This essay examines the limitations of societal gender norms and expectations of the late nineteenth-century and how the fictional character Ántonia Shimerda adheres to and fails to conform to them. In nineteenth-century America men and women were divided into two different spheres. Women were expected to stay within the four walls of the home and take care of cooking, housekeeping and raising the family’s children. The home was believed to be the only place where a woman could be truly happy. However, in the novel Ántonia proves that women can be happy performing physically demanding tasks outside of the expected sphere for women. To explore Ántonia’s gender fluidity this essay focuses on gender expectations and norms in the historical setting of the novel and analyzes the reasons for her to abandon her gender and the consequences this has in her life. The representation of a character that both adheres to and fails to conform to the nineteenth-century gender perceptions indicates the performative nature of gender. Cather creates a fluid gender in Ántonia, who proves to be both an independent and strong character that clearly illustrates the limitations of rigid gender norms.

This thesis revisits William Wordsworth’s practical and poetic engagement with education as epitomised in his claim that “Every Great poet is a Teacher: I wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing.” By situating this claim in the larger contexts of Wordsworth’s writings and Britain’s educational development from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, it argues that Wordsworth advocated a poetic education of receptive and creative imagination as a corrective to the practical education of passive learning and reading, and that his authority as a poet-teacher was confirmed rather than challenged by the wide divergence of his reception in Nineteenth Century Britain. The introduction defines the research topic, argues for Wordsworth’s relevance as a poet-teacher against his dubious reception in contemporary educational institutions, and examines some mistaken notions of him as a poet of nature and childhood. Chapter One investigates Wordsworth’s lifelong critique of contemporary pedagogical theories and practices for their confusion of education with instruction and their neglect of religion. Chapter Two studies Wordsworth’s proposal for an alternative mode of poetic education that relies on nature, books, and religion to foster the individual’s religious imagination, which informed Wordsworth’s vocation as a poet, and underlay the revisions of the educational backgrounds of his major poetic speakers. Chapter Three explores Wordsworth’s endeavours to cultivate readers’ receptive and creative imagination against the prevalent literary taste through differentiating strategies of communication in his poetic theories and short poems written between 1794 and 1815. Chapter Four discusses the educational uses made of Wordsworth’s poetry through studying the representative selections of his poems edited by Victorian educators, so as to reveal the slow, winding, but steady process of his being recognised as a teacher in both practical and poetic senses. The thesis concludes with a reaffirmation of Wordsworth’s authority and relevance as a teacher, both then and now.

This thesis analyses the Scottish Whig party between 1801 and 1820 with particular focus on party structure, organisation, and ideology. It seeks to provide a picture of the Scottish Whig party between these dates and to demonstrate that the party developed and maintained a sophisticated structure, cultivated an active and diverse body of members, and contributed to the intellectual development of the national Whig party. Chapter One explores the multiple opinions that existed within the Scottish Whigs on the issue of reform and how these ideas were disseminated in the press. Chapter Two discusses the fissures that existed within the Edinburgh Whigs and notes the generational gap which saw the younger Whigs compete with the older ones for pre-eminence within the party. Chapter Three extends this study beyond the confines of Edinburgh and examines the importance of a culture of conviviality to the party through a study of the dinners held throughout Scotland in honour of Charles James Fox. Extending beyond the urban centres, Chapter Four delves into the complexities of county politics in Scotland and the methods that the Whigs developed in order to overcome local challenges. Chapter Five explores the practical means by which the opposition party maintained itself, specifically through the patronage of university chairs and livings in the Church of Scotland. Through a brief exploration of the career of John Allen, Chapter Six discusses the importance of London and Holland House to the Scottish Whigs and provides suggestions for further research. Finally, it is asserted that, by the 1820s, a diverse and dynamic Scottish Whig party had emerged and was actively contributing to the national Whig party intellectually, by developing a 'new' Scottish Whiggism, and in terms of personnel. Throughout, this thesis demonstrates the flexibility of terms such as 'Whig' and 'Foxite principles' and argues for a broader interpretation of political activity and involvement as being vital to the study of early nineteenth-century politics.

