A lonely damsel's imprisonment within a castle or convent cell; the eavesdropping of a prisoner next door; the framed image of a woman with a mysterious past. These are familiar themes from 1790s gothic novels, which exploded onto the scene with milestone works like Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis' The Monk. They are also key features, however, of canonical nineteenth-century poems, from Tennyson's "Mariana" to Browning's "My Last Duchess." In this dissertation, I argue that tropes of the gothic novel became disseminated in poetry of the Victorian era, manifesting as formal features that have not heretofore been recognized by scholars as essentially gothic. While most scholars recognize gothic poetry only in a small subset of poems that include ghosts, graveyards or superstition, I contend that gothic tropes became definitive of what we now regard as quintessentially "Victorian" poetic forms: the dramatic monologue, women's sonnets, and Pre-Raphaelite picture poems. "Framed, Imprisoned, Overheard" explores feminist arguments and interdisciplinary crossings between painting and poetry, focusing on both canonical and lesser-known poems of major Victorian poets. Close reading fiction by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft, and poems by Charlotte Smith, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti and G. M. Hopkins, I offer a revisionist history that looks beyond the small subset of poems about ghosts or other "gothic" themes, demonstrating how innovations in 1790s sensation fiction contributed to the evolution of major Victorian verse forms.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. Lauren S. Weingarden, Florida State University, School of Visual Arts and Dance, Dept. of Art History. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 7, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains xviii, 294 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation considers how defenses of traditional faith in Britain have adapted to new frontiers of cultural relativism and religious difference. Its contention is that poetry has become central to such defenses. Relativistic thinking would seem to dispose against metaphysical belief; poetry, as a parallel claimant for cultural and expressive particularity, and as a sensuously non-empirical rhetorical medium, offers a way of muffling the dissonance that might otherwise arise from positioning difference and particularity as pretext for claims of universal truth. This study traces formal and rhetorical innovations from the Victorian crisis of faith forward to literary modernism, with a brief conclusion contemplating related developments in more contemporary poetry and religious thought in Britain.

In the late 1870's English society witnessed the rise of the aesthetic movement, a phenomenon which affected the art and literary worlds and which was characterized then and later as the pursuit of art for art's sake. The notoriety of the movement at the time obscured its exact limits and the origins of its ideas and values. The intellectual and literary side of the movement, especially the ideology of art for art's sake, attracted most notice and comment, yet the plastic arts of painting and industrial design were crucial to the theories of aestheticism and its impact on Victorian culture. This thesis examines those plastic arts, and the social and economic contexts in which they had a place, and their relationship to the aesthetic movement. The aim of this thesis is to describe the cultural context in which the aesthetic movement in the arts developed. The aesthetic movement came at a time when most critics would agree that Victorian design in the fine and industrial arts was at a low point, and did much to stimulate higher standards in both fields. The reasons for this failure and subsequent recovery have been incompletely researched and, I think as a result, incompletely understood. The social and economic changes in the fine and industrial art worlds form a large part of this study out of necessity and in dealing with the mechanism of the art markets, the changing status of the painter, the rise of the industrial designer and the growing activity of the middle-classes in the art world, I have attempted to demonstrate that the aesthetic movement was merely an offshoot of a larger cultural problem, a problem which the Victorians could not solve. Behind the aesthetic movement was the problem of reconciling the mechanism and mechanistic rhythms of modern society with art and the values which art represented, especially individualism, humanism and the knowledge of life sprung of faith rather than science. The solutions and compromises which earlier Victorians had accepted were no longer possible to many people in the 1870's. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation makes two arguments: First, it elaborates a depressive genealogy of the Victorian novel that asserts a category of realism rooted in affect rather than period or place. Second, it argues for a critical strategy called "depressive reading" that has unique purchase on this literary history. Drawing on Melanie Klein's "depressive position," the project asserts an alternative to novel theories that are rooted in sympathy and desire. By being attentive to mood and critical disposition, depressive reading homes in on the barely-contained negativities of realism. Through readings of novels by William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Charlotte Brontë, it explores feelings of ambivalence, soreness, and dislike as aesthetic responses and interpretations, as well as prompts to varieties of non-instrumentalist ethics. In the final chapter, the psychological and literary strategy of play emerges as a creative and scholarly possibility.