Over the course of the long nineteenth century, American Christianity changed dramatically, leaving lasting imprints on how families lived, worked, played, and prayed. As America’s prolific “first family,” the Adamses of Massachusetts were key interpreters of the place of religion within a rapidly changing American republic facing denominational turf wars, anti-Catholic violence, a burgeoning market economy, Civil War, shifting gender roles, and the collapse of providentialism. Constant globe-trotters who documented their cultural travels, the Adamses developed a cosmopolitan Christianity that blended discovery and criticism, faith and doubt. Claiming Puritan ancestry and the supremacy of a Unitarian covenant with God, the family was unusually forthright in exploring a subject as personal and provocative as faith. This dissertation shows how they interpreted religious ideas and rites in America over three centuries of civic service. I argue that the Adamses’ cosmopolitan encounters led them to become leading lay critics of New England religion, even as they marshaled Christian rhetoric to sustain American democracy. While scholars of American religion have relied on “fringe” groups to explain the growth and democratization of American Christianity, little has been studied of seekers like the Adamses, transnational agents of American thought and culture who sought avidly among other faiths yet chose to stay within the mainline fold. My study offers a new perspective on the political dynasty, by mapping the religious journeys of Americans who looked for God in eclectic places and then made their return, greatly changed, to the family pew.

Prostitution has recently received increased attention in historical archaeology, but studies pertaining to this topic have been driven by artifacts instead of theory and therefore have been unable to address broader social and economic issues, as is the goal of the field. The approach developed here moves significantly toward this goal in the study of prostitution in the 19th-century mining West.World-systems theory is established as an organizing framework for the study of prostitution in the mining West, a vital internal periphery of the United States and a site of sudden, intense cultural collision due to the expansion of the capitalist world-economy. Prostitution is situated within the context of women's informal labor in peripheries to demonstrate how prostitutes supported formal labor in the mining West and therefore contributed to the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism.The archaeological approach attends to the cultural collision by recognizing gender, ethnicity, and class as active, interacting, and shifting constructions emphasized to assign oneself or others as appropriate to spaces, activities, or interactions and seeking to identify processes of identity formation through manipulated behaviors and symbols. It additionally calls for archaeologists to look at how each construction organized society through the other two.The approach concludes with the development of relevant research questions under the headings of negotiating with and navigating around Victorianism. The former attempt to understand the range of experiences of prostitutes in a way that listens to the "voices" of both prostitutes and Victorians, i.e., through a negotiation, to better realize the personal agency of prostitutes. The latter relate to the labor and economic contributions of prostitutes to the capitalist world-economy, to better recognize and understand their historical agency.Implementation of the approach occurs through its application to recently excavated data from a red-light district in late 19th-century Prescott, Arizona. The results demonstrate that the historical-archaeological study of mining-West prostitution, with the benefit of organizing theory, has excellent potential for providing information on economic processes surrounding an important form of women's labor in a periphery and on social processes that characterized an intercultural-frontier periphery associated with a hegemonic Victorian core.

The emergence of Progressivism at the beginning of the twentieth century influenced many aspects of American society. One of those aspects was urban parks. In the latter half of the nineteenth century Frederick Law Olmsted led a nationwide implementation of "Victorian" parks. These parks featured broad expanses of turf, waterways, and trees. Olmsted and the other Victorian park leaders designed the parks to cultivate Victorian values of self-restraint and independence among the citizenry. With the rise of Progressivism the ideals of the middle class changed. Led by Theodore Roosevelt, millions of Americans embraced the "strenuous life" and its emphasis on strength and leadership. Consequently, parks changed. The new Progressive park design favored athletic facilities over places for repose. Audubon Park in New Orleans was built just as this change was occurring, and therefore provides us an opportunity to study this moment in American history in detail.

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According to traditional accounts, following the premature deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron in the 1820s, literature in England fell into a sort of slumber until the late 1830s and early 1840s, when a new generation-a generation we now call the Victorians-came on the scene. Literary scholarship has tended to ignore this period of slumber as an uninteresting gap between the two dynamic movements of Romanticism and Victorianism. It was during this transitional period, however, that Leigh Hunt, one of the most radical of Romantic figures, wrote and staged A Legend of Florence (1840) in an attempt to stimulate a literary revival. Hunt's play reasserts the radical philosophies that defined his younger days, when as the central figure of the "Cockney School" he had drawn other radical writers such as Keats and Shelley into his circle. These philosophies included the primacy of literature, political radicalism, sexual liberation, and group authorship. By writing a play in 1840 that reasserted these ideals, Hunt hoped to gather a new coterie following reminiscent of the Cockney School. Responses to the play from Hunt's younger Victorian contemporaries, however, demonstrate how Hunt's once radical "Cockney" ideals had now become relatively safe. The nostalgic fondness with which A Legend of Florence was greeted therefore highlights how in 1840 Romanticism was in the process of being absorbed into Victorian philosophy and aesthetics.

