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This thesis considers the representation of manly identity in the works of George MacDonald, and the way in which that identity is formed in relation to shifting power networks and contemporary social discourses. I argue that the environment of technological and societal change experienced in the mid-Victorian era (in the wake of industrialisation, urbanisation, changes in suffrage and war) led to a cultural need to re-align social, political, physical and economic power within a framework of male moral strength. Taking his lead from Thomas Carlyle and German transcendentalism, MacDonald promoted a paternalist ‗ideal‘ of manliness that articulated a synthesis of moral and physical power, yet which also served to promote a paradigm of domestic authority within diverse areas of male interaction. The dual purposes of this ideal were the defence of national identity (the purview of what I term the ‗Soldier body‘), and the enforcement of a paternalist authority hierarchy that is swiftly subsumed within a hierarchy of social status. As a result, we see the growth of close inter-relationships between the representation of manly identity and the language of class, heavily influenced by Christian socialist narratives of individual development through social education and quiescence. Moreover, we begin to witness disturbing scenes of violence and control, as aspects of MacDonald‘s culture defy confinement within his model of patriarchal domestic authority.

This dissertation examines the central use of implicature within the Victorian novel. 'Implicature' denotes a communicative strategy in which a reader must infer the primary meaning of an utterance from that utterance's relationship to its context, rather than 'decode' explicitly presented information. While all communications rely on implicature to an extent, the novels examined in this thesis contain large gaps in their explicit narration and rely primarily on implicature to communicate central elements of their plots. If readers do not recognise these texts' implicatures, the texts will often appear incoherent: their implicatures must be acknowledged in order for the text to be understood. Because little has been said about the central role implicature can play in fictional narration, this thesis contributes to interpretations of these novels that are currently being discussed in Victorian literary scholarship, as well as literary pragmatic debates about the use of implicature within fictional texts. The dissertation's secondary aim is to examine the implicatures which may be generated by the author's exploitation of certain reader assumptions. It focuses on the reader's potential assumption of narratorial omniscience, and relates it to the reader assumption of the narrative's fictionality. This secondary emphasis contributes to literary pragmatic conceptions of fictionality, and contributes to narratological discussions of narratorial omniscience. Chapter One examines represented illegitimate pregnancies in Victorian novels, and illustrates implicature's use as a politeness strategy. It explains how this use of implicature is called for by the novels' fictional and Victorian contexts. Chapter Two discusses implicatures which communicate characters' semiconscious romantic desires, and relates these representations to Victorian discourses on the unconscious and narratological scholarship on consciousness representation. Chapter Three discusses the central use of implicature in sensation fiction to create narrative 'puzzles', and connects the ensuing playful, sometimes offensive tone to these implicatures' satire of the realist mode.

This thesis considers some of the ways in which the sea was written about and written with in English nineteenth-century prose fiction. It has become a commonplace of literary criticism that, in the century preceding modernism, prose fiction about the sea was unthinking and uninteresting: indentured to outworn generic codes, tied to certain clichés of national identity, Empire, or slipshod sublimity, and vaguely evoking some or all of them. This thesis does not attempt a general contradiction of this view. What this thesis does suggest is that Victorian fiction is not always naïve about its subject and, at times, displays an awareness of the generic and stylistic hazards attendant upon writing about the sea. To write about the sea was to risk writing vaguely. However, to Victorian novelists who wished to draw on vagueness, the sea offered a subject and a style that could be put to use. The introduction sets out the terms of my discussion both of vagueness, and of the attitudes of Victorian writers and readers to the sea as a setting and theme for fiction. The terms of philosophical vagueness are compared with the nineteenth century’s most influential aesthetics of obscurity: the sublime. The purchase of these theories is then tested, first in relation to Ruskin’s lifelong interest in representing the sea in painting and prose, and second with reference to novels by George Eliot, Thackeray, and Gaskell. Prior critical approaches are also considered, as is the topic of empire, which I explain is not my primary focus. The body of the thesis is devoted primarily to three author studies: Frederick Marryat, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad. Each author wrote vaguely about the sea, though vagueness is shown to be, in all three cases, a resource that can be drawn upon with degrees of self-consciousness; if, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, vague language was considered appropriate to the sea, the linguistic resources that the sea in turn offered began to seem increasingly applicable to experiences characterised by uncertainty. I suggest that the sea establishes conditions that invite a rereading of the many repetitions in Marryat’s novels. These repetitions can be viewed, I argue, as traces of Marryat’s struggle to find a language appropriate to the ocean. In Dickens’s writing, the sea is often present as a source both of metaphor and of experience. I suggest that the slippery doubleness of the literary sea is a means by which both Dickens’s characters, and the individuals he encounters as a journalist, can be made to coexist with their ideal or literary doubles. In my chapter on Conrad, I argue that the sea forms a crucial element of the kind of literary impressionism Conrad recommends in his preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) and elsewhere. Vagueness arises when the border between linguistic concepts becomes blurred. Two short interludes, on the subject of shores and depths respectively, consider such permeable thresholds. These interludes also provide a means of charting changes that occurred across the period, a counterpoint to the more temporally specific focus of the author studies. I conclude with a brief discussion of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). Critics have distinguished the high modernist sea from what came before; this coda insists that the sort of vagueness valued by Woolf has an earlier origin.

