This report modifies and re-envisions Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory as the “sympathetic umwelt,” in which sympathy is both the external object of desire and the internal means by which individual, subjective worlds are created. Through the application of this new paradigm to George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” and Middlemarch, this paper suggests that intersubjective relationships in the fictions she conceives are ephemeral illusions. Her early cognitive experiments and intellectual grappling with the nature of emotional connections culminates in the ambiguously defined concept of sympathy. Eliot’s focus on sympathy is not meant to reveal a solution to failures in human compassion and understanding, but to present it as the central problem – both in her own literature and in reality. / text

Thesis advisor: Judith Wilt / This project argues that the concept of haunting pervaded Victorian society, imagination, and thought and reflected anxieties regarding destabilized conceptions of the self and the world. It spans the nineteenth century from Mary Shelley to Henry James in order to claim that the living can invite and employ haunting in ways useful to self discovery or recovery. Rather than view haunting as a primarily one-directional relationship in which the haunter imposes itself on the haunted, I suggest that haunting can be invoked by the haunted in order to integrate new perspectives, conceptions, information, and situations vital to advancing self-perception and understandings of the surrounding world. Consequently, this study introduces a term I call "hauntedness," which amounts to the state of feeling or being haunted. Through this word, I hope to confer greater agency to the notion of being haunted than the more passive, acted-upon "to be haunted" can sometimes convey. Haunted Mind and Matter employs concepts from Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and "Différance" to complicate the question of haunting and enter the critical debate about Victorian haunting in particular. The works of Derrida and critics like Julian Wolfreys, following Sigmund Freud, reveal haunting as not restricted to bonds with spectral ghosts; it exists in every person and discourse. Using the term "haunt" in a multifaceted, flexible manner can challenge notions of the self and what is human through biological, social, and other constructs. The introduction examines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, in my view an inverted ghost story, to exemplify this text's employment of the term "hauntedness." The project then explores uses of terms related to haunting in texts in which mental, historical, and social haunting are infused with strong gothic and Romantic imagery: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898). I claim that these works both reveal the powerful presence of haunting in Victorian thought and society and show characters generating productive, reverberating uses for the haunting they experience in order to progress into the future. Haunted Mind and Matter demonstrates what the lens of haunting can reveal about character and social context in fiction. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis advisor: Rosemarie Bodenheimer / In the aftermath of England&lsquo;s &ldquo;Railway Mania&ldquo; in the 1840s, it became commonplace to equate stock market speculation with gambling. Yet opinion had changed so dramatically by the end of the century that the <italic>Quarterly Review</italic> could confidently declare, &ldquo;Though speculation may lead to rashness and be censurable, <italic>it is not gambling</italic>.&ldquo; This project considers how and why the discourses of gambling and stock market speculation diverged over the second half of the nineteenth century, and the cultural and historical changes this shift encompasses. My inquiry begins with a brief history of the stock market and of gambling practices in nineteenth-century England, followed by a study of the representations of both spheres of activity in the periodical press from 1850 to 1900. Detailed discussions of three Victorian novels--<italic>Little Dorrit, Middlemarch</italic>, and <italic>The Way We Live Now</italic>--follow. Each of these novels figures the intersection between gambling and the stock market as the site for complex negotiations around changing perceptions of risk, value, and worth in Victorian society. In <italic>Little Dorrit</italic>, Charles Dickens explores issues of culpability and responsibility through the figure of the speculator, Merdle, and his surrogate, Arthur Clennam. By accepting the punishment that Merdle&lsquo;s suicide threatens to forestall, Arthur not only expiates the guilt he feels over his parents&lsquo; rapacious financial practices, he enables speculation to be domesticated and integrated back into the commercial realm. Whereas <italic>Little Dorrit</italic> provides some broad outlines of the &ldquo;speculation plot&ldquo; that gained currency in 1840s and 1850s, my discussion of <italic>Middlemarch</italic> takes a closer look at contemporary gambling rhetoric, particularly as it is employed by George Eliot to convey the general economic instability experienced during the nineteenth century. Finally, I consider Anthony Trollope&lsquo;s engagement with the nineteenth-century debate over limited liability in <italic>The Way We Live Now</italic>. In particular, I examine how Trollope modifies and reworks the conventional rhetoric associated with speculation, adapting it to the changing financial and cultural realities of the late nineteenth century. The resulting text reflects both the extent to which stock investment and speculation had been normalized in mainstream Victorian society and the social convulsions that this integration produced. In each case, I explore how the novel contributed to the acceptance of the stock market as a legitimate social institution in Victorian England, and the ways it betrayed continued ambivalence about both the stock market and its members. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

