This work challenges common arguments as to the division of the political from other fictional genres and, in treatments of nineteenth-century fiction and culture, the private from the public sphere. Through an examination of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Gaskell, I uncover a common concern with the preconditions of liberal selfhood which posits the household as the space in which the political rights-bearer, defined by interiority and mental qualities, comes to be. This rights-bearer is not, as has been argued, defined by purely formal and abstract procedural reason, but in terms of a capacity for reason which includes the capacity for emotion. This work therefore shows domestic space to be the foundation of, rather than the occluded counterpart to, the liberal polity, and argues that an account of the household, in which the liberal self is disclosed, is likewise at the centre of Victorian political fiction.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.39928 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Johnston, Susan, 1964- |
| Contributors | Bristol, Michael D. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001484439, proquestno: NN12395, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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