Although the sensational world of Gothic literature may seem to have little to do with the “dismal science” of economics, readers and critics have long recognized connections between Romantic-era political economic discourse and Gothic novels, from the trope of the haunted castle on contested property to Adam Smith’s metaphor of the spectral “invisible hand.” This study, the first sustained investigation of economics and the Gothic, reads Romantic Gothic literature as an important voice in public debates about the economic ideas that shaped the emerging phenomenon of commercial society. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s notion of the modern social imaginary, it argues that the ways in which Gothic literature interrogated these ideas continues to inform our understanding of the economy and our place within it today. Each chapter focuses on an economic idea, including property, coverture, credit, debt, and consumption, in relation to a selection of representative Gothic texts, from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1848). It analyzes these texts—primarily novels, but also short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—in the context of political economic writings by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others. Through this analysis, this study argues that economic ideas are foundational to the Gothic, a mode of literature deeply engaged with the political, cultural, social, and economic upheavals that characterize the Romantic Age. / Graduate / 2021-05-14

No description available.

No description available.

D.E. Stevenson was a 20th century Scottish novelist writing romance fiction before, during, and after World War II. By analyzing her life and dissecting the genre's formulaic properties, I will show how The English Air is representative of the ways some women coped with the eras of conflict of the two World Wars. In a critical analysis of the novel itself, I will show how Stevenson's attention to Anglo-German relations propels it beyond a light-hearted example of the genre as a whole, pushing against the prescribed requirements of what romance fiction must be. Though Stevenson has never before been studied through an academic lens, her novels were popular and successful, which suggests that this kind of fiction met the needs of readers during the early to mid-20th century, while coping with the devastation and uncertainty of war. / Master of Arts

Lieu commun au sein de l’historiographie de ce courant artistique et littéraire. En déplaçant le curseur chronologique pour étudier la période comprise entre 1789 et 1830, c’est-à-dire entre la fin de l’anglomanie d’Ancien Régime et la date consacrée du triomphe romantique en France, cette thèse s’intéresse aux conditions d’apparition de centaines d’œuvres empruntant leur sujet à un corpus d’une quarantaine d’auteurs britanniques, de Macpherson et Smith – qui dévoilent Ossian à l’Europe –, à Byron,Walter Scott et Shakespeare. Nombre de ces œuvres ont pu être localisées, ou sont connues par divers témoignages, et leur étude permet de constater l’hétérogénéité des profils, des formations, des styles et des motivations des artistes français ou présents sur le sol français qui s’intéressent à ces textes. En appliquant un schéma d’analyse conçu grâce à des outils forgés par les études de réception, les théories de la traduction ou la littérature comparée, il est possible de déterminer que la réception de textes littéraires dans les arts visuels procède en quatre temps distincts : diffusion, transposition, appropriation et répercussions. En étudiant chacune de ces phases et en replaçant la production des artistes en regard des enjeux socioculturels et économiques de leur temps, il en résulte moins une image d’Épinal d’un certain romantisme « frénétique » qu’un instantané de la profonde complexité de la scène artistique du temps, qui voit naître à la fois un imaginaire romantique et un romantisme imaginaire. / Commonplace within the historiography of this artistic and literary movement. By moving the chronological cursor towards the 1789-1830 period, that is between the end of Ancien Régime anglomania and the accepted date of the romantic triumph in France, this dissertation deals with the conditions of appearance of hundreds of artworks borrowing their subjects from within a corpus of more than forty British authors, from Macpherson and Smith - who unveiled Ossian’s poems to Europe - toLord Byron, Sir Walter Scott and William Shakespeare. Many of these works of art could have been localised, or are known through various testimonies, and their study allows us to observe the heterogeneousness of the relevant artists’ profiles, trainings and motivations. By applying an analytical pattern designed to use tools forged by reception studies, translation theory and comparative literature, it is possible to determine that the reception of literary texts in the visual arts proceeds through four phases :diffusion, adaptation, appropriation and repercussion. Placing this artistic production within the sociocultural and economical context of its time reveals a less idealized image of some «gothic» romanticism, the deep complexity of the contemporary French artistic scene which sees the birth of bothromantic imagination and imaginary romanticism.