As fascist movements took hold across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, there emerged a body of lyric poetry concerned with revolution, authority, heroism, sacrifice, community, heritage, and national identity. While the Nazi rise to power saw the deception, persecution, and brutalization of conservatives both in the Reichstag and in the streets, these themes resonated with fascists and conservatives alike, particularly in Germany. Whether they welcomed the new regime out of fear or opportunism, many conservative beneficiaries of National Socialism shared, and celebrated in poetry, the same ideological principles as the fascists. Such thematic continuities have made it seem as though certain conservative writers, including T. S. Eliot, Stefan George, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, were proto-fascist, their work cohering around criteria consonant with fascist ideology. My dissertation, however, emphasizes the limits of such cohesion, arguing that fascist poetry rejects, whereas conservative poetry affirms, the possibility of indeterminacy and inadequacy. While the fascist poem blindly believes it can effect material political change, the conservative poem affirms the failure of its thematic content to correspond entirely to material political reality. It displays neither pure political commitment nor aesthetic autonomy, suspending these categories in an unresolved tension. Paul de Man's work on allegory hinges on identifying a reading practice that addresses this space between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy. His tendency to forget the immanence of history, however, is problematic in the context of fascism. Considering rhetorical formalism alongside dialectical materialism, in particular Adorno's essay "Lyric Poetry and Society," allows for a more rounded and ethical methodological approach. The poetic dramatization of the very indeterminacy that historically constituted conservative politics in late-Weimar Germany both distinguishes the conservative from the fascist poem while also accounting for its complicity. Fascism necessitated widespread and wild enthusiasm, but it also succeeded through the (unintentional) proliferation of political indifference as registered, for example, by the popularity of entertainment literature. While the work of certain conservative high modernists reflected critically on its own failures, such indeterminacy nonetheless resembles the failure to politically commit oneself against institutionalized violence and systematic oppression.

No description available.

No description available.

<p>This essay focuses on Maggie in <em>The Mill on the Floss</em>, by George Eliot. An examination of her life is presented which is anchored in feminist critical theory and focuses on the ordeal Maggie has to endure in a patriarchal society. Furthermore, the life of the Roma is examined through postcolonial theory and compared to Maggie’s. Many of the stereotypes that emerged about the Roma are also present in Maggie’s life. It is argued that Maggie embodies the stereotypes of the Roma through her encounters with different characters in the novel. </p>

This thesis traces the relationship between the First World War, constructions of masculinity, and the life and poetry of T.S. Eliot. Central to this relationship is a study of homoeroticism, which the author characterizes as different from homosexuality but not exclusive of it, in late 19th and early 20th century poetic traditions. The argument begins by establishing a critical framework that draws on contemporary paradigms of Modernist literary gender studies but also seeks to revise them by shifting the focus to issues surrounding masculinity. With this framework in place, the thesis goes on to discuss the tradition of male homoeroticism in artistic movements preceding World War I, including Symbolism, Uranianism, and Aestheticism, then moves on to an examination of the war itself, its effect on soldiers' notions of masculinity, and the intensification of the homoerotic element in the poetry composed by soldier poets. I then reexamine the relationship between Eliot's poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, arguing that both are significantly inflected by the changing masculine consciousness of the war era and that both are largely personal in nature despite their author's insistence on the impersonality of poetry. An explication follows of Prufrock and Eliot's other verse written between 1914 and c.1920, focusing on passages that suggest the homoerotic. The bridge between this and the section on The Waste Land is a commentary on the relationship of Eliot and his friend Jean Verdenal, a Frenchman who was killed in the war, and the import of this friendship to Eliot's work. The possibility of their homosexual involvement is entertained but not insisted upon, the point being reemphasized that homoeroticism, not homosexuality, has the more meaningful impact on the masculine artistic consciousness. All of these ideas culminate in the Waste Land chapter, which highlights passages of the poem dealing with a range of human possibilities for intimacy-male and female, sexual and non-sexual. The study concludes that the poem ought to be read as a representation of an embattled masculine consciousness drawn to the homoerotic but uncomfortable with changing 20th century sexual mores. / Graduation date: 2001

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Comparative Literature, June 1997. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (MA(Philosophy)--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 129-133).