No description available.

This thesis addresses the central role of the haunted house in mid-to-late Victorian Gothic texts. It argues that haunting in fiction derives from distinct architectural and spatial traits that the middle-class Victorian home possessed. These design qualities both reflected and reinforced current social norms, and anxiety about the latter surfaced in Gothic texts. In this interdisciplinary study, literary analysis works alongside spatial examination, under the premise that literature is a space that can be penetrated and deciphered in the same way that buildings are texts that can be read and interpreted. This work is divided into two main sections, with the first three chapters introducing theoretical, historical and architectural notions that provide a background to the literary works to be discussed. The first chapter presents various theorists’ notions behind haunting and the convergence of spectrality and space, giving rise to the discussion of domestic haunting and its appeal. The second chapter examines the Crystal Palace as the icon of public space in Victorian times, its capacity for haunting, as well as its ability to frame the domestic both socially and historically. The third chapter focuses on the prototype of private space at the time—the middle-class home—in order to highlight the specificity of this dwelling, both as an architectural and symbolic entity. The second section also consists of three chapters, dedicated to the “dissection” of the haunted house, divided into three different areas: liminal, secret, and surrounding space. The fourth chapter examines works where marginal space, in the shape of hallways and staircases, is the site of intense haunting. A novel by Richard Marsh and stories by Bulwer-Lytton, Algernon Blackwood and W.W. Jacobs are analyzed here. The fifth chapter is a journey through rooms and secretive space of the spectral home; works by authors such as Wilkie Collins, J.H. Riddell and Sheridan Le Fanu are considered in order to argue that the home’s exceptional compartmentalization and its concern for secrecy translated effortlessly into Gothic fiction. The final chapter addresses an integral yet external part of the Victorian home—the grounds. Gardens in works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, M.R. James, and Oscar Wilde are inspected, proving Gothic fiction’s disregard for boundaries and its ability to exceed the parameters of the home.

This analysis will explore the progression and transformation of carnivalesque theory in six novels. The carnivalesque analysis will focus on Victorian women and the working class over a time period beginning around 1830 and ending in 1910. The novels that comprise this study are Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure; Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley; and finally Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale and E. M. Forster’s Howards End. The study intends to show a progression in the role of women that utilizes carnivalesque display as a vehicle. Women in the Hardy novels represent those who rebel against prescriptive Victorian mores in the midst of carnivalesque scenes. Hardy intends to use transgressive women and the suffering they endure to illustrate how Victorian rules of decorum and the institution of marriage are confining to point of being destructive. Gaskell and Bronte’s novels represent industrial or condition-of-England novels that show how Victorian women gain greater access and understanding of the working class and poor through spending time with these groups while performing charitable works. The carnivalesque has indeed undergone a partial transformation because scenes that overturn authority occur not only in public settings like the marketplace, but they also show up in the form of worker strikes and uprisings. Because the females in these novels have a greater understanding of the plight of the poor workers, they are able to advocate on their behalf and exert influence upon the managers and owners that helps to bring about reform in the workers’ situation. Finally the last two novels represent the culmination of this study as they reveal how carnivalesque scenes, both public and private, frame the experiences of two sets of sisters, both of which occupy the liminal space between the Victorian Age and Modernism. Women have progressed to the point of being able to overcome adversity and personal failure and grow into strong, independent individuals who speak for themselves, live independently, exert their own authority, and finally vote.

No description available.

This project is about what I am calling an “erotic epistemology” in nineteenth-century English elegiac poetry, a condition or event in a poetic text in which the discourses of love and knowledge are, to use a term Shelley liked to describe the experience of love, “intermixed.” The persistence of this inter-discourse suggests some fundamental connection between the desire for love and the desire for knowledge. Curiously, these performances of erotic longing insist urgently in the rhetorical, formal, and somatic registers of elegiac poetry in the nineteenth century. The confrontation with death that elegy stages is ideal for thinking about the relationship between erotic desire and poetic knowledge. As the limit case of a mind confronting an ultimately unknowable condition, the furthest expression of an impossible desire—the desire for the dead—elegies are love poems as well as death poems. This dissertation argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais for John Keats (1821), Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam for Arthur Hallam (1850), Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Ave Atque Vale for Charles Baudelaire (1867), and Thomas Tod Stoddart’s The Death-Wake (1831), perform the poetics of mourning as an erotic discourse, and allow an intimate understanding of a dead other that is an experience of pleasure. Much scholarship on the concept of eros considers it nearly synonymous with sexual desire and bodily pleasure. This project establishes a mode of reading elegy through its figures and forms that conceptualizes eros in these poems beyond sexuality, and without the burdens of biography and history. By stepping outside the critical confines of generic convention, literary influence, and eros-as-sexual want, this dissertation reevaluates the interpretive possibilities of erotic desire and language in a genre that is not commonly read as an amorous mode of speech. For these elegists, knowledge itself is an object of amorous desire, and epistemological want is a motive force of poetic mourning. These poems arrive at the pleasure of this knowledge through verse forms and figures of speech that perform an intimate textual relationship between the living and the dead, and when these linguistic events occur, the elegies reveal themselves as love poems.

