Literature and medicine are not usually seen as related disciplines, but scholars have already begun producing fruitful scholarship regarding historical and aesthetic interactions between them. This thesis adds to that scholarship by examining medicine and literature in nineteenth-century Britain. More specifically, Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both use nineteenth-century medical case conventions to tell their stories. Furthermore, because both works deal with addiction, divided selves, and the power that physical substances can have on morality and character, these two works provide an excellent comparison coming 65 years apart. As such, they are a great point from which to begin looking more closely at how the interactions between medicine and literature evolved during the nineteenth-century in Britain. This thesis examines the role that "scientific" discourse has played in medicine and literature as interpretive disciplines, the rhetorical techniques and innovations surrounding the intersection of the two disciplines, and the authority that each discipline derived by implicitly borrowing ideological assumptions and textual forms from the other. Confessions is a wonderful example of a Romantic, autobiographical text that clearly uses the medical case study conventions; in fact, De Quincey was often cited in the years following the publication of Confessions as an authority on opium and its uses. By the time Jekyll and Hyde was published, however, a work like Confessions could no longer hold its own in medical debates. The professional institutions of medicine and literature had changed too much. Hence, by analyzing these two works side-by-side, I intend to illustrate different narrative approaches to similar issues at the beginning and end of the century. More importantly, I hope to use these texts in conjunction with specific medical case histories to discuss each text's reliance on interdisciplinary authority.

This doctoral dissertation analyses depictions of hell in sanctions, i.e. threats of punishments in Anglo-Saxon charters. I am arguing that an innovative use of sanctions as pastoral and ideological instruments effected the peak of infernal imagery in the sanctions of tenth-century royal diplomas. Belonging to the genre of ritual curses, Anglo-Saxon sanctions contain the three standard ecclesiastical curses (excommunication, anathema and damnation). It cannot be established if other requirements of ritual cursing (authoritative personnel, setting and gestures) were fulfilled. A lack of evidence, together with indications of more secular punishments, suggests that sanctions were not used as legal instruments. Their pastoral function is proposed by frightening depictions of hell and the devil, as fear is an important means of achieving salvation in biblical, homiletic and theological writings available or produced in Anglo-Saxon England. The use of the infernal motifs of Hell as a Kitchen, Satan as the Mouth of Hell and winged demons in sanctions are discussed in detail. Sanctions frequently contain the overtly didactic and pastoral device of the exemplum. Notorious sinners believed to be damned in hell (e.g. Judas) are presented as negative exempla in sanctions to deter people from transgressing against charters. The repeated use of terms from classical mythology for depicting hell in Anglo-Saxon sanctions appears to correlate with the preference for hermeneutic Latin by tenth-century monastic reformers. The reasons for employing classical mythological terminology seem to agree with those suggested for the use of hermeneutic Latin (intellectual snobbery and raising the stylistic register), and glossaries constitute the main source of both types of Latinity. The sanctions of the Refoundation Charter of New Minster, Winchester, which is known to display the ‘ruler theology’ propagated by the monastic reform, are examined in their textual contexts with regard to the observations made in the earlier parts of this dissertation.

Defining rarity as a relative quality in matter roughly opposite to density, this dissertation focusses on the way material qualities of molecular gases, such as semi-opacity, permeation, and blending, inform modernist representations of embodied spatial experience. In modernist writing, rare matter—including air, fog, smoke, and haze—functions as an active component of the sensory environment, filling up the negative space that sets off subjects from objects, and characters from settings. Representing matter across the full range of the rarity-density spectrum allows modernist writers to challenge the ontological status of such boundaries, and to develop dynamic spatial models of the self-world threshold. The Introduction defines rare matter and examines its function as a sensory medium that can alternately define and blur subject/object boundaries. Interpreting dynamic thresholds as products of authorial activism, I argue that modernist narratives disrupt the normative constructions of the self-world boundary that prevailed in biomedical discourse around the turn of the century. Chapter 1, seeking to expand the scope of modernist object studies to include rare matter, analyzes illustrated books about London to demonstrate the increased cultural visibility of the atmosphere in the modernist period. Visual and verbal gestalt effects, modelled on the hermeneutic oscillation between looking at and looking through the fog, foreground the materiality of the atmosphere that fills up three-dimensional space, pressing up against the thresholds of the body and disrupting fixed distinctions between subjects and their surroundings. Chapter 2 shows how D. H. Lawrence harnesses the properties of rare matter to construct dynamic representations of the self-world boundary. In his early novels and his criticism, the oscillation between self-diffusion and self-differentiation expresses characters’ psychological responsiveness to changing interpersonal and ontological pressures. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Virginia Woolf takes advantage of rare attributes like permeation, fluid motion, and variable particle spacing to model process-oriented communities that incorporate dynamic shifts between social autonomy and collective identity. The Conclusion examines rare imagery in modernist scenes of narration, arguing that dynamic self-world thresholds help to articulate a responsive form of reader-text interaction that allows for the alternation of independent and collaborative reading practices.

