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Victorian inquisitiveness about sleep and dysfunctions of sleep is exemplified in novels published during the fifty-year period from Jane Eyre (1847) to Dracula (1897). This inquisitiveness foreshadows modern medical sleep science and immerses the reading public in a body of popular literature that subverts the concept of "normal" sleep. My dissertation explores the ways in which Victorian fiction brings physiological and psychological female concerns to the fore through the plot devices of sleep and sleeplessness. I examine the Victorians' diverse interpretations of illness, physical and sexual vulnerability, moral insanity, criminality, and anxiety to determine the thematic and narratological ways in which these issues are linked to sleeping and waking states. Drawing on feminist literary criticism, cultural historicism, and medical insight from the early nineteenth-century to the present, I argue that Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker use sleep and wakefulness as vehicles to navigate gendered fluctuations of power and loss. Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, and Dracula each present sleep as a gendered space in which power is contested. I argue that sleeplessness and restlessness are the methods women adopt, either on purpose or unintentionally, to realize self-sufficiency and protect themselves from patriarchal jurisdiction and other social restrictions on women. Women must reject their instinctual desires for a certain amount of sleep so that they can maintain agency and authority over their bodies and narratives. Implicit in the novels is the idea that deep sleep is a mechanism for achieving health and moral strength of character. However, explicitly and without apology, the novels use the trope of sleep for women as a violent instrument of loss, infection, powerlessness, and weakness. The cultural and medical artifacts of the time suggest that deep, indulgent sleep is the only way to achieve or maintain health. Yet Victorian authors write sleep as a sure road to incapacitation and subjugation. Brontë, Collins, and Stoker demonstrate that a woman's mind is only as healthy as her sleep, while her body is always safer awake.

This thesis approaches the ways George MacDonald viewed and represented Victorian society in his novels by analysing select social issues which he felt compelled to address. Chapter One introduces the thesis. It contains a review of critical commentary on MacDonald’s work, as well as discussions on his non-fictional texts and essays, industrialism, and the great rural-urban divide of the nineteenth century. Chapter Two concentrates on MacDonald’s representations of the city in Robert Falconer (1868), The Vicar’s Daughter (1872), and Weighed and Wanting (1882) by underscoring parallels between Octavia Hill’s housing and environmental schemes and situations which he experienced firsthand. Chapter Three examines the influence of Nature on MacDonald’s theology and social views. Special emphasis is placed on Wordsworth and the development of MacDonald’s unique pantheism in his texts, such as the short story, ‘A Journey Rejourneyed’ (1865-6), Guild Court (1868), Wilfrid Cumbermede (1872), What’s Mine’s Mine (1886), and Home Again (1887). Chapter Four uncovers MacDonald’s involvement with the animal welfare movement during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Discussions on vivisection, vegetarianism, hunting, animal abuse, evolution, and degeneration are provided with a wide range of MacDonald’s texts, such as Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865), Paul Faber, Surgeon (1879), The Marquis of Lossie (1877), A Rough Shaking (1890), and Heather and Snow (1893). Chapter Five offers a short summation of the thesis. It affirms that MacDonald was deeply troubled by certain social issues that were raised within his society and would use his fiction to express his concerns. The conclusion also offers a few suggestive topics for ongoing research in the field of this thesis.

