Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 138-151). Also available via the World Wide Web.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the Gothic novel, a much neglected and misunderstood school, as a unified literary cycle. Attention has been centred on the domains or sub-systems of the novel where cultural models and generic traits are particularly important and distinguishable: character, plot (with the necessary evocation of a fictional world), theme and symbol. No apology is offered for the many quotations: far too little recourse is made to the texts in most discussions of the Gothic novel and this has all too frequently led to misapprehensions and unfounded generalizations. The opening section places the genre in a historio-literary context, and centres attention on the major novels, while the final section opens additional perspectives on the cycle, suggests the importance of the Gothic school for modern times, and illustrates the inevitability of its central vision of evil.

The English family chronicle novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It occurred as a reflection of the controversies of nineteenth-century natural science over evolutionary development--directly, in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, and indirectly, as English novelists felt the influence of French naturalism. Because the emergence of the family chronicle novel is so closely bound up with naturalism, nowhere can we more clearly see the reaction to naturalism worked out than in the Victorian and Edwardian family chronicles. Very often, to understand the way in which a given novel is a family chronicle--that is, how the author has used the form for his own purposes--is to define the author's stance toward naturalism. In this thesis, I examine works of five chronicle writers--Butler, Hardy, Galsworthy, Bennett, and Lawrence-- and argue that a measure of the success of the works as family chronicles is the degree to which the artists succeed in overcoming the inherent limitations of the naturalist convention, even as they used the form bequeathed by it. I suggest that D. H. Lawrence's, The Rainbow is the most interesting of these family chronicles because he has used aspects of the art of Butler and Hardy, in order to create in opposition to Bennett and Galsworthy. He works with the underlying concerns of naturalism in order to transform them into a passionate denial of the determinist attitude implicit in naturalism. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The thesis studies the social criticism in five English novels written between 1850 and 1913. All the novels can be located in the central tradition of realistic English fiction. The thesis focuses on the thematic similarities of three Victorian novels: Great Expectations, Hard Times, and Middlemarch, and two early modern novels: Jude the Obscure and Sons and Lovers. The novels voice the authors' criticisms of social, and more specifically family, conditioning. The novelists portray the arbitrary ethical norms that define and regulate behavior within specific social environments. Each novel describes the individual's aspirations which are ultimately frustrated by external forces. Although more than half a century separates the publications of Hard Times and Sons and Lovers the critical perspectives of the novelists are essentially the same. The thesis isolates aspects of the novels which realistically portray the attitudes and values of mid and late Victorian society. One avenue of investigation discusses those institutions which enforce the prevailing social doctrine. The dramatic conflict analyzed in this thesis is often between the adolescent and characters, usually older, who personify the repressive doctrine. Much of the anxiety experienced by the protagonists is a result of the confrontation of individual desire and internalized social norms. In Great Expectations and Hard Times Dickens portrays the childhood and adolescent consciousness as it emerge's within a given moral climate. The thesis analyzes how Dickens isolates and criticizes those aspects of Gradgrindery which are dehumanizing and soul-destroying. The first chapter also compares the experiences of the protagonists in Middlemarch to those of Great Expectations and Hard Times. George Eliot heightens the psychological realism by detailing the subjective conflicts within characters. The second chapter describes how Jude the Obscure and Sons and Lovers maintain the focus on the external manipulation of individual desire. The thesis compares how Hardy and Lawrence chronicle the crucial childhood and adolescent experiences of Jude Fawley and Paul Morel respectively. The second chapter analyzes those relationships and conflicts of the major and minor characters which amplify the theme of social repression. The final chapter of the thesis discusses another manifestation of social repression in Jude the Obscure and Sons and Lovers. In these novels this theme is expressed, for the first time in English fiction, in explicit sexual terms. The thesis isolates those external influences, both social and domestic, which inhibit the psycho-sexual development of Jude Fawley and Paul Morel. The family, largely maternal, conditioning of Sue Bridehead and Miriam Leivers is also analyzed as another amplification of the central thematic focus on social conditioning. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Twentieth century women's novels dramatize the daughter's conflicting desires to merge and to separate. Daughters are pulled between the passivity implied by attachment and autonomy they may construe as isolation. A psychoanalytic approach helps to illumine the struggles of daughters to reconcile the need for independence and the need for autonomy. In the struggle to define her own identity, a woman must learn to accept both her kinship with the mother and her separateness. In twentieth century women's novels, heroines have been moving away from the typical Victorian solutions to female identity—marriage and self-sacrifice. In an early novel such as May Sinclair's Mary Olivier, the heroine sacrifices her chance for marriage and remains tied to her mother's side; spiritually, however, she escapes into a mystical detachment. In Edith Wharton's novels, heroines are often caught in a love triangle, unable to reconcile their needs for mother love and sexual love; usually they end up alone. In later novels such as Doris Lessing's, the heroine leaves home to discover her own identity, but because she remains so closely identified with the mother, rejection of the mother means self-rejection. She struggles, then, to accept ambivalence toward her mother and toward herself, finally gaining a vision of integration through fantasy. Finally, in three recent novels—Lady Oracle, Jerusalem the Golden, and Earthly Possessions—the daughters learn that they cannot deny their mothers and their past in order to create themselves anew; they must re-discover the bond with the mother, but this time as adults rather than children. In Lady Oracle and Jerusalem the Golden, daughters struggle with guilt and self-hatred before they learn to recognize their underlying love for the mother. In Earthly Possessions, the heroine moves through emotional recognition of the mother-bond to discover a capacity for both intimacy and separateness. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

