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British literature of the long nineteenth century, exemplified by three authors who lived and wrote in England from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth centuries, was deeply focused on understanding human relationships and increasing equality between the sexes. From the novels of Jane Austen in the late Romantic period, through George Eliot’s Victorian novels, to the prose and plays of Oscar Wilde written on the cusp of a new century, constructions of love and marriage matured within and throughout the authors’ life experiences and art, affecting and reflecting cultural changes in all levels of English society but most notably through the changing mores of the rising middle class. Attesting to their lasting universality in depicting male and female emotions, social standards, and cultural goals, the written works of Austen, Eliot, and Wilde influenced a century of contemporary readers and continue to draw audiences for their timeless understandings of, and insightful approaches to, human relationships. Through detailed analysis of the authors’ selected works, with references to contemporary and modern critical interpretations, I will focus on these ever evolving individual and collective constructs of love and marriage, from Austen’s practical approach to love and sometimes deceptively witty arguments for equal partnership in marriage, through Eliot’s complex studies of individuality and redefined concepts of marriage, to Wilde’s insistence that love, marriage, and partnership be redefine by and true to self, despite pressure to conform. Throughout this detailed study of increasing realism in English society and fiction, changing gender roles and rights, developing relationships between the sexes, and the evolution of conceptions of love, the institution of marriage, a partnership between and within the sexes, this dissertation will focus on the long-term effects of the literary contributions of Austen, Eliot, and Wilde to ever evolving constructions of love and marriage in nineteenth-century England and their enduring effects on the Western World. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / January 18, 2018. / Austen, Eliot, Love, Marriage, Wilde / Includes bibliographical references. / Candace Ward, Professor Directing Dissertation; Aimee Boutin, University Representative; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; Eric Walker, Committee Member.

This project is about what I am calling an “erotic epistemology” in nineteenth-century English elegiac poetry, a condition or event in a poetic text in which the discourses of love and knowledge are, to use a term Shelley liked to describe the experience of love, “intermixed.” The persistence of this inter-discourse suggests some fundamental connection between the desire for love and the desire for knowledge. Curiously, these performances of erotic longing insist urgently in the rhetorical, formal, and somatic registers of elegiac poetry in the nineteenth century. The confrontation with death that elegy stages is ideal for thinking about the relationship between erotic desire and poetic knowledge. As the limit case of a mind confronting an ultimately unknowable condition, the furthest expression of an impossible desire—the desire for the dead—elegies are love poems as well as death poems. This dissertation argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais for John Keats (1821), Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam for Arthur Hallam (1850), Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Ave Atque Vale for Charles Baudelaire (1867), and Thomas Tod Stoddart’s The Death-Wake (1831), perform the poetics of mourning as an erotic discourse, and allow an intimate understanding of a dead other that is an experience of pleasure. Much scholarship on the concept of eros considers it nearly synonymous with sexual desire and bodily pleasure. This project establishes a mode of reading elegy through its figures and forms that conceptualizes eros in these poems beyond sexuality, and without the burdens of biography and history. By stepping outside the critical confines of generic convention, literary influence, and eros-as-sexual want, this dissertation reevaluates the interpretive possibilities of erotic desire and language in a genre that is not commonly read as an amorous mode of speech. For these elegists, knowledge itself is an object of amorous desire, and epistemological want is a motive force of poetic mourning. These poems arrive at the pleasure of this knowledge through verse forms and figures of speech that perform an intimate textual relationship between the living and the dead, and when these linguistic events occur, the elegies reveal themselves as love poems.

This thesis examines the role of historical reference in the representation of homosexuality in British literature since the late nineteenth century. The texts it examines are both literal fictions - novels, short stories and poems - and less 'imaginative' forms, such as biography, historiography and sexology: its main project is to disentangle the network of discourses facilitating and restricting representation of the homosexual past. It identifies the history of this representation as a series of moments - the turn of the century, the 1930s, the 1950s, for example - when homosexuality was redefined, and lesbian and gay traditions correspondingly reinvented. This continual reinvention was often the work of homosexuals themselves:the thesis demonstrates how historical representation has allowed lesbians and gay men to intervene in sexual debate when more obviously 'contemporary' dissident voices were being publicly silenced. Chapters I and 2 examine the invocation of historical example within the late Victorian homophile subculture, and argue that the ancient Greek practice of paiderastia provided tum-of-the-century homosexuals with an affirmative model with which to counter juridical and sexological prescription. Chapters 3 and 4 consider the extent to which Antinous and Sappho became established in the same period as homosexual icons, but were subtly reconstructed by different, sometimes competing, sexual discourses. Subsequent chapters explore the influence of literary models such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well ofLoneliness (1928) upon lesbian historical fiction and biography of the 1930s, and uncover some hitherto forgotten lesbian texts; examine the role of male homosexuality in the women's historical romance of the 1950s; and discuss the homoerotic historical fiction of lesbian authors Mary Renault and Bryher. The final chapter considers recent lesbian and gay historical fiction, and finds reflected in the genre the modem homosexual self-image with all its gender and racial tensions.