This thesis explores the representation of Victorian masculinity in the Boy's Own Paper. While the Boy's Own Paper (1879-1967) is widely recognised as being one of the most successful juvenile periodicals of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries there remains very little critical analysis on the publication’s literature. This thesis aims to contribute to the advancement of the study of nineteenth-century juvenile periodicals by providing the first in-depth textual study of the Boy's Own Paper. Focusing on the Boy's Own Paper during George Andrew Hutchison’s editorship (1879-1913), this project brings together masculinities studies and current research on nineteenth-century periodicals. By examining the reoccurring themes of masculinity in the Boy's Own Paper, this study reveals how the Boy's Own Paper struggled to balance Christian beliefs, changing social demands, and growing imperial objectives. Each chapter delivers a close reading of selected texts ranging from illustrated fictional stories written by leading authors of the day, such as G. A. Henty and Talbot Baines Reed, to letters sent to the editor by Christian missionaries living overseas. The first chapter outlines the editorial practices of Hutchison and addresses the publication’s implied readership. Chapter 2 examines physical masculinity as explored through the paper’s representation of the schoolboy and the athlete as national hero-figures. The relationship between masculinity, self-help, and philanthropy is studied in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 analyses how the racial stereotypes featured within the Boy's Own Paper perpetuated the ideologies of British masculine superiority. Finally, Chapter 5 broadens the study of gender by addressing the participation and representation of female contributors and characters. I conclude by considering the future of Boy's Own Paper research and the implications of periodicals studies in the digital age. In doing so, this study offers a holistic and up-to-date reading of the Boy's Own Paper.

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Une théorie unifiée donnant à Poe une cohérence dans sa diversité est possible lorsqu’on base l’analyse de son œuvre sur sa cosmogonie, c’est-à-dire sur sa conception de l’univers. Celle-ci repose sur un dieu devenu universel en se matérialisant, puis en se divisant en la quasi-infinité de matière formant le monde que nous connaissons. La division de l’âme divine est selon lui reflétée dans la nature intrinsèquement divisée de l’âme humaine. En cela, les notions de temps, de mort et de destinée sont interconnectées : l’histoire cosmique est identique à celle de l’homme, toutes deux régies par le temps et circonscrites par la mort. Cette même histoire se répétant tout au long de son œuvre, elle constitue donc le motif archétypal qui l’unifie. / A unified theory of Poe’s works, bringing his diverse writing together into one coherent story can be found in his cosmogony, that is to say, in his understanding of universal mechanics. This latter understanding is based on the idea of a god dividing himself into the almost infinity of matter that makes up the universe, building it in his literal image. The division of the divine soul is, according to Poe, echoed by the intrinsic division of the human soul. As such, Time, Death, and Destiny are fundamentally interconnected: cosmic history and human history are one and the same, ruled by time and circumscribed by death. This story can be found all throughout Poe’s works and is thus the archetypal pattern at the core of this unified theory.

‘The poet’, Eliot wrote, ‘is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist’. This dissertation is an investigation into the ways in which four poets – Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – imagine what it might mean to labour in verse towards the ‘frontiers of consciousness’. This is an old question about the value of poetry, about the kinds of understanding, feeling, and participation that become uniquely available as we read (or write) verse. But it is also a question that becomes peculiarly pressing in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. In my introductory chapter, I sketch out some of the philosophical, theological, and aesthetic contexts in which this question about what poetry might do for us becomes particularly acute: each of these four poets, I suggest, invests in verse as a means of sustaining belief in those things that seem excluded, imperilled, or forfeited by what is felt to be a peculiarly modern or (to use a contested term) ‘secularized’ understanding of the world. To write poetry becomes a labour towards enabling or ratifying otherwise untenable experiences of belief. But while my broader concern is with what is at stake philosophically, theologically, and even aesthetically in this labour towards the frontiers of consciousness, my more particular concern is with the ways in which these poets think in verse about how the poetic organisation of language brings us to momentary consciousness of otherwise unavailable ‘meanings’. For each of these poets, it is as we begin to listen in to the paralinguistic sounds of verse that we become conscious of that which lies beyond the realms of the linguistic imagination. These poets develop figures within their verse in order to theorize the ways in which this peculiarly poetic ‘music’ brings us to consciousness of that which exceeds or transcends the limits of the world in which we think we live. These figures begin as images of the half-seen (glimmering, haunting, dappling, crossing) but become a way of imagining that which we might only half-hear or half-know. Chapter 2 deals with Tennyson’s figure of glimmering light that signals the presence, activity, or territory of the ‘higher poetic imagination’; In Memoriam, I argue, represents the development of this figure into a poetics of the ‘glimpse’, a poetry that repeatedly approaches the horizon of what might be seen or heard. Chapter 3 is concerned with Hardy’s figuring of the ‘hereto’ of verse as a haunted region, his ghostly figures and spectral presences becoming a way of thinking about the strange experiences of listening and encounter that verse affords. Chapter 4 attends to the dappled skins and skies of Hopkins’ verse and the ways in which ‘dapple’ becomes a theoretical framework for thinking about the nature and theological significance of prosodic experience. And Chapter 5 considers the visual and acoustic crossings of Eliot’s verse as a series of attempts to imagine and interrogate the proposition that the poetic organisation of language offers ‘hints and guesses’ of a reality that is both larger and more significant than our own.