In discussions of English fiction, Hardy and Conrad are only occasionally considered together, and generally as being different exemplars of a late Victorian pessimism who give human dimension to the cosmic ironies of a world bereft of Providence. This study argues for a more vital connection than a coincidence of intellectual outlook, one that finds their fiction is generated by similar conceptions of how human beings experience and gain knowledge of the world in which they live. An epistemology of sense impressions underlies the invention of ‘fictional worlds’, the construction of characters, and the literary style of the otherwise very different novels considered here. As such, it is illuminating to explore both of these novelists in the light of the empirical scientific investigations of the nineteenth century which accorded such prominence to the function and evidence of the senses. While both authors have been the subject of several excellent studies of their relation to Darwin, such studies have tended to concentrate on biology in the case of Hardy, and have seen Conrad more in the province of metaphysics than empirical science. The originality of my study lies in its attention to physics and physiology as informing realms for fiction, not as a matter of direct influence upon the writers, but rather as conceptually and historically complementary modes of apprehending the world within which human experience takes place. Consequently, some of the work of contemporary scientists, as well as modern theorists in the fields of sensation, vision and sound, are seen to be as helpful in elucidating the sensory effects achieved in Hardy’s and Conrad’s novels as the many contemporary and modern literary critics whose work also informs this study. After an Introduction which locates Hardy and Conrad in relation to each other in terms of critical estimation, and which establishes the importance of the senses to their fiction and to their theoretical outlook as novelists, the study closely examines the modes of writing found in three sets of paired novels, exploring their individual treatment of a shared epistemology. In taking Desperate Remedies and The Rescue as often disregarded yet, in my view, foundational texts for each author, the focus is upon the phenomenology of sensation itself, with a distinction made between the outer-directed sensory field established in these novels as opposed to the inner mental world characteristic of Walter Pater which was so influential for Modernism. Both Hardy and Conrad are renowned for their visual evocations, and I take Far From the Madding Crowd and Lord Jim in order to explore each novelist’s extraordinary attention to light, and what it reveals to the eye. I argue that, unlike the later Modernists, the scenic construction of Hardy and Conrad creates occasions that exceed the perceptions of individual consciousness, which it renders as participating in a larger process of the ‘event’. Attending to the sound-world of these novels yields a different inflection of this account: The Return of the Native and ‘Heart of Darkness’ show characters surrounded by an active universe which penetrates to that which is hidden within, and the subject for portrayal is the attempt to give a human accent to phenomena that retain a mystery in their location and transmission. Throughout, both novelists are seen to have a united interest in the medium that surrounds human action and perception, but each novel examined is allowed its individuality and is not coerced into being a mere representative for a theoretical position. This is a study centred upon the early fiction, but the Conclusion proposes that Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Nostromo explore in very different ways an end-point for the novel of sensation, in which the identity of the individual self is open to absorption by the sensory qualities of the circumambient universe that it apprehends.