The changing role of women was arguably the most fundamental area of concern and crisis in the Victorian era. Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the evolving role of women, particularly in regard to the development of the New Woman. I propose that there is an intermediary character type that exists between Coventry Patmore's "angel of the house" and the New Woman of the fin de siecle. I call this character the Wandering Woman. This new archetypal character adheres to the following list of characteristics: she is a literal or figurative orphan, is genteelly poor or of the working class, is pursued by a rogue who offers financial security in return for sexual favors; this sexual liaison, unsanctified by marriage, causes her to be stigmatized in the eyes of society; and her stigmatization results in expulsion from society and enforced wandering through a literal or figurative wilderness. There are three variations of this archetype: the child-woman as represented by the titular heroine of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Little Nell of Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop; the sexual deviant as represented by Miss Wade of Dickens' Little Dorrit; and the fallen woman as represented by the titular heroine of Thomas Hardy' Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hetty Sorrel of George Eliot's Adam Bede, and Lady Dedlock of Dickens' Bleak House. Although the Wandering Woman's journey may resemble a variation of the bildungsroman tradition, it is not, because unlike male characters in this genre, women have limited opportunities. Wandering Women always carry a stigma because of their "illicit" sexual relationship, are isolated because of this, and never experience a sense of fun or adventure during their journey. The Wandering Woman suffers permanent damage to her reputation, as well as to her emotional welfare, because she has been unable to conform to archaic, unrealistic modes of behavior. Her story is not, then, a type of coming of age story, but is, rather, the story of the end of an age.

This MA thesis is concerned with the analysis of three poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The theoretical basis of this work is the theory of "ut pictura poesis" which examines the relationship between poetry and fine arts. In the case of Rossetti, this theory can be easily applied since Rossetti was not only a poet but mainly a painter. "The Blessed Damozel" which is the first poem to be analyzed, exists as a painting as well as a musical composition by Claude Debussy. The second poem in this thesis is "The Card Dealer" which was inspired by an actual painting by Theodor Van Holst, a copy of which Rossetti himself owned, though the original visual image is considerably modified in the poem. The last poem is "My Sister's Sleep" whose dramatic elements of individual scenes are quite outstanding. Just like the two preceding poems, "My Sister's Sleep" uses "painterly techniques" as well (the spatial composition of figures on the scene, emphasis on details, "painting" the scene and atmosphere, characterization, gestures, colours, materials, slowed-down tempo, general stasis of depiction, elongation of the tense moment to which the entire poem aspires, symbolism, mysticism, etc), which in effect create an easily imaginable mental picture that can be compared to actual Pre-Raphaelite paintings. These (and...

Over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, a professional scientific and medical community was coming into being. Exclusive membership, limits to the definition of science, and separation of the professional from the popular sphere became important elements in the consolidation of scientific authority. Studies exploring Victorian scientific authority have tended to focus on professional journals and organs of middle-class culture; this thesis takes a new approach in exploring how this authority is reflected and negotiated across the content of the popular mass-market periodicals which provided leisure reading for working- and lower-class men and women. It uses as examples Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, Reynolds's Miscellany and the Family Herald. The readers of these publications were consumers of scientific information, participants in popularised science and beneficiaries and subjects of new research, but were increasingly excluded from the formal processes of developing scientific theory and practice. Examining representations of anatomy and of mesmerism, health advice and theories of class and gender, the thesis argues for an expanded understanding of mass-market periodicals as communicators of scientific ideas, showing how such material widely informs the content of these publications from fiction to jokes to full-length factual articles. However, the role of the periodicals is much wider than simply the transmission of received ideas, and the thesis reveals a plurality of positions with regard to science and medicine within the popular press. The periodicals engage with modern science in complex and varied ways, accepting, modifying and challenging scientific theories and methods from different positions. The form of the periodical is key, presenting multiple sources of knowledge and ways in which readers may be invited to respond. Chambers's broad support for scientific progress is informed by its useful knowledge identity but tempered by its founding editor's own ambivalent relationship to the scientific establishment. The Herald, influenced by both the periodical's commercial character and its editor's adherence to a spiritual, anti-materialist view of existence, is strongly resistant to modern science, while Reynolds's incorporates it alongside other forms of knowledge in its aim to educate, entertain and empower readers from a socialist perspective.

Les études qui entreprennent d’évaluer la place de la maladie dans les romans de Dickens et Collins adoptent souvent le point de vue du médecin, montrant comment leurs peintures de la maladie constituent des diagnostics scientifiquement exacts. Or la médecine est d’abord un discours sur la maladie : diagnostiquer les personnages des romanciers reviendrait donc à considérer la grille de lecture médicale comme outil d’analyse valable pour évaluer la maladie dans leur œuvre. Cette thèse se propose d’interroger la pertinence d’une telle grille de lecture, qui semble anachronique [ce discours se construit tout au long du XIXe siècle, il n’est donc pas constitué au moment où les deux romanciers écrivent]. Il s’agit de comprendre comment le discours médical s’est imposé au fil du XIXe siècle : pour dire et écrire la maladie, la médecine s’est inspirée d’autres types de discours, et en premier lieu celui du roman, qu’elle a utilisé pour tenter de prendre place dans les esprits victoriens. Après avoir établi les conditions dans lesquelles est né ce nouveau discours normatif, cette thèse analyse la relation de Dickens et Collins avec ce discours. Conscients que les médecins tentent de passer d’un art à une science positive, les deux romanciers semblent se méfier des nouvelles catégories nosographiques et méthodes cliniques. Nous sommes alors fondés à lire leurs romans non plus seulement comme des documents qui questionnent la pathologie scientifique, mais aussi comme des prismes d’autres imaginaires du corps malade. L’étude de leur œuvre dévoile ainsi les soubassements imaginaires de la nouvelle médecine, mais aussi l’esthétique du morbide propre à chacun des deux auteurs. / Studies concentrating on the value of disease in novels by Collins or Dickens often adopt a medical point of view, showing that the novelists depict illness with the eyes of trained clinicians, offering surprisingly precise case studies and diagnoses. This approach sheds light on some episodes; yet, the “medico-realists” seem to overlook that by viewing literature through a medical prism, they are using the tools and rationale of a constructed discourse. Pathology, which is the science that studies the disease and not the disease itself, was created all long the 19th century. Viewing the novelists’ treatment of disease only through the filter of pathology gives a reductive image of the way they understand morbidity. This research aims at deconstructing the medical discourse, and at showing how, to take up Dickens’s words, “for theories, as for organised beings, there is also a Natural Selection and a Struggle for Life”, which str! uggle scientific medicine has apparently won. Doctors have used other types of discourse to create their own, and in so doing, novels have been a great source of inspiration. After positing that medicine creates a myth of positivism, this study goes on to analyse the way Dickens and Collins considered the rise of this new field. Unlike what medico-realists seem to take for granted, the novelists did not subscribe to the new medical methods and even denied understanding disease according to pathological categories. Their use of diseases unexpectedly unveils the way doctors wrote and imagined disease. Studying Dickens’s and Collins’s ways of conceiving pathology offers insight into the imaginary origins of a burgeoning science.

My thesis problematizes the simplistically and widely accepted idea of a Victorian ‘crisis of faith’ or religious ‘decline.’ Most historical and critical narratives of nineteenth-century Britain portray the Victorian Age as a period marked by a crisis of faith and a gradual secularization through (Darwinian) scientific developments. My work questions this by examining the late-Victorian novels of colonial India and the British New Woman novels. My first chapter deals with Victorian popular fiction that presents the invasion of Victorian London by colonial idols. The idols, overdetermined as both Hindu and Theosophist in inspiration, force the British legal system to recognize the limits of its own materialist perceptions of reality, so that it finally arrives at a deeper understanding of spirituality. My second chapter deals with Victorian New Woman novels where I study how the British New Woman as a literary figure, despite apparent unbelief and disempowerment, embodies a deep-seated religious power that can be assumed only by a woman and that helps challenge the assumption of declining faith. My final chapter examines the shift of scene to India, where once again the English men and women inadvertently express their fears of British secularization in the context of their encounter with Oriental faiths, but ultimately arrive at a richer appreciation of the religious ‘impossible’ through this encounter with colonial ‘otherness.’

My dissertation, Understanding the Gray:Aging Women in Victorian Culture and Fiction, explores the cultural construction of aging for middle-class Victorian women and how aging was experienced and then depicted within novels. Chiefly, I work from midcentury to the end of the century in order to understand the experience of aging and ways women were ascribed age due to their position in society as spinsters, mothers, and progressive women. I explore how the age of fictional women reflects and contributes to critical debates concerning how Victorian women were expected to behave. Debates over separate spheres, how women were perceived in British society, and how women’s rights changed during the 19th century highlight how aging affected women and how they were treated throughout the century. Victorian fiction illustrates the ways women achieved different roles in society and how age and the perception of age affected their ability to do so. Understanding how aging was experienced, understood, and ascribed to Victorian women who fought in various ways for new terms of citizenship and mobility helps us begin to trace how we treat and respond to aging in women today. The first chapter outlines the social status of unmarried women and spinsters, considering how age affected women’s ability to lead professional lives in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). The second chapter, on George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, explores older motherhood through Mrs Transome and illustrates how the novel seeks to teach younger women of the pitfalls of unequal marriages. The third chapter builds a cultural understanding of how aging was linked to progressive, anti-domestic womanhood and racial impurity through the New Woman and in H.R. Haggard’s She.