Victorian society witnessed a transformation in the understanding and treatment of psychological disorders. The expansion of nosologies or classifications of lunacy was one measure hailed by psychological physicians as indicative of their mastery over madness. Yet between the 1840s and the 1870s the introduction of moral insanity and monomania to established classificatory systems undercut the medical authority of physicians and challenged their desired cultural stature as benevolent and authoritative agents of cure. Far from consolidating medical authority, these `partial' forms of lunacy (which were detected in the emotions rather than the intellect) paradoxically heightened anxiety about the ease with which eccentric or sane individuals could be wrongfully incarcerated in lunatic asylums. This dissertation examines the themes, motifs and defining issues of wrongful incarceration as they were discussed in Parliament, national and regional newspapers, medical and literary journals, and novels and short stories. Discussing in detail several infamous `cases' of wrongful confinement, it traces the ways in which anxieties were formulated, expressed and negotiated. The public outcry over cultural representations of wrongful confinement generated heated reactions from physicians and lunacy law reformers. The most contentious discussions centred on the manner in which notions of humanity and benevolence, and tyranny and liberty, were marshalled to influence public opinion. These debates represented not solely a legal conflict centring the claim to treatment and authority over the alleged lunatic, but more dramatically a battle for the public's good opinion. As important as medico-legal trials and their consequent rulings was the contested appropriateness of sentiment; this was manifested in words and images utilised to exacerbate or contain anxiety. The wrongful confinement controversy constitutes an important (though largely overlooked) episode in the history of English nineteenth-century psychiatry; formatively altering perceptions of the profession of mental science in the Victorian period.

This thesis traces the re-conceptualisation of melancholia as a biomedical mental disease in Victorian medicine, with an emphasis on the uptake of physiology into British psychological medicine. Language appropriated from experimental physiology allowed physicians to speak about ‘disordered emotion’ as a physiological process occurring when the brain was subjected to repeated ‘irritation’. When it came to diagnosing asylum patients, however, internal biological explanations of disease were of little use. Instead the focus was on externally observable ‘symptoms’, chiefly ‘depression’, ‘mental pain’, and ‘suicidal tendencies’. The late-nineteenth-century symptomatology of melancholia was in part constituted through statistical practices put in place by the Lunacy Commission, and which emphasised certain symptoms and nosological categories in the diagnosing of asylum patients. At the same time, the symptoms that emerged as defining criteria of melancholia were theorised within a biological explanatory framework. Thus, diagnostic descriptions of melancholia travelled back and forth between the casebook and the textbook, producing a disease concept that on the surface displayed remarkable coherence yet simultaneously spoke volumes about the negotiations that take place when medicine seeks to neatly label and classify the complexities of human life. In sum, this thesis shows how melancholia was constituted as a modern diagnostic category in nineteenth-century British medicine. In doing so, it also tells the story of how ‘disordered emotion’ was made into a possible and plausible medical concept.

This thesis elucidates the relationship between the emergence of literary aestheticism and ambiguities in the status and meaning of religious doubt in late Victorian Britain. Aestheticism has often been understood as a branch of a larger, epochal crisis of religious faith: a creed of 'art-for-art's-sake' and a cult of beauty are thought to have emerged to occupy the vacuum created by the departure of God, or at least by the attenuation of traditional forms of belief. However, the model of secularisation implicit in this account is now often challenged by historians, sociologists, and literary critics, and it fails to capture what was at stake in Swinburne and Pater's efforts to reconceptualise aesthetic experience. I suggest affinities between their shared insistence that art be understood as an independent, disinterested realm, a creed beyond creeds, and secularisation understood as the emptying of religion from political and social spheres. Secondly, I analyse how Swinburne and Pater use the apparently neutral space created by their relegation of religion to imagine the secular in far more radical terms than conventional Victorian models of religious doubt allowed. Their varieties of aestheticism often posit secularism not as a disillusioning effect of modern rationality but as a primordial enchantment with the sensuous and earthly, prior to a 'fall' into religious transcendence. I explore their tendency to identify this ideal of the secular with aesthetic value, as well as the paradoxes produced by their efforts to efface the distinctions between the religious and the aesthetic. My argument proceeds through close readings that reveal how the logic of aestheticism grows out of Swinburne's and Pater's efforts to challenge and refashion the models of religious doubt and secularism established by a previous generation of Victorian writers - Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Tennyson - and situates this shared revisionary impulse within larger debates surrounding the idea of secularisation.