The novel-criticism of Henry James has been allowed to overshadow the achievement of his English contemporaries, whose essays, letters, and periodical-articles show a highly articulate concern with many of the most fundamental problems of novel-writing. This study examines the whole body of critical opinion over the years 1860-1900, both in its detailed expression and in its general movements. The status of the novel as a genre is hotly debated during the first fifteen years or so from a predominantly moral view-point, and critics show themselves urgently concerned with its vast dominance over the literary scene and its influence on the behaviour of society. The old Evangelical suspicions remain, and those who defend fiction are usually obliged to do so in a utilitarian way, emphasing its provision of noble exerapla and strengthening maxims, and its effect on the imagination and the sympathies, which are the key to a virtuous life. After 1880, the moral respectability of novel-reading is fairly assured, in spite of continuing traces of doubt, and argument over the novel's general position is now concentrated on its claims to offer more than mere relaxation, many holding, to the end of the century, that this is the form's main function, but a growing number (especially among the novelists themselves) stressing, on the contrary, its "seriousness", its philosophic scope, and the imaginative heights to which it can attain. At the same time, the aesthetic status of the novel is slowly changing by the attempts of critics to define it vis-à-vis the other arts, to describe its history and its categories, and to enunciate its own laws, despite the opposition of many who continued to believe in spontaneity and informality. The new devotion by some to craftsmanship and the artistic conscience is the final factor in a status for the novel that remains, even in 1900, controversial and insecure. The central question of the novel's realism or non-realism is resolved for many critics in terms of a simple correspondence with life, a mirroring of normal experience without exaggeration or convention, and, above all, a portrayal of characters which affect the reader as if alive. This is widely challenged, however, sometimes only unconsciously, by the modifications necessary in order to give pleasure, the exclusion of dull or sordid subject-matter, the selection of "agreeable" characters, and an artistic treatment that is generally optimistic and consoling. More consciously, Idealism reveals itself in accounts of the novelist's temperament and imagination as a valid distorting medium, his subjectivity, "vision", or sympathy; and, again, in thoroughly non-Realist descriptions of a transcendental realm of Beauty, or Truth, or Essence, which the novel should represent, sometimes by use of the Type or the Symbol. The structural nature of the form is also used to distinguish it from life, especially with reference to the non-mimetic quality of artistic illusion, vraisemblance and compression. All of these traits, Realist and Idealist, are crystallized in the great disputes of the 'eighties and 'nineties caused by the advent of French Naturalism and the supposedly Realist school of Henry James and W. D. Howells; and proponents of Idealism, an unexpectedly numerous band, express their ideas with enthusiasm in their reactions to the revival of the Romance-form in the last two decades. The novel's representation of reality is also modified in various ways by its embodying various value-judgments, and the necessity for moral didacticism dominates many accounts, especially in the earlier years. The nature of the moral code to be observed by novelists is generally of more interest to critics than the specific manner of its implementation in aesthetic terms, and the values prove to be either vaguely Transcendental - the enshrining of the Moral Ideal - or more Empirical, based on social convention and the Christian tradition. The operation of values and ideas in fiction is usually examined by critics from the standpoint of their effect on the "moral sense" or the emotions of readers, or their origins in the moral nature of the artist himself, and comments on how the novelist's judgments are embodied in his Characterisation or in his use of the convention of Poetic Justice take us only a little nearer to the heart of the problem. Didacticism is also widely attacked, on the grounds that it causes unnaturalness and that values should be in some way dramatised and made inherent, but again, few details are given of this proper method, most accounts, like Leslie Stephen's and Saintsbury's, returning to the moral quality of the writer's imagination. Even enemies of traditional morality, like Pater, Swinburne, Henley, Moore, and Havelock Ellis, confine themselves to demanding fewer moral restrictions for the novel, and none denies - or satisfactorily explains - its essential moral or philosophical relevance. Lastly, novel-critics prove to have much to say on questions of technique, centered on the antinomy between the Novel of Plot and the Novel of Character, the organic unity of a novel, and the various problems of narrative-method. After the early favour given to "Character", a reaction occurs against the excessive character-analysis of the French and American schools, and 'plot' becomes a desirable and much-sought quality. The novelty of Henry James' methods is unappreciated, and the conservatism of novel-theory in this respect is most marked. Constructive unity, on the other hand, is a concept that receives much valuable elaboration, and, under various interpretations, is a reviewers' fetish at all times. The question of Point of View is also well-known to the period, the advantages and disadvantages of Omniscience and Autobiography being fully gone into, and, in one remarkable essay by Vernon Lee, is the subject of a full and intelligent discussion. The ageis criticism of fiction, then, despite its limitations, gives an impression of some width and insight, and, with its many unexpected characteristics, must be regarded as an important sector of Victorian literary theory.

MA, Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 1995

This dissertation uses the concept of erotic conduct to rethink theatre’s role in Victorian society and its influence on the novel more specifically. Though uncommon today, the term “conduct” was widely used by Victorian commentators seeking to identify what facets of erotic experience were most important to social life and the formation of individual character. Instead of parsing the pathologies of desire, as Michel Foucault would lead us to expect, commentators directed their attention to volitional—and often habitual—behaviors that took pleasing erotic sensations as their primary end. Such conduct transpired in all spaces of everyday life, but this project turns to a diverse set of archival sources to make the case that it was conduct at the theatre that held the greatest fascination. A mass culture of an exceptional magnitude, situated in discrete physical spaces, the Victorian commercial theatre provided ample opportunities for both fleeting and enduring encounters between people who weren’t married or even necessarily of the opposite sex. This dissertation shows how new varieties of sexual character emerged at the theatre, where they were either tacitly permitted or flamboyantly indulged: the imperious actress; the ardent female spectator; the cruising sodomite; and the female dandy. Drawing on a breadth of archival research, "Eccentric Conduct" makes the case that just as the theatre affected the erotic habits of many Victorians, so did it influence the storytelling habits of many Victorian novels. Explicit depictions of performers and theatergoing have led many critics to characterize the Victorian novel as anti-theatrical, eschewing the fleshly and meretricious matter of live performance in favor of representing the superior qualities of privacy, domesticity and moral continence associated with the bourgeois home. This project counters this view by uncovering the subtler yet more pervasive influence theatre had on the characters, vocabulary, images and narrative devices of realist fiction. Novelists most often deployed theatrically-derived storytelling habits when seeking to represent pleasures inconsistent with the institution of patriarchal marriage. Instead of imitating the disciplinary conduct of the police or patriarch, to which the novel is often compared, novels by Eliot and Hardy sought to convey and thus promote the pleasures they also represented. In order to make theatre’s effect on the metalanguage of Victorian fiction intelligible, I reconstruct the conduct to which novelists elude by juxtaposing artifacts such as theatergoing diaries, scrapbooks, trial records and cabinet photographs alongside the “actress novel” genre, Middlemarch, Teleny, The Heavenly Twins, and Jude the Obscure.