Browsing by Subject "Victorian literature"
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Item Benevolent failures : the economics of philanthropy in Victorian literature(2010-12) Kilgore, Jessica Renae; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Hedrick, Elizabeth, A.; Ferreira-Buckley, Linda; Hoad, Neville; Cleaver, HarryThis dissertation critically examines why mid-Victorian fiction often dismisses or complicates monetary transactions and monetary charity, even as it negatively portrays differences in social status and wealth. I argue that the novel uses representations of failed charity to reconstruct, however briefly, a non- monetary and non-economic source of value. Further, I examine how the novel uses techniques of both genre and style to predict, form, and critique alternate, non-economic, social models. While tension surrounding the practice of charity arises in the late eighteenth century, the increasing dominance of political economy in public discourse forced Victorian literature to take a strong stance, for reasons of both ethics and genre. This stance is complicated by the eighteenth-century legacy that sees charity as a kind of luxury. If giving to the poor makes us feel good, this logic suggests, surely it isn’t moral. Thus, while much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature remains dedicated to the ethics of charity, the practice becomes immensely complex. By discussing the works of Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, this project exposes a wide variety of responses to this deep cultural anxiety. These authors are, ultimately, strongly invested in redefining the meaning of benevolence as a valid form of social action by moving that benevolence away from monetary gifts and toward abstractly correct moral feelings, though their individual solutions vary widely.Item Color, the Visual Arts, and Representations of Otherness in the Victorian Novel(2012-07-16) Durgan, JessicaThis dissertation investigates the cultural connections made between race and color in works of fiction from the Victorian and Edwardian era, particularly how authors who are also artists invent fantastically colored characters who are purple, blue, red, and yellow to rewrite (and sometimes reclaim) difference in their fiction. These strange and eccentric characters include the purple madwoman in Charlotte Bront??s Jane Eyre (1847), the blue gentleman from Wilkie Collins?s Poor Miss Finch (1872), the red peddler in Thomas Hardy?s The Return of the Native (1878), and the little yellow girls of Arthur Conan Doyle?s ?The Yellow Face? (1893) and Frances Hodgson Burnett?s The Secret Garden (1911). These fictional texts serve as a point of access into the cultural meanings of color in the nineteenth century and are situated at the intersection of Victorian discourses on the visual arts and race science. The second half of the nineteenth century constitutes a significant moment in the history of color: the rapid development of new color technologies helps to trigger the upheavals of the first avant-garde artistic movements and a reassessment of coloring?s prestige in the art academies. At the same time, race science appropriates color, using it as a criterion for classification in the establishment of global racial hierarchies. By imagining what it would be like to change one?s skin color, these artist-authors employ the aesthetic realm of color to explore the nature of human difference and alterity. In doing so, some of them are able to successfully formulate their own challenges to nineteenth-century racial discourse.Item The intimate pulse of reality : sciences of description in fiction and philosophy, 1870-1920(2014-08) Brilmyer, Sarah Pearl; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Matysik, Tracie; Mackay, Carol H; Baker, Samuel; Wojciehowski, Hannah; Hoad, NevilleThis dissertation tracks a series of literary interventions into scientific debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how the realist novel generated new techniques of description in response to pressing philosophical problems about agency, materiality, and embodiment. In close conversation with developments in the sciences, writers such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner portrayed human agency as contiguous with rather than opposed to the pulsations of the physical world. The human, for these authors, was not a privileged or even an autonomous entity but a node in a web of interactive and co-constitutive materialities. Focused on works of English fiction published between 1870-1920, I argue that the historical convergence of a British materialist science and a vitalistic Continental natural philosophy led to the rise of a dynamic realism attentive to material forces productive of “character.” Through the literary figure of character and the novelistic practice of description, I show, turn-of-the-century realists explored what it meant to be an embodied subject, how qualities in organisms emerge and develop, and the relationship between nature and culture more broadly.Item Monstrous Silhouette: The Development of the Female Monster in British Literature(2017-07-11) Woodworth, Savannah J.; Courtney, LeeIn this thesis, I analyze the effects of social, political, and economic change and the historical effects of said change on the literary representations of female monsters as portrayed by male authors in medieval and Victorian literature. To contextualize the literature selected, each chapter involves extensive research which I argue influenced the presentation of the characters selected. Each chapter also includes extensive textual analysis to show direct examples in the text relating to the historical context, followed by a section tying the ideology of the thesis with the context provided in the historical and textual analysis sections. The purpose of this analysis is to demonstrate the repercussions of social change on the social standings of women and the manifestation of those changes within literature as a form of expression for the conflicting representations of the nature of femininity and the anxieties of the male writers in these moments of upheaval. At the beginning of this analysis, there was some expectation for a direct correlation between masculine anxieties and increases in female independence resulting in wholly negative portrayals of women, resulting on monstrous images; however, each character, despite their clearly monstrous traits, was nuanced in a way that was frequently empathetic, particularly when placed within the historical context of social change.Item The transcendental hero in selected Victorian literature.(Texas Tech University, 1975-08) Tamkoc, CarolineNot available