The purpose of this thesis is to firmly situate the fictions of contemporary Arab British and Arab American women writers who write in English within the corpus of ethnic and mainstream literary criticism. I aim to position these fictions within their historical and sociopolitical contexts. I also aim to shift the focus from the texts’ female protagonists to male and minor characters in order to explore how the writers construct both political Islam and Islam as a private faith; how they construct Palestinian Muslim masculinities; and how they respond to the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror. I argue that these fictions offer some of the most astute reactions to the events of 9/11 and their repercussions. I also argue that Arab American literature in general and Arab American women’s literature in particular is more canny than its Arab British counterpart. Thus, I aim to show how Arab American literary productions refract a development from the literature of self-exploration to that of transformation allowing them a well-deserved spot in Ethnic-American literary studies and in time, mainstream American literary studies. Another of my aims is to investigate how Arab American and Arab British writers highlight the diversity of Arabs, Muslims and Islam, thus addressing essentialist reductions of Arabs and Muslims as a monolithic group. In chapter one, I investigate how Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret negotiate issues such as Islamic clothing. I also question anew Arab women writers’ perceived role as “cultural commentators.” In chapter two, I explore how Laila Halaby’s West of the Jordan and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home construct Palestinian Muslim masculinities, and how they challenge the Anglo-American stereotypical representations of Arab Muslim masculinity. In chapter three, I analyse how Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land, Frances Khirallah Noble’s The New Belly Dancer of the Galaxy and Alia Yunis’ The Night Counter negotiate cultural, political and social views of America. I aim to examine whether Halaby, Noble and Yunis’ ambiguous position, as legally ‘white’ citizens who are also members of a marginalized and religiously racialized minority, offers them a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ In the conclusion, I offer some suggestions for future research.

Radio drama developed as a genre as new media proliferated and challenged the cultural primacy of print. The methods of production and distribution and the literary genres that developed during the age of print provided models for radio playwrights to follow but also cultural forces for them to challenge. This dissertation considers these dual influences of print on the radio drama of four playwrights: Orson Welles, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, and Tom Stoppard. Each playwright “remediates” the printed page in radio plays by adapting or evoking the form of various literary texts, including novels (Welles), travel writing (Thomas), diaries and transcribed speech (Beckett), and historical writing (Stoppard). By representing written texts in an electronic, primarily oral medium, these authors examined the status of literary expression in an age of ascendant electronic media. Welles’s The War of the Worlds and Huckleberry Finn, Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and other broadcasts, Beckett’s Rough for Radio II and Embers, and Stoppard’s In the Native State highlight defining features of the print tradition and reveal how practices of writing and “reading” changed in the radio environment. These plays suggest that radio prompted writers to reconsider the literary author’s creative role, the text’s stability, and the audience’s interaction with the work. “Radio Texts” ultimately argues, therefore, that radio drama’s significance transcends its place in media history and dramatic criticism; the works I examine also point to radio plays’ important role in authors’ re-evaluation of literary expression in a changing twentieth-century media ecology. / text

This thesis involves both editorial practice and literary analysis. In order to establish an editorial framework for the electronic scholarly edition of Dr. Ralph Barnes Grindrod's pamphlet <em>Slaves of the Needle</em>, I examine current issues in electronic textual editing. In the electronic scholarly edition, approximately twelve of the pamphlet's thirty-five pages are transcribed and encoded using TEI-based code. The second aspect of my master's thesis concerns the depiction of seamstresses in nineteenth-century British literature. <em>Slaves of the Needle</em> provides a non-fiction counterpart to the fictional seamstresses of mid-nineteenth-century literature. Using <em>Slaves of the Needle</em> as a basis for evaluating the accuracy of mid-nineteenth-century characterizations of seamstresses, I show that authors such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ernest Jones, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna were familiar with the working conditions of seamstresses. By conducting a close reading of certain representations of the seamstress in both fiction and non-fiction, I develop a theory of why the depiction of some aspects of the seamstress story are more accurate than others.

