The thesis attempts to discuss the character of late Romantic literature and art as it developed in England throughout the Victorian period. It follows the assertion made by G. Hough that it is possible to identify a continuous presence of Romantic ideas and methods in the writings of some major Victorian authors, and reflects the fact that there was actually no consensus or prevailing unequivocal view of Romanticism at that time, as is evidenced in the contradicting statements of such writers as John Ruskin and Walter Pater. The first objective of the thesis is thus to define the characteristic features of English Romanticism as they can be tracked down in the formative period of the 18th century and the time of High Romanticism of the first decades of the following century, and to see what transforming changes these characteristics underwent during the Victorian era. The sources of Romantic sensibility are located in the revolutionary role of the scientific discoveries of the 17th century and a new focus of the philosophical writings of that period, concerning mainly operations of the human mind. This development resulted in new aesthetic conceptions based on the two prevailing approaches, empiricism and Neo-Platonism. These theories conditioned the main concern of Romantic thought, i.e. an...

This thesis deals with the topic of the female characters in selected novels of Charles Dickens. The theoretical part is focused on describing the characteristic features of the women in the Victorian period. The practical part analyses the most important female characters according to the author's personal choice, shows similarities and differences among them and compares them with the society at that time.

Thesis abstract This thesis will focus on the ways in which the transformations in nineteenth-century Gothic stories mirror the gradual changes in the Victorian society's notions about perception and about the metaphysical. The nineteenth century marks a time when advances in science made it clear that not seeing something does not mean that it does not exist, and when psychologists made it clear that seeing something does not necessarily mean it does exist. Moreover, the nineteenth century was a time when religious notions that were previously accepted without question started to be doubted. When people lost their faith in the unseen and at the same time became aware that their eyes are not sufficient to see everything and that their mind may play tricks on them, the notion of reality was increasingly problematized, which is made especially clear in the genre of the Gothic. It could be argued that while the basic tropes of the Gothic remain more or less the same; however, the way they are used, the reactions of the protagonists as well as the general outlook of the story are problematized by newly introduced ideas about vision and human mind. It could be said that in many cases there is no longer a clear boundary between the protagonist and the 'other' of the story, which can often be interpreted as an...