Scholarship on Herman Melville has a tendency to treat the sea as a destination in itself, but in one of Redburn's autobiographical moments the narrator confesses that initially his "thoughts of the sea were connected with the land; but with fine old lands, full of mossy cathedrals and churches, and long, narrow, crooked streets without side-walks, and lined with strange houses". When in literary trouble, Melville rebounded by employing the earliest furnishings of his imagination, using England as his setting and his theme. In his examination of the political, economic, and above all cultural ties between Britain and the United States, Melville anticipated the analytical models used by transatlanticist scholars today: At times he treated England and America as uncanny doubles and trips abroad as akin to time-travel, with each country seeing the other as both a point of origin and a vision of the future. Elsewhere, Melville tracked the circulation of people and objects throughout a unified--and dehumanized--Anglo-American world. Critics are often tempted to treat Melville's English writings, like his trips to England, as a vacation from his real work, but a deep engagement with British culture, and his attempt to write his way into it, was Melville's life's work. He is never writing only about England; produced at moments of professional crisis, Melville's transatlantic fictions include interrogations of the global marketplace and the possibilities for art. Through readings of Redburn, the diptych stories, and Israel Potter, this dissertation aims to explicate what Melville's English works have to say about England, America, commerce, art, and the author's own place in the British literary heritage he valued so highly.

The popular British theatre of the late nineteenth century has often been regarded as both aesthetically and politically bankrupt: bombastic and spectacular, it offered a vision of sensational theatricality lacking both the formal innovation and the intellectual charge of the later avant-garde stage and of literary modernism. My dissertation, by contrast, argues that one element of the nineteenth-century stage survived and claimed a place at the heart of British modernism: the idea of the actor. In successive chapters stretching from 1897 to 1958, I take up works of fiction and drama by Bram Stoker, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, revealing how various performers of the late-Victorian stage became essential to the formation of modernist aesthetics. I show that the actor's significance lay not only in her cultural station but also in her subversive mediation of artistic convention and self-conscious reenactment of the past; by returning to the performers of the 1890s, these British and Irish writers reconceived the terms that are central to our understanding of modernism: personality, history, and tradition. As the late-Victorian stage passed out of living memory, these writers continued to invoke the actor in their treatments of the technological proliferation of text, the politics of reading during the First World War, the authority of obituary in the literary tradition, and the potential for re-writing historical progress through the lens of community theatre. Positioned between media--theatre, poetry, and the novel--and also between opposing visions of creativity and the artistic process, my research intervenes in related discussions in both theatre studies and the scholarship on modernist literature. By focusing on the art of the actor at this pivotal moment in both theatrical and literary history, I challenge the dominant assumption of an abstract anti-theatricality on the modernist stage by discussing the ambivalently "naturalistic" performance styles of Henry Irving, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Marie Lloyd, and Ellen Terry. Likewise, I argue that their art of acting reframes the key terms of literary modernism by reversing the prerogatives of textuality and the cultural practice of reading. In these ways, the actor provided a means of continually restaging the advent of modernity (and the death of the past) into the middle of the twentieth century.