Cette thèse analyse les notions dialectiques incarnées dans Jane Eyre et dans Wuthering Heights afin d’éclairer les phénomènes dialectiques littéraires, sociopolitiques, et/ou subjectifs présents dans les deux romans. Le mot “dialectique,” approprié dans cette recherche, porte au moins trois connotations: étymologique, marxiste et kristévane. D’abord, la perspective dialectique est appelée à analyser les formes littéraires rivales, le romantisme rémanent et le victorianisme dominant, qui convergent vers la grande ligne de démarcation poétique dans les deux romans. Puis, en faisant référence au concept de l’interpellation et à la notion des “Deux Nations” qui caractérise la société victorienne, cette thèse s’engage dans une interprétation dialectique sur l’interaction entre le sujet et l’idéologie dominante afin d’explorer comment les idéologies du « getting on » et du « self-help » à l’ère victorienne influencent les vies de la famille Brontë, comment les deux romancières reflètent ces valeurs sociopolitiques dominantes dans leurs créations de Jane Eyre et de Heathcliff, et comment les sœurs Brontë dépeignent la lutte et le pèlerinage à travers lesquels le héros et l’héroïne transcendent le fossé social qui reste posé entre les deux nations. Finalement, fondée sur l’héréthique de Julia Kristeva, cette thèse enquête sur l’identification Heathcliff-Catherine en l’interprétant comme une autre éthique de subjectivité. Globalement, la thèse met en lumière trois niveaux remarquables de significations dialectiques des palimpsestes brontëens en dévoilant la profondeur de leur art. / This doctoral thesis analyzes the dialectic notions incarnated in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights so as to shed light on the literary, sociopolitical, and/or subjective dialectic phenomena epitomized in the two novels. The word “dialectic,” appropriated in this research, carries at least three connotations: etymological, Marxist and Kristevan. At first, the dialectic perspective is drawn on to analyze the rival literary forms, the residual Romanticism and the dominant Victorianism, that converge at the great divide of poetics in the two novels in a similar yet subtly different manner. Then, referring to the concept of interpellation and the notion of the “Two Nations” that so well characterizes the Victorian society, the thesis engages in a dialectic interpretation of the interaction between the subject and the dominant ideology of his/her time with an aim to explore how the “getting on” and “self-help” ideologies of the Victorian age influence the lives of the Brontë family, how Charlotte and Emily Brontë reflect the dominant sociopolitical values in the creation of Jane Eyre and Heathcliff, and how the Brontë sisters depict the struggle and pilgrimage through which their hero and heroine transcend the social chasm that lies between the Two Nations. At last, based on the herethics of Julia Kristeva, this dissertation probes into the Heathcliff-Catherine identification and interprets it as an otherwise ethics of subjectivity. Altogether, the thesis scrapes three significant layers of the Brontëan palimpsests of dialectic significations and lays bare the profundity of their art.

L’œuvre de De Quincey s’inscrit à la croisée de trois concepts presque indéfinissables : autobiographie, romantisme, et une dimension trop souvent négligée, l’ironie. Qu’elle soit rhétorique, tragique ou « romantique », l’ironie exprime parfaitement les multiples contradictions du mangeur d’opium : outil rhétorique de confrontation et d’autodérision, individualiste et communautaire, sociable et provocatrice, l’ironie est à la fois l’instrument d’une rédemption et l’expression d’un profond malaise, une façon de se mettre en avant comme de s’effacer totalement. Entre Romantisme et Victorianisme, De Quincey interroge les limites de son identité et de son statut d’intellectuel, et reste réticent à exploiter le potentiel subversif de la parodie : l’ironie semble alors s’effacer derrière ses protestations nostalgiques et autocritiques. Pourtant elle sous-tend pour une bonne part la vitalité et la diversité de l’écriture des essais, dont elle manifeste une modernité largement sous-estimée, tant par les critiques que par De Quincey lui-même. L’ironie permet finalement d’esquisser une unité qui recentre les Confessions au cœur de la diversité de l’œuvre, plutôt qu’à la marge d’un ensemble hétéroclite au statut incertain. / Studying the works of De Quincey necessarily leads to three concepts almost impossible to define: autobiography, Romanticism, and all-too neglected irony. Whether rhetorical, tragic or “romantic”, irony expresses perfectly the many contradictions of the opium-eater. As the rhetorical tool of conflict and self-derision, claiming both individualistic and community values, sociable and provoking, irony is the way to redemption as much as the expression of deep unease, a way of pushing himself forward, or of withdrawing into the background. Caught between Romanticism and Victorianism, De Quincey questions the limits of his own identity and his status as an intellectual, and exploits reluctantly the potential subversion of parody, so that irony seems to yield to nostalgia and self-derogatory laments. And yet it can be said to underlie the vitality and diversity of the essays, whose modernity has been greatly underestimated by the critics and by De Quincey himself, as well. Finally, irony allows us to re-evaluate the Confessions as the centre of a unified, though diverse, set of writing, rather than as one of many, rather ill-assorted essays of unequal value.

Female characters in novels by Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster are studied in their relationships as wives, mothers, daughters and prospective brides. The novels selected are those where the writers are concerned with families dominated by Victorian ideals. Virginia Woolf: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Bay (1919), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927). E.M. Forster: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907) , A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910).The socioeconomic, religious and ideological origins of the Victorian ideals are traced, esp. as they are related to the writers' family background in the tradition of English intellectual life. The central theme of the four novels by Woolf is the mother-daughter relationship which is analyzed in its components of love and resentment, often revealed in an interior monoloque. Forster's novels usually present a widowed mother with a daughter and a son. It is shown how the plot, dialogue and authorial intrusions are used to depict a liberation from the constraints of the Victorian ideals of family life. The mothers in the novels of both writers are shown to be representative of various aspects of the Victorian ideal of womanhood. The attitudes of men towards women vary from those typifying Victorian conceptions of male superiority to more modern ideals of equality and natural companionship. / digitalisering@umu