Issues which faced Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries include the effects of new scientific theories on traditional religious belief, the impact of technological innovation, the implications of mass literacy and the changing role of women. This thesis records how such issues are reflected in contemporary literature, focusing on the emergence of popular culture and the best seller, a term which conflates author and novel. The first English best seller was Marie Corelli and, by way of introduction, Part I offers a summary of her life and her novels and a critical overview of her work. Part II of the thesis examines how the theory of evolution undermined traditional religious belief and prompted the search for a new creed able to defy materialism and reconcile science and religion. Contemporary literature mirrors the consequent interest in spiritualism during the 1890s and the period immediately following the Great War, and critical readings of Corelli�s A Romance of Two Worlds and The Life Everlasting demonstrate that these novels - which form the nucleus of her personal theology, the Electric Creed - are based on selections from the New Testament, occultism and, in particular, science and spiritualism. Part III of the thesis looks at the emergence of �the woman question�, the corresponding backlash by conservatives and the ways in which these conflicting views are explored in the popular literature of the time. A critical examination of the novella, My Wonderful Wife, reveals how Corelli uses social Darwinism in an ambivalent critique of the New Woman. Several of Corelli�s essays are discussed, showing that her views about the role of women were complex. A critical analysis of The Secret Power engages with Corelli�s peculiar kind of feminism, which would deny women the vote but envisages female scientists inventing and operating airships in order to secure the future of the human race. Interest in Marie Corelli has re-emerged recently, particularly in occult and feminist circles. Corelli�s immense popularity also makes her an important figure in cultural studies. This thesis adds to the body of knowledge about Corelli in that it consciously endeavours to avoid spiritualist or feminist ideological frameworks, instead using contemporary science as a context for examining her work.

This thesis explores the idiosyncrasies of the nineteenth-century property market and the significance of rented spaces in the literary imagination, focusing on Charles Dickens's fiction and journalism. The traditional understanding of the Victorian home has been challenged in recent criticism that points to the permeability of the public and private spheres, complicates the ways in which gender mapped onto these spheres, and highlights the difference between home and house, freehold and leasehold. This thesis contributes to the discussion by showing that domestic space was a more fractured concept than the middle-class ideal suggests. Versions of 'home' could be found in a multitude of unlikely and unstable places: in inns, hotels, lodging-houses, boarding-houses, and private houses subdivided into apartments for income. Drawing particular attention to London, I reveal tenancy - the commodification of space - to be a governing force in everyday life in the period. The vast majority of the population had an immediate economic relationship with the rooms and houses they inhabited, and this basic fact had various social, psychological and imaginative corollaries. Dickens may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of domestic ideology, but as this thesis argues, rented spaces had an enduring hold upon him. Most significantly, for Dickens, to write about tenancy meant to write about writing. His tenancy narratives touch upon questions of genre, style, character, authorial self-consciousness and the literary marketplace - especially his dialogue with the writers working around him. I explain that the emerging prominence of rented spaces gave Dickens and his circle new narrative opportunities, offering them a tool with which to study the boundaries of different genres. Space, then, does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the novel, but plays a direct part in determining which incidents take place. Accordingly, the chapters in this thesis are principally divided by genre. The introduction lays out the historical, theoretical and geographical coordinates of the argument. The first chapter identifies some of the key features of Dickens's emerging urban style, situates his early work within an influential farce tradition, and brings the figure of the landlady to life. The second discusses spatial metaphors in the Bildungsroman; it ends with an argument about the 1851 window-tax repeal and its implications for literary lodging-houses. Chapter 3 considers the sudden growth of the hospitality industry during the Great Exhibition and its corresponding narratives, from comedy to sensation fiction. This is followed by a short interlude on seaside lodgings, where Dickens and his contemporaries modernised the pastoral for the nineteenth century. After charting contemporary debates surrounding 'low' lodging-houses, Chapter 4 demonstrates how these writers used rented spaces to make major contributions to the rise of the detective story. The fifth chapter, on living alone and living together, is largely dedicated to the multi-authored Christmas numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round; these witty collections suggest that the dynamics of the lodging-house reflect the politics of Dickens's immediate circle. Finally, a coda contemplates the legacy of Dickens's tenancy narratives in the late nineteenth century and beyond.

