My dissertation, "Only Connect": Friendship, Belonging, and Space in the Works of J. M. Barrie, E. M. Forster, and J. R. Ackerley, argues that early- and mid-twentieth-century narratives of friendship bring a sense of openness to spatial regimes and social boundaries of the period. In conversation with recent scholarship on Victorian friendship--especially Richard Dellamora's Friendship's Bonds (2004), Leela Gandhi's Affective Communities, and Sharon Marcus's Between Women
(2007)--and queer and affect theory, my readings of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1911), E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924), and J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip (1956) cover a variety of fictional spaces spanning metropole and empire--such as the Victorian nursery, Neverland, pastoral England, the colonial social club, the Marabar Caves, the animal clinics and public parks of London--in order to locate and better understand friendship as a recurring set of
affects and practices between selves and others that are horizontal and emerging, not hierarchical and foreclosed. Mapping different formations and moments of friendship in a range of spaces, my dissertation highlights the extent to which friendship, as a narrative trope and theoretical framework, affords new ways of thinking about being, belonging, and becoming with others. My dissertation also examines the different ways in which Barrie, Forster, and Ackerley's narratives of
friendship confound major themes of the Victorian novel, such as gender-specific separations of private and public life, the marriage plot, bourgeois subject-formation, nation-building, and the racialization of colonial subjects. While mindful of higher-stake concerns over identity-formation, ideological debates over subjectivities and their corresponding communities of belonging, the four chapters in this dissertation are more interested in bearing out the affective energies of
friendship, and the unpredictable or non-teleological ways in which they are invoked in certain moments and places but not others.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NEU//neu:rx915882p |
| Source Sets | Northeastern University |
| Detected Language | English |
Page generated in 0.2182 seconds