<p>This dissertation argues that the Victorian novel created a sensory self much like that articulated by Victorian physiological psychology: a multi-centered and process-oriented body that reacts to situations and stimuli as they arise by mobilizing appropriate cognitive and nervous functions. By reading Victorian fiction alongside psychology as it was developing into a distinct scientific discipline (during the 1840s-70s), this project addresses broader interdisciplinary questions about how the interaction between literature and science in the nineteenth century provided new ways of understanding human consciousness. I show that narrative engagements with psychology in the novel form made it possible for readers to understand the modern person as productively rather than pathologically heterogeneous. To accomplish this, fiction offered author and reader an experimental form for engaging ideas posed and debated concurrently in science. </p><p>The novels I read - by authors including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot - emerge as narrative testing grounds for constructions of subjectivity and personhood unavailable to scientific discourse. I attribute the novel's ability to create a sensory self to its formal tactics, from composites of multiple first-person accounts to strange juxtapositions of omniscience and subjectivity, from gaps and shifts in narrative to the extended form-in-process of the serial novel. My side-by-side readings of scientific and literary experiments make it clear that fiction is where we find the most innovative methods of investigation into embodied forms of human experience.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis argues that what it terms fever narratives figure prominently in Charles Dickens’s fiction. Fever was regarded not as a symptom but as a generic disease that had sub-species, such as cholera, smallpox, typhus and typhoid, and that presented itself through devastating epidemics that frightened the public and drove the government to enact public health legislation. The core elements of the fever narrative – such as fever’s cause, pathology, treatment and prevention – were still not clearly understood. This inevitably heightened public anxiety and frustration, particularly given lengthy delays in the bureaucratic processes of Parliament and local governments in dealing with fever’s perennial threat. The politically favoured sanitarian narrative influenced Dickens significantly. Sanitarians believed that water and sewer projects in urban localities and improved sanitary practices would prevent most diseases. However, Dickens was influenced also by an alternative approach that this thesis calls the “medical narrative,” comprising a more holistic vision of public health, reliant on improved treatments, greater medical professionalism, and specialized hospitals, in addition to sanitary reform. Dickens’s 1840s novels reflected both approaches, but he emphasized the medical narrative in portrayals of the fevers of individual characters. In the 1850s, the predominant focus of fever narratives in Dickens’s journals and novels became fever of the social body – fever that figuratively infected English institutions or the country as a whole. Dickens’s fever narratives became progressively darker during these two decades and, with each novel onward from Dombey and Son (1846-48), his representations of fever apocalypses infecting both the rich and the poor became more strident, even to the extent of suggesting that the whole institutional and economic infrastructure of the country would suffer an irrevocable blow. The thesis argues that Dickens presented these minatory scenes of vengeance in response to what he perceived as the blindness of the middle class to the condition of the sick and poor of England. This reached a climax with “Revolutionary fever” in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The thesis presents a final argument that Dickens’s stories of the early 1860s and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) provided both a continuation of and a denouement for the two previous decades’ fever narratives, by offering a view of the dust of corpse upon corpse of those who were mowed down by fever, and of a river polluted by this dust. However, he foresees also the possibility of the fundamental regeneration of a more humane physical, social and institutional environment in England.

This thesis investigates music in Mexico City, with an emphasis on women's relationship to Romanticism, education, consumption, domestic music-making and public performance. During the first decades after independence in 1821, Mexicans began the process of constructing an identity, which musically speaking meant an expansion of the secular musical world. Such construction involved the development of internal activity alongside a conditional receptivity to external influence in the form of the visits of Italian opera companies such as those of Manuel García and Max Maretzek, and travelling virtuosi such as pianist virtuoso Henri Herz, who brought new repertoire and performance practices to Mexican theatres and homes. As consumers and as musicians, women were at the centre of such developments. In Mexico, both European music and that of local musicians was disseminated by means of ladies' journals and imported and locally-printed sheet music by foreign and Mexican composers, in order to supply a growing home market for amateurs. Abundant surviving repertoire for the home, the widespread availability of musical instruction as revealed through advertisements, and witness accounts of soirées and concerts in the theatre reveal a budding musical world that has hitherto been overlooked and which occurred during a period generally deemed of little importance in Mexican musical history. By investigating a key period in the social-cultural history of Mexican music, this thesis crafts a narrative of intersections between the musical life of Mexican women and the incipient construction of a musical-cultural identity.