Orientador: Helio Rebello Cardoso Junior / Banca: Lourdes Madalena Gazarini Conde Feitosa / Banca: Claudio Denipoti / Banca: Ivan Esperança Rocha / Banca: Milton Carlos Costa / Resumo: O século XIX foi caracterizado pela historiografia ocidental como um momento de elaboração e definição de importantes conceitos científicos, pela busca por avanço tecnológico, assim como pelo crescimento literário e cultural. A retomada e a utilização de elementos da cultura greco-romana têm sido presença constante na formação e utilização desses conceitos. Alguns trabalhos populares vitorianos sugeriam que os romanos clássicos deixaram para os ingleses uma civilização que se dirigiu quase que diretamente para o estado moderno inglês. Partindo desse pressuposto, o objetivo deste trabalho é analisar como os vitorianos interpretaram a sexualidade romana, bem como, a conduziram no que diz respeito à construção de uma moral sexual no período, através da leitura das obras de Ovídio, poeta latino do século I d.C. que teve muita repercussão em seu momento histórico. Dentre suas obras, a Ars Amatoria se destaca, por pregar a ideia de que o prazer sexual entre homens e mulheres, para ser plenamente satisfatório, deveria ser mútuo, e a relação, livre e espontânea por ambas as partes. No entanto, Ovídio foi uma referência não assumida entre os vitorianos, justamente pelo fato de o século XIX estar marcado por uma necessidade de controle da conduta sexual. Esse controle insere-se no contexto de uma nação que vive um momento de mudanças devido à crescente industrialização e logo ao descontrole populacional desencadeado por fatores sociais, econômicos e imperialistas. A literatura vitoriana se caracteriza em parte pela produção de romances e biografias moralizantes, fato este que excluiria Ovídio do modelo de um herói que deveria ser exaltado. / Abstract: The nineteenth century was characterized by Western historiography as a period of working up and definition of important scientific concepts, by search for technological advancement, as well as by literary and cultural growth. The recovery and the use of greek and roman culture elements have been constantly present in the formation and use of these concepts. Some popular Victorian works suggested that the Classic Romans left to the British a civilization which turned almost directly to the modern English state. Based on this purpose, this work aims to analyze how the Victorians interpreted the Roman sexuality, and how they led it concerning to the construction of a sexual morality in that period. For this, we resort to reading Ovid‟s works, Latin poet of the first century AD which had repercussions in his historical moment. Among his works, Ars Amatoria is detached, for preaching the idea that sexual pleasure for men and women, to be fully satisfactory, should be mutual, and the relationship, free and voluntary by both parties. However, Ovid was a reference not assumed among the Victorians, precisely because the nineteenth century is marked by a need to control sexual behavior. This control is inside the context of a nation that is experiencing a period of change due to increasing industrialization and soon to lack of controll of population triggered by social, economic and imperialist factors. The Victorian literature is characterized in part by the production of moralizing novels and biographies, a fact that excluded Ovid as a model of a hero which should be exalted. / Doutor

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:32:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011-03-01Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:03:52Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 barbosa_rc_dr_assis_parcial.pdf: 125860 bytes, checksum: 550870f74b0312a91ef7c0528c96879f (MD5) Bitstreams deleted on 2015-08-28T16:09:01Z: barbosa_rc_dr_assis_parcial.pdf,. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2015-08-28T16:10:02Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000641254_20151231.pdf: 128485 bytes, checksum: 4ff5f025ae353b5b7814410496d06c74 (MD5) Bitstreams deleted on 2016-01-04T10:26:43Z: 000641254_20151231.pdf,. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2016-01-04T10:28:34Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000641254.pdf: 1243575 bytes, checksum: 8e0bca5f612405a468e43bc3331e1966 (MD5) Bitstreams deleted on 2017-01-02T15:03:56Z: 000641254.pdf,. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2017-01-02T15:05:10Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000641254.pdf: 49504527 bytes, checksum: 113151c3d6ff3c2410941b87c6faaab1 (MD5) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / O século XIX foi caracterizado pela historiografia ocidental como um momento de elaboração e definição de importantes conceitos científicos, pela busca por avanço tecnológico, assim como pelo crescimento literário e cultural. A retomada e a utilização de elementos da cultura greco-romana têm sido presença constante na formação e utilização desses conceitos. Alguns trabalhos populares vitorianos sugeriam que os romanos clássicos deixaram para os ingleses uma civilização que se dirigiu quase que diretamente para o estado moderno