1,720,973 research outputs found
Gender Politics in the Early Poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson
No full textThis study explores representations of gender in the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson as they apply to Victorian England. In particular, it addresses the apparent gender transgressions that seem to occur in his presentation of "masculine" women and "feminine" men; these transgressive portrayals seem to defy a society that maintains a binary of gender strictly contrasting women and men through opposing roles and qualities. Several critics have explored Tennyson's use of "masculine" women and "feminine" men in relation to his society. Some of these critics maintain that he still challenges the rigid Victorian norms despite conservative closures, while others argue that he presents two readings simultaneously; while he reinforces conservative gender in his endings, he still leaves the possibility for gender transgression open. Another group of critics, with whom I align myself, maintains that Tennyson ultimately reinforces such conservative gender distinctions. However, while most of these critics contend that Tennyson's reinforcement of gender is either unintentional or only occurs in the latter stages of the poem, I maintain that conservative norms of gender are apparent even when gender transgression seems most evident. Furthermore, while most criticism on Tennyson and gender deals with his later poetry, from The Princess (1847) onwards, my study includes a full chapter on Tennyson's representations of gender as early as ''Mariana'' (1830), and also including ''The Lady of Shalott" (1832) and 'Ulysses" (1842).Master of Arts (MA
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Re-deflning the Victorian Ideal: the Productive Transnormative Family in Sensation Fiction
No full textThis study examines two of the most popular sensation novels of the 1860s, Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and East Lynne by Ellen Wood, and their respective treatments of the Victorian family. Building on the work of critics who question and challenge the cohesiveness of the domestic ideal and the complete family within Victorian ideology, this project explores the representation of family units in both novels that are somehow beyond the ideological normative family of husband, wife and biological children. I examine several different figures, including the stepmother, the governess, the orphaned child, the single parent, and the unmarried aunt in order to trouble the distinction between the normative family and the transnormative family and thereby suggest that the contradictions and tensions that exist within a family grouping can function as enabling rather than debilitating. Through such an examination, I redefine the domestic ideal as ultimately flexible and adaptable rather than fleeting, frail or unachievable.Master of Arts (MA
Ruck, Muck, and a Closed System of Truth: Science, Spiritualism, and the Negotiation of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century England
Get PDFThis project examines how the confluence of nineteenth-century England’s educational reform, periodical literature, and scientific community growth contributed to a public dialogue between science and spiritualism that positioned the two as antithetical. I argue that this media-borne dialogue entrenched in the public consciousness a scientific domain claiming authority through masculinized, exclusionary language that effectively enclosed knowledge within objective measurement, while dismissing spiritualist notions of embodied knowledges based in affect. In doing so, I locate the under-recognized bridge between the printed medium of the debate itself and its durable influence on public discourse, occurring as it did at precisely the moment to best influence the broadest public.
The first chapter examines the confluence of educational reform, burgeoning print culture, and rising science professionalization that formed the ideal delivery platform for the promulgation of a cultural narrative pitting objective knowledge against the subjective. The second chapter examines contemporary newspaper and journal articles to find science repeatedly metaphorized as solid ground, “objective”, and masculinized, while spiritualism is shadowy, irrational, and feminized. Metaphors of light and landscape recur from both sides, with spiritualist voices further claiming unquantifiable and communal experience as of equal value to the material “useful knowledge” privileged by science and institutional schooling. The final chapter analyzes texts from George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marie Corelli, and Richard Marsh for representations of science, scientists, and those deemed outside their circles. There I discern a reflection of the media debate that finds unexpected – if unsettling – compatibilities between spiritualism and science, rejecting the alleged incompatibility of objective and subjective knowledge. All the texts speculate as to the parameters of human physical and mental life, but notably, none resolve the argument.DissertationDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)This project examines the ways nineteenth-century England’s educational system, periodical literature, and growing science community contributed to a public dialogue between science and spiritualism. The knowledge and practices privileged by science were repeatedly framed as more valuable than, and irreconcilable with, the subjective, personal knowledges of spiritualism, which posited a spiritual human self beyond the limits of the material body. This paper uses examples from contemporary newspaper and journal articles to study the dialogue between science and spiritualism, and finds science metaphorized as solid ground, “objective”, and masculinized, while spiritualism is shadowy, irrational, and feminized. These positions became entrenched enough in the public mind to affect the era’s speculative fiction, but in analyzing texts from George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marie Corelli, and Richard Marsh, the author also finds an embrace of science and spiritualist themes as sometimes compatible, blurring the simple “sides” of the media conversation