The thesis discusses the development of nineteenth century responses to the United States. It hinges upon the premise that travel writing is narrative and that the travelling itself must therefore be constructed (or reconstructed) as narrative in order to make it available for writing. By applying narratology to the work of literary travel writers from Frances Trollope to Henry James I show the influence of travelling point of view and writing point of view on the narrative. Where these two points of view are in conflict I suggest reasons for this and identify signs in the narrative which display the disparity. There are several influences on point of view which are discussed in the thesis. The first is mode of travel: the development of steamboats and later locomotives increasingly divested travellers from the landscape through which they were travelling. I concentrate on Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain travelling by boat, and Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James travelling by rail to examine how mode of travel alters travelling point of view and influences the form of travel writing. The second is the frontier: writing from a liminal space creates a certain point of view and makes travel not only a passage but a rite of passage. I examine travel texts which discuss the Western frontier as well as the transatlantic frontier. As the opportunity for these frontier experiences diminished through the spread of American culture and developments in travel technology, so the point of view of the traveller changes. A third point of view is provided by European ideas of nature and beauty in nature. The failure of these when put against American landscapes such as the Mississippi, prairies, and Niagara forms a significant part of the thesis, the fourth chapter of which examines writing on Niagara Falls in guidebooks and the travel texts of Frances Trollope, Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anthony Trollope, Twain and James. Other points of view include seeing the United States through earlier travel texts and adopting a more autobiographical interest in travelogues. In the final chapter the thesis contains a discussion of the nature of truth in travel writing and the tendency towards fictionalisation. The thesis concludes by considering the implications for truth of having various travelling and writing points of view impact upon constructing narrative out of travel.

This thesis considers the early dissemination and critical/cultural/literary reception of the nouveau roman in Britain, roughly between the years 1957–73. The nouveau roman is considered in its capacity as an avant-garde grouping of writers and texts coming from France, and as articulated at the interface of the novel and its theoretical metalanguage; the main nouveaux romanciers considered are Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the nouveau roman's status as nouveau was presented in Britain in the period in question. One of the major arguments of the thesis is thus: that the question of the nouveauté of the nouveau roman became a nodal point for negotiations over the legacy of modernism, and over the meaning of the 'contemporary' in literature in the postwar period. Part I charts the emergence of the nouveau roman in Britain. It looks first at the origins and the methods of the nouveau roman's initial dissemination, drawing on a range of previously undocumented archival sources. The main focus here is Calder & Boyars – the nouveau roman's main British publisher – and in particular the notions of publics that framed its activities involving the nouveau roman. Subsequently, the nouveau roman's British reception is considered with reference to an extensive survey of periodicals and books. Part II looks at the literary impact of the nouveau roman. First, a range of novels is considered as bridging the critical and the literary response in Britain to the nouveau roman. The authors considered are: Pamela Hansford Johnson, J. I. M. Stewart, Muriel Spark, John Fowles, J. B. Priestley, William Cooper, Rayner Heppenstall, and Christine Brooke-Rose. Then, other novels are considered more directly within the domain of the nouveau roman, seen against the background of Robbe-Grillet's approach to objects and materiality, and with reference to notions of 'project-work' in Butor's novels. Novels are considered by: Brian W. Aldiss, Muriel Spark, Denis Williams, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, and Alan Sheridan. Finally, the nouveau roman is looked at in relation to an emergent avant-garde in the British novel. Here, the nouveau roman is seen as providing terms with which British writing from the period in question was able to present itself as avant-garde beyond the manifestations of individual works. The conclusion briefly surveys more peripheral and non-novelistic British responses to the nouveau roman, considering the way in which they inscribe the nouveau roman as 'contemporary'. The thesis turns finally to the legacy of the nouveau roman for the British novel of the present day.