inglês. Partindo desse pressuposto, o objetivo deste trabalho é analisar como os vitorianos interpretaram a sexualidade romana, bem como, a conduziram no que diz respeito à construção de uma moral sexual no período, através da leitura das obras de Ovídio, poeta latino do século I d.C. que teve muita repercussão em seu momento histórico. Dentre suas obras, a Ars Amatoria se destaca, por pregar a ideia de que o prazer sexual entre homens e mulheres, para ser plenamente satisfatório, deveria ser mútuo, e a relação, livre e espontânea por ambas as partes. No entanto, Ovídio foi uma referência não assumida entre os vitorianos, justamente pelo fato de o século XIX estar marcado por uma necessidade de controle da conduta sexual. Esse controle insere-se no contexto de uma nação que vive um momento de mudanças devido à crescente industrialização e logo ao descontrole populacional desencadeado por fatores sociais, econômicos e imperialistas. A literatura vitoriana se caracteriza em parte pela produção de romances e biografias moralizantes, fato este que excluiria Ovídio do modelo de um herói que deveria ser exaltado. / The nineteenth century was characterized by Western historiography as a period of working up and definition of important scientific concepts, by search for technological advancement, as well as by literary and cultural growth. The recovery and the use of greek and roman culture elements have been constantly present in the formation and use of these concepts. Some popular Victorian works suggested that the Classic Romans left to the British a civilization which turned almost directly to the modern English state. Based on this purpose, this work aims to analyze how the Victorians interpreted the Roman sexuality, and how they led it concerning to the construction of a sexual morality in that period. For this, we resort to reading Ovid‟s works, Latin poet of the first century AD which had repercussions in his historical moment. Among his works, Ars Amatoria is detached, for preaching the idea that sexual pleasure for men and women, to be fully satisfactory, should be mutual, and the relationship, free and voluntary by both parties. However, Ovid was a reference not assumed among the Victorians, precisely because the nineteenth century is marked by a need to control sexual behavior. This control is inside the context of a nation that is experiencing a period of change due to increasing industrialization and soon to lack of controll of population triggered by social, economic and imperialist factors. The Victorian literature is characterized in part by the production of moralizing novels and biographies, a fact that excluded Ovid as a model of a hero which should be exalted.

This study explores how Anglophone fiction from the mid-Victorian period to the outbreak of the First World War acted as an imaginative testing-ground for theories of the evolution of language. Debates about the past development and the future of language ranged beyond the scope of empirical data and into speculative narrative. Fiction offered to realize such narratives in detail, building imaginative worlds out of different theories of language evolution. In the process, it also often tested these theories, exposing their contradictions. The lack of clear boundaries between nature and culture in language studies of the period enabled fictions of language evolution to explore questions to which contemporary researchers have returned. To what extent is communication instinctive or conventional? How do social and biological factors interact in the production of meaning? The study traces two opposing tendencies of thought on language evolution, naming them language ‘progressivism’ and ‘vitalism’. Progressivism imagined speakers evolving away from involuntary, instinctive vocalizations to extert rational control over their discourse with mechanical precision. By contrast, language vitalism posited a mysterious, natural power in words which had weakened and fragmented with the rise of writing and industrial society. Certain genres of fiction lent themselves to exploration of these ideas, with utopian tales seeking to envision the end-goals of progressive theory. Representations of primitive language in imperial and prehistoric romances also promoted progressivism by depicting the instinctive, irrational speech from which ‘civilization’ was imagined as advancing away. Conversely, much historical and invasion fiction idealized a linguistic past when speech had expressed natural truth, and the authentic folk origins of its speakers. Both progressivism and vitalism were undermined through the late nineteenth century by developments in biology, which challenged claims of underlying stability in nature or purpose in change. Simultaneously, philologists increasingly argued that meaning was conventional, attacking models of semantic progress and degradation. In this context, a number of authors reconceptualized language in their fiction as a mixture of instinct and convention. These imaginative explorations of the borderlands between the social and biological in communication prefigured many of the concerns of twenty-first-century biosemiotics.