My thesis examines the concept of sweetness as an aesthetic category in nineteenth-century British culture. My contention is that a link exists between the idea of sweetness as it appears in literary works and sugar as an everyday commodity with a complex history attached. Sugar had changed from being considered as a luxury in 1750 to a mass-market staple by the 1850s, a major cultural transition which altered the concept of sweetness as a taste. In the thesis I map the consequences of this shift as they are manifest in a range of texts from the period, alongside parallel changes in the aesthetic category of sweetness. I also assess the relationship between the material history of sweetness and the separate but related concept of aesthetic sweetness. In focussing on the relationship between sugar and sweetness in the Victorian period this thesis examines an area of nineteenth-century life that has previously never been subject to detailed study. Although several critics have explored the connection between sugar and concepts of sweetness as they relate to abolitionist debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, my focus differs in that I assert that other material histories of sugar played as significant a role in developing discourses of sweetness. Throughout this study, which spans the period 1780-1870, I draw on a range of sources across a variety of genres, including abolitionist pamphlets, medical textbooks, the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Wilkie Collins, the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, and the poetry of Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. I conclude that literary cultures in the nineteenth century increasingly use discourses of sugar to relate to the mass market and explore the commercialisation of literature, at a time when a growing commodity culture was seen as a threat to literary integrity.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:11:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 6144.pdf: 32503381 bytes, checksum: d3df6020c184821212fe5bd618dc0890 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-28 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / This dissertation aims to investigate how the Charlotte Brontë s literary project presents in the novel, Jane Eyre (1847), through female authorship, and, as its transposition into Cinema, the movie version by Cary Joji Fukunaga´s Jane Eyre (2011) occurs. The literary project of the author focuses on the issue of gender and its concern was to give voice to the women of her time. The director´s project for this movie comes from melodrama to the triumph of love search. The purpose of analysis is to understand how the interpretation of this source-novel occurs in the 21st century, with the aim of examining how this story is reread, seeking current interpretive understanding of the novel through the film. Thus, this study will demonstrate the importance of the periodization as proposed by Jameson (1992) for the reading of the novel and its transcreation, according to Campos (2004), considering the relationship between economic s, political, social and aesthetic characteristics of each period, as also teaches Candido (1967). The research was developed through the reading the novel, of the theoretical works about the author as well as the director and analysis of filmic narrative. / Esta dissertação tem por objetivo demonstrar como o projeto literário de Charlotte Brontë se apresenta no romance Jane Eyre (1847), por meio da autoria feminina, como ocorre sua transposição para o Cinema, na versão fílmica, de Cary Joji Fukunaga, Jane Eyre (2011). O projeto literário da autora concentra-se na questão de gênero e sua preocupação foi a de dar voz à mulher de seu tempo. O projeto do diretor para esse filme parte do melodrama para o triunfo da busca pelo amor. O intuito de análise é perceber como ocorre a interpretação desse romance-fonte no século XXI, com o objetivo de analisar como essa história é relida, buscando a compreensão interpretativa desse romance-fonte na atualidade pelo olhar fílmico. Neste âmbito, este estudo demonstrará a importância da periodização conforme proposto por Jameson (1992) para a leitura do romance e de sua transcriação, de acordo com Campos (2004), considerando as relações entre as características econômicas, políticas, sociais e estéticas de cada período, conforme também nos ensina Candido (1967). A pesquisa foi desenvolvida por meio da leitura do romance, de obras teóricas sobre a autora e o diretor e análise da narrativa cinematográfica.