This dissertation draws on studies of gift exchange by cultural anthropologists and social theorists to examine representations of gifts and gift giving in nineteenth-century British novels. While most studies of the economic imagination of nineteenth-century literature rely on and respond to a framework formulated by classical political economy and consequently overlook nonmarket forms of social exchange, I draw on gift theory in order to make visible the alternate, everyday exchanges shaping social relations and identity within the English novel. By analyzing formal and thematic representations of gifting over the course of the nineteenth century, in novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, I consider the way that gift exchange relates and responds to the emergence of capitalism and consumer culture. I trace two distinct developments in nineteenth-century gift culture: the first, the emergence of an idealized view of the gift as purely disinterested, spontaneous, and free, and the second, the emergence of a view of charity as demoralizing to the poor. These developments, I contend, were distinct ideological formations of liberal economic society and reveal a desire to make the gift conform to individualism. However, I suggest further that these transformations of the gift proceeded unevenly, for in their attention to the logic and practice of giving, nineteenth-century writers both give voice to and subvert these cultural formations. Alongside the figure of the benevolent philanthropist, the demoralized pauper, and the quintessential image of altruism, the selflessly giving domestic woman, nineteenth-century novels present another view of gift exchange, one that sees the gift as a mix of interest and disinterest, freedom and obligation, and persons and things. Ultimately, by reading the gift relations animating nineteenth-century novels, I draw attention to the competing conceptions of selfhood underlying gift and market forms of exchange in order to offer a broader history of exchange and personhood. In its recognition of expansive conceptions of the self and obligatory gifts, this dissertation recovers a history of the gift that calls into question the ascendency of the autonomous individual and the view of exchange as an anonymous, self-interested transaction.

Criticism that involves the linkage of the terms ‘environment’ and ‘literature’, or ‘ecocriticism’, has focused largely on texts such as nature writing or on fiction that is set in rural or wilderness settings. This project attempts to widen the scope of ecocriticism by analysing the contemporary British novel, in which nature conceived in such stereotypical ways is largely absent. However, in my analysis of the fifteen texts selected here, I demonstrate that British women writers employ new discursive constructions of nature in order to contest deterministic formulations that subjugate both women and nature. My focus on female textual bodies enables me to explore representations of the fluid interfaces of nature and culture. In my analysis of novels from an environmental standpoint, `environment' is reconceived to refer to `where we live, work, and play' and may include not only the countryside and urban nature, but also the female body itself. Thus, the nature of my title is an inclusive term that includes contemporary discourses of nature employed by the sciences of biomedicine, genetics and technology. This project examines the ecofeminist premise that discourses of mastery not only affect subjugated others such as women, animals and others, but also influence the treatment of the natural environment. Analysing novels that employ forms of embodiment that foreground extreme bodily conditions such as pregnancy, monstrosity and death, I employ the theoretical constructs of Mikhail Bakhtin (the grotesque body, carnivalisation and dialogism) and Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection as tools of analysis to provide a new conception of ecological bodies. Novelists such as Jeanette Winterson, Fay Weldon, Penelope Lively, Zadie Smith, Margaret Drabble, Kathy Lette and Eva Figes provide a wide range of viewpoints from which to gather evidence of the insistence of the recurring trope of the endangered body within the troubled landscape of contemporary Britain.

Cette étude vise à mieux comprendre le traumatisme et la hantise qui est concomittante, comme le montrent spécifiquement The Pregnant Widow (2011), Wish You Were Here (2012) et The sense of an Ending (2011), les récits qui en découlent et qui font allusion au sentiment contemporain des crises existentielles mondiales. Nous avons analysé les implications du traumatisme et de la spectralité dans l'économie narrative comme étant le reflet d’implications sociales et culturelles plus vastes. Nous avons cherché à démontrer comment la spectralité et la « possession » par le traumatisme représentent non seulement une lutte psychique interne pour « perlaborer » le traumatisme, mais aussi la façon dont cette lutte affecte et altère les notions profondes de subjectivité des protagonistes. Nous avons étudié comment les différentes manifestations du traumatisme sont (re)présentées dans le texte et comment les manifestations textuelles du traumatisme prouvent ou contredisent certains points de vue établis sur le traumatisme dans le milieu universitaire au cours des trois dernières décennies. En outre, nous avons étudié la dynamique découlant de l'interaction textuelle entre la narrativité et le traumatisme, car la narrativité est un élément visiblement mis en avant-plan dans les romans du corpus. Notre préoccupation était de savoir si l'interaction entre fiction et trauma permet à la littérature de richement élaborer le traumatisme au-delà de sa conception comme un vide cognitif et si la mise en avant métafictionnelle de la narrativité permet d’aller au-delà de la révélation postmoderne de la réalité comme une construction fictive. Le traumatisme, personnel ou collectif, est représenté comme la force affective qui déclenche une réflexion subjective universelle. Le résultat de cette enquête psychique est un réexamen de la subjectivité et une prise de conscience de l’existence composée d’êtres interconnectés et donc responsables. Ces romans problématisent une période contemporaine en crise profonde et souscrivent à une vision du monde immanente. L'univers représenté dans ces romans évoque un seul corps vulnérable, appelant à la sensibilité et à l’éthique. De plus, ils réaffirment la nature de la subjectivité relayée par des constructions sociales fictives, mais ils avancent également que les récits provisoires et revisités du traumatisme sont la seule voie vers l'avant pour « perlaborer » le trauma. / This study sets out to gain a better understanding of trauma and its concomitant haunting as reflected specifically in The Pregnant Widow (2011), Wish You Were Here (2012) and The Sense of an Ending (2011), narratives that arise from, and allude to the contemporary sense of global existential crises. We investigated the implications of trauma and spectrality for the narrative economy as reflecting the wider social and cultural implications. We aimed to demonstrate how spectrality and “possession” by trauma represent not only an internal psychical struggle to ‘work through’ trauma, but how this struggle also impacts and alters the protagonists’ deep-seated notions of subjectivity. We studied how the various manifestations of trauma were (re)presented in the text and how the textual manifestation of trauma proved or contradicted certain established views of trauma as theorized in the academia over the past three decades. Additionally, we researched the dynamics arising out of the textual interaction between narrativity and trauma, as narrativity is a visibly foregrounded element of the corpus novels. Our concern was to know whether the fiction-trauma interaction is one in which literature allows for a richer elaboration of trauma beyond its conception as cognitive void, and whether metafictional foregrounding of narrativity points to any tendency beyond postmodern revelation of reality as a fictive construct. Trauma, whether personal or collective, is depicted as the affective force that triggers a universal subjective questioning. The outcome of this psychical investigation is a revised subjectivity and an awareness of existence as composed of interconnected – and thus responsible – beings. The novels problematize a contemporary period in deep crisis and subscribe to an immanent worldview. The universe portrayed in the novels evokes a single vulnerable body, calling for ethical sensibility and care. Further, they reaffirm the nature of subjectivity as mediated through fictive social constructs, yet they also posit the revisited provisional narratives of trauma as the only way forward toward working through trauma.