Two children, Dan and Una, sit in the woods and listen to a story of Britain's early history told to them by Sir Richard, a spirit conjured from the past for this instructive purpose. In this tale, Sir Richard gains treasure by defeating the "devils" that terrorize a village of African people. In many ways, this framed narrative sets up the expected hierarchy found in children's literature wherein the adult actively narrates a story and the child silently listens and learns. However, the children of Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill do something else--they question and challenge. At the end of the story, Dan declares, "I don't believe they were Devils" and backs up his disbelief by drawing on other books he has read. While much scholarship on children's literature reads child characters through the lens of adult desire and finds them voiceless and empty, I seek out moments wherein these imagined children, like Dan and Una, challenge adult dissemination of knowledge. Building upon recent scholarship that sees the child less as a straightforward projection of desire and more complexly as a site for conflicting ideologies and tensions, my dissertation enters into the critical conversation concerning the figure of the child and suggests a fresh, new approach to reading adult-child relations in children's literature. Urging readers to focus on the ways in which fantasy literature imagines and represents child characters' relationships to language--as readers, authors, storytellers, and questioners--I argue that whether deliberately or unselfconsciously these works imagine a child capable of interacting with language in order to seize power and thus unsettle the force of adult desire. Even as the characters themselves remain the products of adult creation, the relationship to language they model for their implied readers transcends a simple one-to-one correlation of adult authorial desire and a child reader's internalization. Each of my four chapters focuses on a pair of authors: Sarah Fielding and Mary Martha Sherwood, Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, Frederika Macdonald and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Rudyard Kipling and E. Nesbit. Instead of mere escapism and fancy, these portraits of childhood address debates surrounding the emerging genre of the novel, religious censorship, educational legislation, imperial ideology, medical discourses, and textbook publication. By juxtaposing these novels in pairs alongside these significant historical contexts, my project brings the child's voice, which we often ignore, to the surface. Like Dan and his declaration of disbelief, the readers imagined by these important works of fantasy refuse to sit in silence and instead play with words to question, create, and challenge.

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

<p>This dissertation argues that the boundaries between capitalism and criminality have become increasingly blurred over the past two centuries, and it traces this development through the Victorian era into American modernity. Operating on the premise that popular literature reflects wide-spread concerns and anxieties of a common audience, each chapter focuses on one primary text as a cite for analysis through which we gain a window of insight into the popular perception of criminals and the role of criminality in developing capitalism. In an attempt to provide relevant context and establish a solid foundation on which to work, the dissertation begins with an introduction that outlines major developments in the British literary field, with a particular eye toward bourgeoning popular mediums, beginning in the eighteenth century and leading into the Victorian era. This foundational work establishes urban compression and rapid industrial development as major concerns for a Victorian audience and figures them as the backdrop on which the discourse of criminality will play itself out.</p> <p>The first half of the dissertation focuses on the Victorian era, whereas the latter half analyzes works of American literature in the early-twentieth century. Chapter one looks to <i>Oliver Twist</i> as the preeminent example of Victorian criminality, with particular emphasis on middle-class complicity in reinforcing the social structures and environmental determinism that Dickens identified as major causes of Victorian crime. Chapter two progresses to the late-Victorian era and discusses Anthony Trollope’s <i>The Way We Live Now</i>. Doing so allows approaching Victorian criminality from the opposite vantage point, seeing the advent of white-collar crime and fraud as now more significant than the formerly dominant concern of petty crimes as seen in <i>Oliver Twist</i>. These early chapters mark a progression of criminality that gradually enmeshes itself in the habits of ambitious capitalists, which I argue is paramount to the construction of the discourse of criminality and capitalism. Rather than isolated incidents, I forward these texts as representative of thematic shifts in the literary field and public consciousness.</p> <p>Such a progression is carried over into American modernism, which constitutes the focus of chapters three and four. In chapter three, systemic violence inherent in laissez-faire capitalism and cronyism become the focus of the discussion, as presented in Upton Sinclair’s <i>The Jungle</i>. This chapter presents Sinclair’s didacticism as a necessary and significant progression in popular social-critique literature, and it contends that the gradual shift away from the personalized narrative of Jurgis to the heightened awareness of his political awakening marks an important development that figures criminality as not only part of, but indeed integral to, capitalism and its smooth functioning. This is contrasted with chapter four which presents <i>The Great Gatsby</i> as a misinterpretation of the lessons presented in <i>The Jungle</i> and reverts back to individualism as a flawed solution to capitalism’s ills. Whereas <i>The Jungle</i> was critiqued based on socialist didacticism and so-called lack of artistry, <i>The Great Gatsby </i>experienced immense success for its artistry, despite the fact that it falls back into the trap of individualism, romanticizing the criminal and capitalistic success of its protagonist while ultimately slating him for sacrifice to reinforce the status quo.