Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2001. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 177-188).

In a Victorian Britain in crisis, Chartism was as it remains an exemplary site for contestation of various forms of authority--social, political, theological, historical, and literary. When Carlyle in his Chartism essay demands what "the under classes intrinsically mean," he discounts "these wild inarticulate souls" unable to recognize or express their own true state (122). But even as Carlyle authorizes detached observation, he also helps cement those unpredictable alliances that haunt his work. In an increasingly statistical culture, the representation of Chartism has much to tell about technologies of power, the cultural inflection of difference, and the production and reproduction of knowledge, value, and legitimacy. Thus, it seems timely to re-examine Chartism and its diverse representations within and beyond the so-called social-problem novel. Like other forms of knowledge production, the novel both helped shape and was reshaped by Chartism which tested to the limit the novel's pretension to adequate representation of a common world. / Such investigation indicates the importance of interpretation despite its being attacked by everyone from political economists to postmodernists. I thus interpret Victorian reform through its literary mediations, and in relation to the kinds of authority and accounting associated with a history and theology in crisis. In reading for reform largely male middle-class experts, I deploy a double strategy, reading them to bring out the power and agency of the underrepresented, and realigning texts and contexts to reform the ways they are read. While Carlyle and Peter Gaskell defined the terms of succeeding debates on Chartism, they did not fully determine the interpretations of their own words or other pertinent evidence by the underclasses or by writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley. By the forms of their fiction, these two writers helped legitimate the lives and utterances of the working classes and exposed the class- and gender-based hierarchies of literary genres and social and political conventions. Elizabeth Gaskell and Kingsley rework such authoritative discourses as history and theology and reform reading and writing in ways that frustrate the efforts of literary taxonomists then and now, and accept the burden of interpretation to make a difference in the literary and social scene. / By socializing and historicizing literary categories in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin and others, I aim to escape those intellectual "tramlines" that have constrained commentary. The careful generic and other demarcations and hierarchies of traditional critical discourse and unexamined allegiance to stable notions of class, gender, nation, and religion have operated against the disruptive power and productivity of the work of Gaskell and Kingsley. Equally, whereas historians like Dorothy Thompson turn to "empirical data" (Chartists x) to dispel the confusion of interpretations of Chartism, my practice is theoretical, as my story of the past is continuous with my understanding of the present. Even Gareth Stedman Jones (part of the linguistic turn in historical studies) cannot sufficiently rethink Chartism when he concedes determining force to government policy and Carlyle's terms, although he usefully shifts attention from the economic to the political. He operates, however, within a rigid binary logic that separates the social and political while underplaying the cultural and a range of linguistic practices and forms of dissemination that constituted Chartist identity.

Zugl.: Vechta, Hochsch., Diss., 2004

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX219170.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also in a digital version from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

This study explores how Anglophone fiction from the mid-Victorian period to the outbreak of the First World War acted as an imaginative testing-ground for theories of the evolution of language. Debates about the past development and the future of language ranged beyond the scope of empirical data and into speculative narrative. Fiction offered to realize such narratives in detail, building imaginative worlds out of different theories of language evolution. In the process, it also often tested these theories, exposing their contradictions. The lack of clear boundaries between nature and culture in language studies of the period enabled fictions of language evolution to explore questions to which contemporary researchers have returned. To what extent is communication instinctive or conventional? How do social and biological factors interact in the production of meaning? The study traces two opposing tendencies of thought on language evolution, naming them language ‘progressivism’ and ‘vitalism’. Progressivism imagined speakers evolving away from involuntary, instinctive vocalizations to extert rational control over their discourse with mechanical precision. By contrast, language vitalism posited a mysterious, natural power in words which had weakened and fragmented with the rise of writing and industrial society. Certain genres of fiction lent themselves to exploration of these ideas, with utopian tales seeking to envision the end-goals of progressive theory. Representations of primitive language in imperial and prehistoric romances also promoted progressivism by depicting the instinctive, irrational speech from which ‘civilization’ was imagined as advancing away. Conversely, much historical and invasion fiction idealized a linguistic past when speech had expressed natural truth, and the authentic folk origins of its speakers. Both progressivism and vitalism were undermined through the late nineteenth century by developments in biology, which challenged claims of underlying stability in nature or purpose in change. Simultaneously, philologists increasingly argued that meaning was conventional, attacking models of semantic progress and degradation. In this context, a number of authors reconceptualized language in their fiction as a mixture of instinct and convention. These imaginative explorations of the borderlands between the social and biological in communication prefigured many of the concerns of twenty-first-century biosemiotics.

No description available.

Thesis (D. Min.)--New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 2007. / Abstract and vita. Includes final project proposal. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-171, 39-42).

The historical era between 1850 and 1950 is known to be a turbulent period reflected not only in adult literature but also in the texts written for children. This unusually rich period in terms of political, social and ideological development certainly influenced most parts of the world. However, it was particularly important for England mainly for the transition of the Victorian era and Edwardian period to the modern history initiated by the WW I. Throughout this period many new ideologies arose and scientific discoveries were more numerous than ever. In 1859, for instance, Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published and initiated the still on-going war period between Christianity and science. At the same time, the concept of childhood started to be understood in a different way and books written for children became a common commodity converting the end of 18th century in the Golden Age of children's literature. However, according to Peter Hunt's publication Understanding Children's Literature, 'all texts are inevitably infused by ideologies'. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is firstly, to study the way in which ideologies are incorporated in the texts for children (overt or covert) and secondly, the extent to which the texts for children become a vehicle of...

This study examines how teachers at Kingsley Elementary School feel about the multiage program now as compared to when the program was first implemented. There were 28 teachers and two administrators interviewed to determine their perceptions of the positive and negative influences of the multiage program. The purpose of the study is to reveal the success or failure of the multiage program at Kingsley Elementary School and to explore the process used by the school to implement the process. The approach to this study is qualitative and uses interview data from both former and current Kingsley staff. Five research questions were formulated. The field effort concentrated on the respondents' perceptions of the developmental process of the multiage program. Results suggest that the teachers' and administrators' perceptions of the multiage program at Kingsley Elementary School are basically for traditional methods. During the analysis, suggestions emerged from the interviewees to improve the multiage program. Some of these suggestions could be used as a guide for other school systems that are beginning implementation of a multiage program.