Defining rarity as a relative quality in matter roughly opposite to density, this dissertation focusses on the way material qualities of molecular gases, such as semi-opacity, permeation, and blending, inform modernist representations of embodied spatial experience. In modernist writing, rare matter—including air, fog, smoke, and haze—functions as an active component of the sensory environment, filling up the negative space that sets off subjects from objects, and characters from settings. Representing matter across the full range of the rarity-density spectrum allows modernist writers to challenge the ontological status of such boundaries, and to develop dynamic spatial models of the self-world threshold. The Introduction defines rare matter and examines its function as a sensory medium that can alternately define and blur subject/object boundaries. Interpreting dynamic thresholds as products of authorial activism, I argue that modernist narratives disrupt the normative constructions of the self-world boundary that prevailed in biomedical discourse around the turn of the century. Chapter 1, seeking to expand the scope of modernist object studies to include rare matter, analyzes illustrated books about London to demonstrate the increased cultural visibility of the atmosphere in the modernist period. Visual and verbal gestalt effects, modelled on the hermeneutic oscillation between looking at and looking through the fog, foreground the materiality of the atmosphere that fills up three-dimensional space, pressing up against the thresholds of the body and disrupting fixed distinctions between subjects and their surroundings. Chapter 2 shows how D. H. Lawrence harnesses the properties of rare matter to construct dynamic representations of the self-world boundary. In his early novels and his criticism, the oscillation between self-diffusion and self-differentiation expresses characters’ psychological responsiveness to changing interpersonal and ontological pressures. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Virginia Woolf takes advantage of rare attributes like permeation, fluid motion, and variable particle spacing to model process-oriented communities that incorporate dynamic shifts between social autonomy and collective identity. The Conclusion examines rare imagery in modernist scenes of narration, arguing that dynamic self-world thresholds help to articulate a responsive form of reader-text interaction that allows for the alternation of independent and collaborative reading practices.

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M.A. (English) / Victorian studies is a field much-studied and, during the century that has passed since the end of Queen Victoria‘s reign, literary criticism on the subject has been extensive. In the main, however, criticism has tended to focus on the protagonists of Victorian novels, whether to argue that their journeys are immoral, or represent a warning against immorality, or to examine their behaviour and so arrive at conclusions regarding identity. Through a close reading of Oscar Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Robert Louis Stevenson‘s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker‘s Dracula (1897), and by focussing on the reactions and responses of Victorian society (as the texts represent it) to the novel‘s transgressive characters rather than on those characters themselves (as has been the trend) this dissertation moves away from readings of duality and moral judgment and towards a greater understanding of the intricacies of late-Victorian society itself. In addition, and through this process, this dissertation interrogates the bifurcated and contradictory nature of the Victorian moral structure and destabilizes the binary oppositions of character judgment that were so fundamental in its creation. Furthermore, through a discussion of the historical context of the text‘s chosen for this study, this dissertation challenges the formulation and authenticity of Victorian morality by considering the manner in which power informed the behaviour and decisions of middle-class Victorians at the turn of the century. To this end, I will consider how the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, especially those pertaining to power and morality, are invaluable in problematizing the binary system of categorization that so dominated the late-Victorian cultural space. Finally, I argue that the texts I have elected to study represent a climate of unrest and dissatisfaction with the Victorian moral climate at the fin de siècle (or turn of the century) and that they are instrumental in our understanding of that moral climate and the subsequent changes to it.

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Ce mémoire étudie les épitomés de la figure doppelganger en trois romans britanniques gothiques du XIXe siècle: Frankenstein de Mary Shelley, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde de Robert Louis Stevenson et Dracula de Bram Stoker. En utilisation avec les sources secondaires dont The Origin of Species et The Descent of Man de Charles Darwin, et The Uncanny de Sigmund Freud, je soutiens que le doppelganger symbolise les conventions sociales et les angoisses des hommes britanniques dans les années 1800. Grâce à un examen des représentations physiques et métaphoriques de la dualité et de la figure doppelganger dans la littérature primaire, je démontre que la duplicité était courante au XIXe siècle à Londres. En conclusion, les doppelgangers sont des manifestations physiques gothiques de terreur qui influencent les luttes avec bien séance, des répressions des désirs et des craintes de l'atavisme, de la descente et de l'inconnu dans le XIXe siècle. / This thesis investigates the representations of the doppelganger figure in three nineteenth-century British Gothic novels: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Using Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny, I argue that the doppelganger symbolizes social conventions and anxieties of British men in the 1800s. By examining the physical and metaphorical representations of duality and the doppelganger figure in literature, I demonstrate that duplicity was commonplace in nineteenth-century London. I conclude that the doppelgangers are physical Gothic manifestations of terror that epitomize nineteenth-century struggles with propriety, repression of desires, and fears of atavism, descent, and the unknown.