</p> <p>These four chapters, I argue, constitute four major stages in progression of the discourse on criminality and capitalism, but leave many questions still unanswered, particularly as regards how society should appropriately and adequately engage the issues contained within these texts. An epilogue is included at the end of this project as an attempt to look forward to expansion of this research and continue to trace this progression up to present-day texts of popular culture. In doing so, my research will engage the development of the criminally-capitalist antihero in popular culture and argue that such figures are representative of the crisis of contemporary capitalism that sees no legitimate (nor illegitimate) ways of succeeding in capitalism.</p>

Thesis advisor: Maia McAleavey / My dissertation explores how nineteenth-century novelists imagined rational thinking as a cognitive resource distributed through physical, social, national, and even imperial channels. Scholars studying nineteenth-century discourses of mind frequently position rational thinking as the normalized given against those unconscious and irrational modes of thought most indicative of the period's scientific discoveries. My project argues, in contrast, that writers were just as invested in exploring rational thinking as multivalent procedure, a versatile category of mental activity that could be layered into novelistic representations of thinking by "thinking with games": that is, incorporating forms of thinking as discussed by popular print media. By reading novels alongside historical gaming practices and gaming literatures and incorporating the insights of twenty-first century cognitive theory, I demonstrate that novelists Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling experimented with models of gaming to make rational thinking less abstract and reveal its action across bodies, objects, and communities. If Victorian mind-sciences uncovered "thinking fast," games prioritized "thinking slow," a distinction described by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his recent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2013). Scenes of games often slow thinking down, allowing the author to expose the complex processes of rational, cognitive performance. Furthermore, such scenes register the expanded perspective of recent cognitive literary studies such as those by Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine, which understand thinking, at least in part, as externalized and social. In effect, by reading scenes of thinking along the lines proposed by strategic gaming, I demonstrate how novels imagined social possibilities for internal processing that extend beyond the bounds of any individual's consciousness. Of course, games easily serve as literary tropes or metaphors; but analyzing scenes of gaming alongside games literature underscores how authors incorporated frameworks of teachable, social thinking from gaming into their representations of rational consciousness. For strategy games literature, better play required learning how to read the minds of other players, how to turn their thinking inside out. The nineteenth-century novel's relationship to games is best understood, I suggest, within the landscape of popular games literature published at its side - sometimes literally. An article on "Whistology" appears just after an installment of The Woman in White in Dickens's All the Year Round; the Cornhill Magazine published a paean to "Chess" amid the serialization of George Eliot's Romola. As a genre, strategy manuals developed new techniques for exercising the cognitive abilities of their readers and, often along parallel lines, so do the novels I discuss. Prompting the reader to think like a game player often involved recreating the kinds of dynamic, active thinking taught by games literature through the novel's form. My dissertation explores how authors used such forms to train their readers in habits of memory, deduction, and foresight encouraged by strategy gaming. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Although the Bible retained substantial cultural currency throughout the Victorian period (1837–1901), new approaches in biblical criticism challenged accepted ideas about its divine inspiration and theological unity. This dissertation shows that the pressures exerted by this biblical criticism prompted Victorian writers to undertake an imaginative recovery of wisdom literature. Adapting wisdom literature’s characteristic forms in their own works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction prose, these writers constructed dynamic frameworks of revelation and authority. My study analyzes a series of strategically chosen case studies from the 1840s to the 1880s: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s A Drama of Exile (1844), George MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), George Eliot’s Romola (1862–63), John Ruskin’s The Queen of the Air (1869), and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). This selection brings together writers who self-identified as Christian but whose eclectic ideas set them apart from their contemporaries, as well as those who rejected Christianity but nonetheless engaged thoughtfully with biblical texts in their own writing. By demonstrating that these writers used wisdom literature to productively re-imagine the experiences of questioning and doubt, this dissertation contributes to the interdisciplinary project of reassessing religion and secularization in the nineteenth century. More specifically, my focus on biblical wisdom literature aims to revise and supplement the critical paradigm of the Victorian sage, which has come to define scholarly understanding of biblical allusion and literary authority in this period. Where previous studies have focused on the sage’s prophetic rhetoric, this dissertation argues that adaptations of wisdom literature generated an alternative mode of writing, one characterized by an artistic and heuristic poetics. / Graduate / 2021-08-11