The research seeks to identify the opportunities online collaboration may deliver to the Victorian Regional Gallery Network (VRGN). The research further seeks to identify the Commonwealth and Victorian State Government policy context that contributes to realising these opportunities and the type of eBusiness models that could be applied to the online environment of the Victorian Regional Gallery Network. The problem statement of the research argues that in order for the Victorian Regional Gallery Network (VRGN) to remain sustainable in the long term, it must develop collaborations within and external to the gallery sector to deliver value adding solutions for income generation and to cultural product, while seeking new business opportunities offered by the use of Information Technology and the Internet. The range of products offered by the galleries and their geographical distribution encourages collaborations to be undertaken, and in doing so, serves the customers of the VRGN who are increasingly becoming users of the Internet and who are expecting content online. Failing to consider the changing factors that online technologies present for conducting business and communicating common issues across the sector as a whole, puts the VRGN at risk of becoming redundant to its consumers (audience/customers), and a liability to its stakeholders. The major research question is as follows: How can the Victorian Regional Gallery Network (VRGN), as a provider in the cultural and entertainment sector, deliver cultural product to its audiences (customers) through the use and application of collaborative online networks and their related e-business technologies? The research seeks to address this question by investigating the 14 regional galleries that comprise the Victorian Regional Gallery Network, by reviewing their operations and relationships with their stakeholders, and by suggesting a variety of electronic business models that may assist in engaging in collaborative online networks. The scope of the research has three broad objectives: 1. the analysis of the role, function and activity of the Victorian Government in supporting collaborative online networks 2. the identification of an appropriate collaboration model that uses eBusiness and that can be applied to the VRGN 3. the analysis of the typical operating environment of the VRGN and the minimum requirements that will enable the implementation of a collaborative online network At the heart of the research therefore is an understanding of the factors that contribute to a collaborative online network, so that the galleries and the VRGN can efficiently and competitively conduct business and communicate common issues amongst its members. The case study design was selected, as the researcher systematically gathered in-depth information on a single entity, i.e., the VRGN. The methodology deployed in the research needed to effectively gather and collect relevant information from a variety of sources within the VRGN and hence two main approaches were utilised. The first was a questionnaire using the Likert and Dichotomous scale to collect data regarding the operations of the gallery, and the second included a series of interviews which were developed to address specific questions to the key staff within the main target groups of the research. The conclusions that can be drawn out of the combined research include: i. The use of internet technology by the VRGN does not appear to be limited by technical issues. This provides a technological foundation on which to develop possible I.T. and collaborative online solutions for the VRGN ii. The technology required to develop collaboration in the first instance is not a barrier to implementation as it is common technology iii. Knowledge of the characteristics of collaboration including understanding the dynamics of trust, communication, equality, strategic alliances, knowledge distribution, negotiations and incentives are essential if it is to effectively and productively occur in the gallery network. The findings of the research indicate that collaboration currently occurs in the galleries, but it is also hampered by a culture that can sometimes work against the sector as a whole. The creation of strategic alliances amongst the galleries has also been found to be successful, but the advantages of these alliances are yet to be realised or tested across the VRGN iv. A Collaborative Online Network model has been proposed which may enable the gallery sector to share information, encourage communication, coordinate training and professional development opportunities and develop sector-wide research and development projects. The development of the collaborative online network would also assist in addressing the core issue of the research question concerning the provision of cultural product to state audiences through an online environment, and providing incentives to reduce cost and share resources v. The eBusiness model that will assist the VRGN in remaining competitive and active could use the Online Sales model, and will have the opportunity to exploit vertical aggregation of the Victorian arts industry to develop a portal or 'vortal' where the VRGN and its products and services can be marketed on a singular basis to the internet audience. The Online Sales Model also assists in developing a revenue stream for the galleries which may assist in its long term sustainability

This research was concerned with the phenomenon of problematic school-related absenteeism (PSRA) within the Victorian secondary school system with particular reference to middle schooling. The study investigated categories of PSRA, identified major risk factors associated with PSRA, and outlined outcomes relevant to selected school-based strategies employed in the management and minimisation of PSRA. A review of literature was undertaken that identified a number of major categories and risk factors that were associated with PSRA. Subsequently, a conceptual framework was developed. It was the conceptual framework underpinned by the research questions that guided the research design and the collection and analysis of data. Five research questions underpinned this research. The primary research question was: