and whether married, separated, unmarried, widowed, homosexual, or not easily identifiable either way are solitary figures. Their movement within and interaction with their environments reveal the uneasy combination of separation and exposure experienced by working women of all classes at the fin de siècle. This thesis examines the solitary female figure in works of British fiction produced between 1880 and 1922. It considers the pressures and implications of separation and exposure in relation to female celebrity and creative practices at the fin de siècle. My methodology involves examining the biography and auto/biographical works of Amy Levy (1861-1889), George Egerton (pseud. of Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright; 1859-1945), Sarah Grand (pseud. of Frances Elizabeth Bellenden McFall; 1854-1943) and Charlotte Mew (1869-1923), and drawing out aspects that speak to the desires for privacy and, conversely, publicity and/or companionship. I identify how their lived experience of this conflict broadly, between society and solitude affected the depiction of modern female consciousness in their literary works by examining their female characters subjective interaction with three environments: the foreign landscape, the home, and the city. My aim is to identify how Levy, Egerton, Grand and Mew used their literary works to acknowledge and retaliate against the restrictions which continued to limit urban women's physical, social and psychological autonomy.

Postcolonial theory teaches us that the Empire was as much a textual as a physical undertaking: the Empire was (and is) experienced through its texts. Anthony Trollope was an enthusiastic traveller and helped to "write the Empire" in both his travel narratives and in his novels. This study examines his travel narrative South Africa, and explores how the colony is depicted in this work and in Trollope's "colonial" novels: Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, John Caldigate, An Old Man's Love and The Fixed Period. Trollope's colonies are places of moral danger where the value systems instilled by English society provide the only means for overcoming the corrupting influences of the colonial space. He writes the colonies as images of Britain, but these images are never true reflections of the homeland: there is always an element of distortion present, which serves to subvert the "Englishness" of his colonial landscapes. / English Studies / MA (ENGLISH)

O objetivo desta dissertação é apresentar uma leitura de O Morro dos Ventos Uivantes (1847), de Emily Brontë, e de Jane Eyre (1847), de Charlotte Brontë, com foco nas convenções góticas contidas nas duas obras e observando as maneiras como tais convenções interferem nos movimentos das duas protagonistas, Catherine e Jane, cada uma lutando para se adaptar ao seu espaço e, ao mesmo tempo, para realizar seus anseios. Apesar de as duas obras serem estruturalmente diferentes uma da outra, ambas compartilham uma atmosfera gótica intensa, bem como uma consequente densidade psicológica que influencia a disposição mental das duas protagonistas. A leitura dos dois romances foi conduzida com a finalidade de explorar as relações encontradas entre os aspectos estruturais, sociais e psicológicos envolvidos, ressaltando os elementos góticos que representam os desafios que Catherine e Jane são forçadas a enfrentar. A obra The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), da crítica literária Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, é utilizada para identificar e contextualizar a capacidade que as imagens góticas têm de traduzir o peso imposto pelas convenções sociais sobre o processo natural de crescimento das duas protagonistas. Considerando que esse peso é consideravelmente ampliado pelas práticas sociais ligadas a questões de gênero, foi explorado o conceito de Gótico Feminino, como apresentado pela Professora Carol Margaret Davison. Especial atenção é reservada para as imagens relacionadas com espaço – o espaço psicológico necessário para o crescimento emocional das protagonistas; e o espaço físico, que determina onde e como elas devem se movimentar. Aqui o suporte teórico é oferecido pelas poéticas dos elementos primitivos, de Gaston Bachelard, para análise do corpo de imagens apresentadas nos dois romances. A conclusão comenta as soluções encontradas por Catherine Earnshaw e Jane Eyre para abrir caminho e superar os obstáculos que se lhes apresentam; e também ressalta o quanto as convenções góticas conseguem revelar sobre a estrutura social que elas representam. / This thesis consists of a reading of Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Charlotte Brontë‘s, Jane Eyre (1847), focusing on the body of Gothic conventions they hold, and the ways in which such conventions interfere with the movements of the two female protagonists, Catherine and Jane, each struggling to fit into their space, while trying to accomplish their desires. Although the two works are structurally different in several ways, they share an intense Gothic atmosphere and its consequent psychological density, which influences the mental frame of the two protagonists. In order to explore the relations among the structural, social and psychological aspects involved, a reading of the novels has been conducted, focusing on the presence of Gothic elements that stand for the challenges Catherine and Jane are bound to face. Literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick‘s work The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986) is used to identify and contextualise the capacity of Gothic imagery to reveal the weight of social conventions upon the natural process of growth of the two protagonists. Inasmuch as the pressure becomes intensified by the rules of gender settlements, the concept of Female Gothic is explored, as presented by Professor Carol Margaret Davison. Particular attention is paid to the imagery related to space – psychological space for the protagonists to grow emotionally, and physical space, as determinant of where and how they must move. Here the theoretical support is offered by Gaston Bachelard‘s poetics of the primitive elements, unveiling the body of images presented in the two novels. The conclusion indicates the solutions found by Catherine Earnshaw and by Jane Eyre to find their way and overcome the obstacles they meet; with comments on how revealing Gothic imagery is of the social conventions it represents.

This thesis explores representations of wild nature in two Arthurian texts – one British and one American – produced in an age characterised by rapid social transformation: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-1885) and Howard Pyle’s Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903). By investigation of the textual descriptions of wilderness and the portrayals of characters living there, the study aims to investigate what attitudes towards unkempt nature are displayed in the two texts. While both narratives give evidence of a powerful nostalgia for a vanishing paradise, the yearning for Eden is expressed quite differently. Pyle’s text fuses the concepts of wilderness and paradise together by depicting the unkempt landscape as a place of splendour and spiritual enjoyment. Such a celebration of nature might well be seen a reaction against the rapid loss of wild spaces across America (and Britain) during the life-time of the author. In the Idylls, paradise is represented in the domesticated yet green landscape of the faraway fairy island of Avilion. Wilderness, on the other hand, is depicted as a harmful disease progressively spreading across the realm, arguably bringing about a moral degeneration among the human characters. In the end, however, it is not wilderness, but the corruption of the supposedly civilised characters that causes the collapse of Arthur’s empire. On closer inspection, the real danger thus seems to come from culture and material conditions rather than from nature.

O objetivo desta dissertação é apresentar uma leitura de O Morro dos Ventos Uivantes (1847), de Emily Brontë, e de Jane Eyre (1847), de Charlotte Brontë, com foco nas convenções góticas contidas nas duas obras e observando as maneiras como tais convenções interferem nos movimentos das duas protagonistas, Catherine e Jane, cada uma lutando para se adaptar ao seu espaço e, ao mesmo tempo, para realizar seus anseios. Apesar de as duas obras serem estruturalmente diferentes uma da outra, ambas compartilham uma atmosfera gótica intensa, bem como uma consequente densidade psicológica que influencia a disposição mental das duas protagonistas. A leitura dos dois romances foi conduzida com a finalidade de explorar as relações encontradas entre os aspectos estruturais, sociais e psicológicos envolvidos, ressaltando os elementos góticos que representam os desafios que Catherine e Jane são forçadas a enfrentar. A obra The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), da crítica literária Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, é utilizada para identificar e contextualizar a capacidade que as imagens góticas têm de traduzir o peso imposto pelas convenções sociais sobre o processo natural de crescimento das duas protagonistas. Considerando que esse peso é consideravelmente ampliado pelas práticas sociais ligadas a questões de gênero, foi explorado o conceito de Gótico Feminino, como apresentado pela Professora Carol Margaret Davison. Especial atenção é reservada para as imagens relacionadas com espaço – o espaço psicológico necessário para o crescimento emocional das protagonistas; e o espaço físico, que determina onde e como elas devem se movimentar. Aqui o suporte teórico é oferecido pelas poéticas dos elementos primitivos, de Gaston Bachelard, para análise do corpo de imagens apresentadas nos dois romances. A conclusão comenta as soluções encontradas por Catherine Earnshaw e Jane Eyre para abrir caminho e superar os obstáculos que se lhes apresentam; e também ressalta o quanto as convenções góticas conseguem revelar sobre a estrutura social que elas representam. / This thesis consists of a reading of Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Charlotte Brontë‘s, Jane Eyre (1847), focusing on the body of Gothic conventions they hold, and the ways in which such conventions interfere with the movements of the two female protagonists, Catherine and Jane, each struggling to fit into their space, while trying to accomplish their desires. Although the two works are structurally different in several ways, they share an intense Gothic atmosphere and its consequent psychological density, which influences the mental frame of the two protagonists. In order to explore the relations among the structural, social and psychological aspects involved, a reading of the novels has been conducted, focusing on the presence of Gothic elements that stand for the challenges Catherine and Jane are bound to face. Literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick‘s work The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986) is used to identify and contextualise the capacity of Gothic imagery to reveal the weight of social conventions upon the natural process of growth of the two protagonists. Inasmuch as the pressure becomes intensified by the rules of gender settlements, the concept of Female Gothic is explored, as presented by Professor Carol Margaret Davison. Particular attention is paid to the imagery related to space – psychological space for the protagonists to grow emotionally, and physical space, as determinant of where and how they must move. Here the theoretical support is offered by Gaston Bachelard‘s poetics of the primitive elements, unveiling the body of images presented in the two novels. The conclusion indicates the solutions found by Catherine Earnshaw and by Jane Eyre to find their way and overcome the obstacles they meet; with comments on how revealing Gothic imagery is of the social conventions it represents.