The main aim of this interdisciplinary project is to examine attempts to codify sexual knowledge in Egypt between 1830 and 1928. Through surveying medical, religious, legal and moral writings on sexuality, this study aims to examine the underlying politics of sexual knowledge and the structures of permissions and prohibitions within which sexual knowledge was articulated in the period under study. The research recognizes that there are several sources that informed people about sexual behaviour in the period under study. However, the study is concerned only with a number of writings that imparted teachings about sex directly or indirectly to the growing literate middle class, and proceeds to discuss their authors and contexts. The study's main focus is the influence of medical and scientific conceptualization of sex differences on the understandings of gender and sexuality. In nineteenth-century Egypt, the study argues, professional medical authorities promoted medical theories that suggested men's innate active sexuality and inability to control their sexual urges. At the same time, professional Egyptian doctors increasingly projected women as mentally and physically fragile because of their reproductive cycle. Women were increasingly viewed as incapable of being sexually spontaneous. To remain healthy, women were advised to suppress their sexual desires to be satisfied only through marital sex. Through examining the interconnections between medical, legal, religious and moral discursive literature on sexual behaviour, this study brings into light the associations between sex, sexuality and the creation and recreation of gender. The study demonstrates that medical perceptions of male and female sexualities were at the core of moral and intellectual discourses on gender equality as well as religious opinions on sex-related issues. Since there was a multiplicity of ideological and activist stands on questions about sexuality and gender in the period under study, the study explores the variety of ways in which nationalists, feminists and religious scholars adopted, borrowed or negotiated with scientific and medical ideas on female sexuality to support their different views on contemporary controversial issues such as gender equality, polygamy etc. Medical and scientific ideas of male and female sexuality had a complex impact on discursive literature on gender and sexuality. On the one hand, they were employed to justify the continuity of patriarchy and the increasing male regulation of female sexuality. On the other hand, they strengthened arguments in support of the participation of women in public life.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Paris served as the epicentre for artistic creation; artists flocked to the French capital in search of training, camaraderie, and, ultimately, success. Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, and James McNeill Whistler were amongst these hopeful artists in the 1850s. While each eventually created a thriving practise for himself, each also fought to establish his artistic career and identity during these early years. Because the narrative of a young, struggling artist is not an uncommon one, this stage is often brushed aside when examining the trajectory of these artists’ careers. However, such a dismissal does not allow for a full contextualization of an artist’s life and oeuvre. Fantin, Legros, and Whistler evidence this truth, both individually and as a small group. While attempting to define their maturing artistic identities, these three artists deliberately elected to join forces and become the Société des trois. This era bore witness to the birth of the artistic avant-garde, which elevated expression and individualism; with this in mind, the decision to develop a closed artistic society is unique. Fantin, Legros, and Whistler adhered to specific societal tenets and maintained loyalty to each other in an artistic environment that praised the individual. There are many reasons that supported their decision; for example, the Société enabled them to transition from the student to professional phases of their careers between 1858 and 1868. Eventually, as the choices the artists made in the formation of their artistic identities diverged, the Société was no longer necessary, and each member went his own way. In light of their decisions to unite as a formal society, Fantin, Legros, and Whistler’s period of maturation must be understood through the lens of the Société des trois. / Graduate / 2018-05-01

This thesis examines how images of the Swedish singer Jenny Lind worked to distance her from the typical nineteenth-century view. Because of their position within the public sphere, female performers were thought to be sexually available and often had the reputation of prostitute. Lind achieved a level of success that made her one of the most famous women of the mid-nineteenth-century. She was known not only for her talent as a performer but also for her morality and piety. Examining the Lind images in the context of nineteenth-century social codes and feminist theatre history, it becomes evident that Lind was a different type of female performer. This thesis will also discuss how photographic portraits of Lind adhered to codes for proper bourgeois portraits of women in the nineteenth century, thus distancing her from the stigma that was attached to stage performers.

During the first half of the nineteenth century in many cities in Germany, England and the United States, free and public galleries were opened to encourage the purchase of art works. Some sponsoring organizations were controlled by artists and some by interested lay persons. All of the sponsors hoped to educate the public and to elevate artistic taste as well as to sell works of art. Many of the organizations offered a premium in the form of a yearly engraving to induce interest and to promote membership. Often there was an annual distribution of paintings and other works of art by lottery. In several cities in the United States these organizations, which were called art unions, began offering memberships. The largest and most influential in the United States was the American Art-Union in New York. However, their success was short lived; by the mid-eighteen fifties, they had closed their doors.