Victorian Narratives of Intimate Violence and the Problems of Visibility
Get PDFThis dissertation explores the struggle between the impulse to cover up intimate violence and the impulse to make it public and consumable in nineteenth century England. It shows that intimate violence was both spectacular and unspeakable, rendering woman abuse a highly contested site of representation. It also reveals, however, that these ostensibly diametric modes of portraying violence worked in tandem to test the limits of what was socially and culturally representable during the period, and, in turn, to challenge hierarchies of genre, gender, class, and sexuality. This thesis is therefore both a study of the ways in which representations of intimate violence have avowed the imagined differences between members of disparate social categories and a study of how these differences often break down in the face of brutality. Chapter One shows that although street literature's representations of abuse seem invested in spectacularizing working-class violence, they often gesture towards the failures of middle-class domestic life and thus presume a unique vision of cross-class, shared moral experience. Chapter Two explores how feminist poet, pamphleteer, and novel writer Caroline Norton conflates multiple female identities to emphasize the importance of women's creative self-imagining as a means to resist physical violence and the rhetoric that encourages or allows it. Reading Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, Chapter Three intersects discourses on abuse with disability studies to interrogate how the conspicuous bodies of battered women can disrupt male homosocial interactions and complicate discourse on trauma and representation. Finally, Chapter Four considers the ways in which displacements of intimate violence in Wilkie Collins's The Woman In White create sympathetic bonds that blur subjective distinctions between abusive men and violated women to test male authority over representation.ThesisDoctor of Philosophy (PhD
Police Inadequacy and the Space of the City in British Fin de siècle Literature
No full textThis thesis examines the representation of police in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century British literature. My analysis focuses on the relations between the subjects of the texts, as well as the texts themselves, and the institution of the police. I develop an understanding of the police as a compromised force of bureaucratic adjuncts who, in the conception of these Victorian texts, possess a troubling power over the bodies and spaces of British citizens. I discuss the multifarious anxieties about imperial and national decline during the period, and show how in all of my primary texts fears about the loyalties and effectiveness of police run parallel to fears for more traditionally Victorian modes of social control, such as class, charity, and the family. Also I examine the built space and social environment of fin de siècle London as it is constructed in these texts and show how they figure the capital as a space of alienation, danger, and degeneration. The combined investigation of the space and those who police it reveals serious concerns about justice and identity as meted out by an often-impersonal but increasingly interventionist state. The projects seeks to contribute to a larger cultural history of the police in order to better understand that institution which orders and arbitrates so much of modern life, and also seeks to articulate some of the concerns raised during the development of the modern welfare state.ThesisMaster of Arts (MA
"Thy Word is all, if we could spell": Romanticism, Tractarian Aesthetics and E.B. Pusey's Sermons on Solemn Subjects
Get PDF[missing pages: 34,64,98]The influence of Romanticism on nineteenth-century aesthetics has been well documented. Less well researched, however, has been the significant contribution of the Romantic Movement to the religious discourse of the Victorian church. Focusing on the movement commonly called the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement, I examine the religious significance ofthe Romantic discourse inspired by the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Specifically, I outline the importance of the Romantic sensibility for nineteenth-century preaching, focusing on the works ofE.B. Pusey. Pusey has often been neglected in studies concerning the aesthetic aspects of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England, and though his sermons and theology demonstrate a notable Romantic influence, critics have favoured those members of the Movement who produced explicitly aesthetic works (such as John Keble and his book of verse, The Christian Year). In contrast, this Thesis locates Pusey in relation to nineteenth-century aesthetic concerns. The sermon occupied a place of central importance in the religious and literary discourses of nineteenth-century England. Attendance at sermons was both a religious obligation and a cultural activity. The pulpit functioned as a source of moral pedagogy and social commentary, and the century's famous pulpiteers were the objects of considerable public attention. As a leader of the Oxford Movement, Pusey was at the forefront of one of the most significant cultural events ofthe nineteenth century, and it is in his sermons that the aesthetic and theological vision of that Movement can best be located. To that end, this Thesis elucidates the characteristics of nineteenth-century pulpit oratory and the indebtedness of the Victorian sennon to the aesthetic theories of the Romantics. Pusey's sennons, particularly the Sermons on Solemn Subjects delivered at St. Saviour's, Leeds, are considered in relation to these issues.Master of Arts (MA
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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