This dissertation examines representations of deep time in nineteenth-century British novels in order to argue that these texts help carve a path for our contemporary definitions of deep time and the Anthropocene. Examining fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, I suggest that these novels participate in the secularization of deep time by transforming the concept of vast spiritual time that had been in use earlier in the nineteenth century into a scientifically-informed model that anticipates our current understandings of deep time. While the concept of geological time emerged in the late-eighteenth century and became widely recognized in the nineteenth, the phrase “deep time” originates in nineteenth-century literature when Thomas Carlyle first used it in a non-scientific context. By studying a wide range of fiction, I demonstrate how nineteenth-century authors employed innovative narrative strategies to convey these potentially inconceivable timescales in non-numerical terms, and thereby make them more accessible to human comprehension. I also challenge conventional distinctions between literary realism and popular romance in the period by analyzing the complementary ways in which both genres of fiction engage with vast temporal scales in their narratives. I develop my argument by examining how these novels use a model of what I call “folding time” to incorporate remote time periods into their texts. Departing from the novel’s linear narrative structure to bring distant historical moments into direct contact with one another, folding time situates human activity in relation to vast pre-and-post-human periods and in doing so acknowledges an age of humans within deep time; in this sense, these novels articulate an early concept of the Anthropocene. By including deep time in the novel’s traditionally individual and familial framework, these authors simultaneously expand the novel’s temporal scope and humanize vast scientific timescales. Further, as these novels illustrate characters’ psychological responses to overwhelming scientific timescales, they reposition deep time in relation to private temporal experience. This study employs an interdisciplinary approach to acknowledge the mutually reciprocal relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century, and draws on temporality studies, history of science theory, and literary criticism to situate its argument in relation to current critical discussions. I also consider the work of scientists such as Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and William Thomson in order to contextualize my novels’ scientific references. By studying nineteenth-century British novels in relation to scientific temporalities, this dissertation recovers an overlooked component of the history of deep time that has had significant and lasting cultural influence given the enduring popularity and wide readership of these texts.

This thesis examines the figure of Medusa in the works of three Victorian women: the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), and the artist Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919). For many in an era that sought to categorize women according to rigid social boundaries, Medusa embodied all that is suspicious, dangerous, and alluring about women. But in subtle and unexpected ways, these three women reimagined the Medusa archetype and used it to explore female experience and expression, as well as the challenges and complexities of female authorship. In their works, Medusa, like other hybrid personae such as the mermaid and the lamia, became a figure through which to explore liminal spaces and slippery categories. I argue that these women prefigured the twentieth-century feminist rehabilitation of Medusa. I also suggest that this proto-feminist transformation of the myth draws, directly and indirectly, from the tradition of Ovid, the first poet to suggest that Medusa’s monstrosity resulted from her victimhood and that her power is not merely destructive, but also creative. My analysis contends that, contrary to common understanding, women were revisioning Medusa’s meaning well before the twentieth century.

No description available.