The edition of Pamela a person reads will affect his or her perception of Pamela's ascent into aristocratic society. Richardson's revisions to the fourteenth edition of Pamela, published posthumously in 1801, change Pamela's character from the 1740 first edition in such a way as to make her social climb more believable to readers outside the novel and to "readers" inside the novel. Pamela alters her language, her actions, and her role in the household by the end of the first edition; in the fourteenth edition, however, she changes in little more than her title. Pamela might begin as a novel that threatens the fabric of class hierarchies, but it ends-both within the plot and externally throughout its many editions-as a novel that stabilizes and strengthens social norms.

Urban spaces have appeared in literature for a long time and they seem to fascinate a lot of contemporary writers. The constructions of cities become exceptionally complex in postcolonial British fiction that portrays urban landscape from the perspective of first and second generation immigrants from Britain's former colonies. All of the novels discussed in this work are set in London and the characters are immigrants of the South Asian and Caribbean diasporas in Britain: the thesis focuses namely on Brick Lane (Monica Ali), White Teeth (Zadie Smith) and Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (Meera Syal). However, the work also makes short digressions to a number of older works which deal with the immigrant experience in London: The Lonely Londoners (Sam Selvon), The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie) and The Buddha of Suburbia (Hanif Kureishi). The entire thesis consists of five parts and begins with an introduction to several theoretical terms that are necessary for analyses of immigrant identities and urban spaces. All of the theory that is discussed in the first chapter is then applied to the chosen novels by Ali, Smith and Syal. Overall, the thesis focuses on the ways in which the ex-colonial subjects in the books perceive London according to their gender and the particular generation of immigrants that...

This thesis concentrates on the depiction of family in two contemporary British novels. These are: Hanif Kureishiʼs In macy (1998), wri en in the first person narra ve, and Elizabeth Day's Scissors Paper Stone (2011), written in the third person narrative. This thesis analyses the novels from various perspectives with the main emphasis put on the theme of family. It also takes into consideration the different narrative modes used in the novels. In the theoretical part this thesis concentrates on the development of family with the main stress placed on the changes that took place in the second half of the twentieth century in Britain. The topics that it deals with are the breakdown of a relationship, fatherhood, dysfunctional communication and other themes concerning the family and interpersonal relationships.

My thesis explores why beauty became so much more important in nineteenth-century Britain, especially for marriageable young women in the upper and middle class. My argument addresses the consequences of that change in the status of beauty for plain or ugly women, how this social shift is reflected in the novel, and how authors respond to the issue of plainer women and issues of their marriageability. I look at how these authorial attitudes shifted over the century, observing that the issue of plain women and their marriageability was dramatized by nineteenth-century authors, whose efforts to heighten the audience's awareness of the plight of plainer women can be traced by contrasting novels written early in the century with novels written mid-century. I argue that beauty gained more significance for young women in nineteenth-century England because the marriage ideal shifted, a shift which especially influenced the upper and middle class. The eighteenth century brought into marriage concepts such as Rousseau's "wife-farm principle" the idea that a man chooses a significantly younger child-bride, mentoring and molding her into the woman he needs. But by the end of the century the ideal of marriage moved to the companionate ideal, which opted for an equal partnership. That ideal was based on the conception that marriage was based on personal happiness hence should be founded on compatibility and love. The companionate ideal became more influential as individuality reigned among the Romantics. The new ideal of companionate marriage limited parents' influence on their children's choice of spouse to the extent that the choice lay now largely with young men. Yet that choice was constrained because young men and women were restricted by social conventions, their social interaction limited. Thus, according to my reading of nineteenth-century authors, the companionate ideal was a charade, as young men were not able to get to know women well enough to determine whether or not they were compatible. So instead of getting to know a young woman's character and her personality, they distinguished potential brides mainly on the basis of appearance.