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This work challenges common arguments as to the division of the political from other fictional genres and, in treatments of nineteenth-century fiction and culture, the private from the public sphere. Through an examination of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Gaskell, I uncover a common concern with the preconditions of liberal selfhood which posits the household as the space in which the political rights-bearer, defined by interiority and mental qualities, comes to be. This rights-bearer is not, as has been argued, defined by purely formal and abstract procedural reason, but in terms of a capacity for reason which includes the capacity for emotion. This work therefore shows domestic space to be the foundation of, rather than the occluded counterpart to, the liberal polity, and argues that an account of the household, in which the liberal self is disclosed, is likewise at the centre of Victorian political fiction.

The title of our thesis is The Myth of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in Michel Tournier's Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique and J.M. Coetzee's Foe. We intend to show how Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe story has become a renewed, transformed myth in the fictional works of Michel Tournier and J.M. Coetzee. In the first chapter, we will analyse the attitude of critics to Daniel Defoe, Michel Tournier and J.M. Coetzee's works, and we shall review the pertinent aspects of the three novelists' life. In the second chapter, we will define the concept of myth according to the African and European thinkers. We shall also stress the types, functions and myth's expressions in literary work. In the third chapter, we shall analyse and compare the characters of the three novels following the theory of A.J. Greimas which will be enriched by Evgueni Meletinski. We will divide the characters into protagonists, accessories, opponents, neutrals and absents. Analysis and comparison of the fictional characters will identify two major groups: colonizer and colonized. There will also be an examination of the meaning of characters' names used by the three novelists as well as our opinion on the fictional characters of Defoe, Tournier and Coetzee. Analysis of plot structures will show how the three novels are composed according to a cyclical pattern. The fourth chapter will be devoted to a comparative thematic analysis of solitude, sexuality and education. This will reveal the two faces of each theme as well as the hidden philosophy of the three novelists. And the fifth chapter will identify the narrative and stylistic techniques of the novels. It will show the kind of genre used by Defoe, Toumier and Coetzee as well as the letter and journal. It will also show the types of stylistic aspects of the three novels which are present in the novels. We will examine in the sixth chapter the spaces and the time framework of the three novels. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2007.

The eighteenth-century British novel derived its purpose, structure, and theory of characterization from the life-history, in the form of biography or autobiography. In eighteenth-century Britain both the novel and the life-history emerged in recognizably modern forms. Like the life-history, the novel maintained as its purpose the Horatian maxim that art should both instruct and entertain. Moreover, the novel and the life-history shared the same structure, as each novel purported to be the biography or autobiography of the title character of the work. Finally, the novel and the life-history adopted the same theories of characterization for the major as well as minor characters within the works.However, life-writing was at this time in a period of transition from the static to the dynamic theory of characterization. This transition came as a result of a significant change in the view of the source of personality. In the static life-history the central subject, as well as the minor figures, possessed an innate, unchanging personality. Thus when Plutarch wrote of Alexander or of Julius Caesar, these figures were depicted as men born to greatness. However, each was imperfect, possessing in the Aristotelian sense a tragic flaw. In the main this theory was significant because it placed no value on what was later to be considered so important in the development of personality-the individual's experiential life.In direct contrast to the static theory, the dynamic view of personality was the result of Cartesian and Lockean psychology which saw personality as the direct result of not the innate but instead the experiential processes. The experiences of the central character, rather than exemplifying innate qualities, now were seen as shaping and delineating that personality. The application of this new theory to both the modern novel and life-history produced a central character or characters growing according to the dynamic theory, though the minor characters remained "type" characters in accordance with the static theory.Therefore, the sources of the British eighteenth-century novel lay both in the dynamic biographies and autobiographies of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century and in the classical life-writers beginning with Plutarch and Josephus, as well. In this study the primary classical works analyzed are Josephus, the portrait of Herod in the Jewish Antiquities and his own in The Life; Plutarch's "Julius Caesar" and Suetonius' "Julius Caesar"; St. Augustine's Confessions; Dante's Vita Nuova; and the transitional Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. The adoption of the new dynamic theory is illustrated in two life-histories: Colley Cibber's Apology and Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage.The application of the dynamic theory to eighteenth-century autobiographical novels is exemplified by Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Tobias G. Smollett's Roderick Random. Though there was a complex psychological portrait of Richardson's Pamela Andrews, with a number of moral digressions, there were little character development and few digressions in Smollett's novel.A far more complex treatment of the theories of personality occurred in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. As narrator Tristram centered the work upon the four.crucial accidents that had formed his personality, and on those other three dynamic characters who were connected with these misfortunes--the Shandy brothers and Parson Yorick. In contrast, minor characters such as Dr. Slop were drawn according to the static theory. The digressions within the work were encased within a comic-satiric framework. Thus the two theories of personality--static and dynamic--which informed eighteenth-century life-writing served also as the principal source for characterization in the eighteenth-century British autobiographical novel.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1989. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [244]-254).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 1999. / Adviser: Carol Houlihan Flynn. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-281). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2000. / Advisers: Sheila Emerson; Modhumita Roy. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 229-249). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007. / Title from file title page. Ian C. Fletcher, committee chair; Jared Poley, committee member. Electronic text (136 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Nov. 5, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-136).