"Narrative Units" traces the development of a unique perspective on narrative form in the theory and practice of the early British novel. From Aristotle's Poetics through twentieth-century formalism, structuralism, and narratology, major theories of narrative have approached narrative form as a unified whole, whether that whole is defined as plot, structure, or discourse. By contrast, early British novelists tended to conceive of narrative as a looser accretion of individual parts, identified with terms such as "adventure," "episode," "incident," "accident," "situation," "moment," "scene," "period,” and "crisis," as well as temporal spans such as hours, days, weeks, and years. This dissertation examines the social, philosophical, and technical implications of viewing narrative through this lens of narrative parts, or what I call “narrative units.” The project begins by comparing the emphasis on narrative units in the early British novel with dominant traditions in narrative theory, which tend to prioritize narrative totalities. It then proceeds to analyze the functioning of narrative units in the novels of three key innovators of the tradition: Henry Fielding, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen. In each of these case studies I identify the key units deployed by the author, considering the dialogic relationship between them and the unique narrative dynamics that they bring about. Ultimately, I show that the unusual emphasis on narrative units in the long eighteenth century emerges in response to a series of major social and intellectual crises of the eighteenth century: in Fielding, the epistemological opacity of cities and institutions; in Radcliffe, the fragmentation of self in the sentimental subject; in Austen, the breakdown of community in a rapidly accelerating society. I conclude that by prioritizing and emphasizing narrative parts over narrative wholes, these authors deformed and disrupted prevailing models of narrative, from Aristotelian plot and Enlightenment progress to the sentimental flow of feelings, and along the way developed a new poetics of uncertainty, stasis, and fragmentation. In identifying and analyzing the historical vocabulary deployed by authors themselves to articulate the fundamental structure of their narratives, “Narrative Units” develops a new methodology for the study of narrative, offers a new approach to the history of the novel, and contributes to current critical efforts to synthesize formalist and historicist methods of literary study.

This dissertation shows that print illustration – particularly its technologies, its financial implications, and its role in scientific representation – influenced three major nineteenth-century British writers as they built their versions of realism for their long fiction. William Makepeace Thackeray was inspired by lithography and the scientific atlas to make fast, socially-relevant characters which he catalogued in The Book of Snobs. Collaboration with John Everett Millais helped Anthony Trollope in the mid-century develop a realism in his Barsetshire novels that required close observation and included careful details. Toward the end of the century, Thomas Hardy’s engagement with George Du Maurier in A Laodicean helped Hardy develop a realism that both showed the instability of the visual representation and showed how images were made. All three novelists were interested, in their own ways, with the connection between seeing and knowing. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2019. / March 27, 2019. / Illustration, Nineteenth Century, Novel, Realism / Includes bibliographical references. / Meegan Hanson, Professor Directing Dissertation; George S. Williamson, University Representative; Barry Faulk, Committee Member; David Gants, Committee Member.

This thesis explores the ways in which the Opium War has been represented in both non-fictional and fictional Anglophone narratives. It looks at the construction of various 19th century discourses surrounding this historical event and the different meanings it has been endowed with through such discourses. It then examines the ways in which some of those meanings have been challenged in more recent accounts. The purpose of this thesis is to show how and why certain ideas are constructed and propagated, and how these in turn can be questioned, challenged and reinterpreted, giving us a wider perspective, and thus better understanding, of the said event. The study is divided into two parts: non-fiction and fiction. The non-fiction section includes two chapters on the discourses of the Opium War, one on translation and one on historical texts while the second section focuses on two contemporary fictional narratives of the Opium War. Chapters one and two are based on a selection of 19th century archival documents and constitute a discussion of the discourses that have been formed around the Opium War in five specific fields: political, economic, religious, medical and legal. An analysis of these discourses will show them to be part of a larger sinophobic discourse that constructed China as Britain’s cultural inferior around the time of the conflict. To view the Opium War in terms of cultural encounter requires a discussion of translation. Chapter three investigates the role and importance of translation and translators in creating and/ or sustaining the meanings created by these various discourses. Chapter four is an analysis of two more recent historical narratives: one a history of opium, the other a history of the Opium War. These texts contribute to an expanded understanding of the 19th century conflict as they offer different and more contemporary meanings with regard to the war that partly challenge earlier ones. Because of that, they also mark a transition towards my discussion of fictional narratives where the focus is on introducing new speaking positions that contest those ideas, images and ‘truths’ propagated by narratives such as those that are part of the Opium War discourses. Chapter five investigates how Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession goes against an important aspect of such discourses, that of hierarchy, by emphasizing cultural incommensurability and cross-cultural miscommunication between the British and the Chinese while refusing to stratify the two into cultural and civilizational hierarchies. Chapter six examines the ways in which Amitav Ghosh invents a new narrative of the Opium War in the first two parts of an intended trilogy: Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke. This last chapter looks at how, by focusing on the silenced Indian aspect of the Opium War and the unexplored Sino-Indian side of the conflict, Ghosh transforms the war from an exclusively Sino-British to a more global event. / published_or_final_version / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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