According to certain Spanish authors of treaties of canon law, the practice dates back to twelfth-century France and became widespread after the Council of the Lateran in 1213 (Carbonero, 1864). ...According to the statistics on natural population change, the proportion of marriages of widows and widowers during the decade 1860-1869 was close to the tendency described in Table 5 (17% for men; 9.1% for women).
According to ffrench, theory's writing-indistinguishable, at times, from the kind of literature that it actively promoted-defined itself pri- marily through its excess, its uncontainable "truth," ...that is, a truth irreducible to a positive and objective knowledge, one that upsets the "ideology" of literature, con- testing its metaphysics and investment in a psychological/bourgeois understanding of "the author.\n Similarly, in "Why You Can/'t Believe the Arabian Historian Cide Hamete Benengeli: Islam and the Arabian Cultural Heri- tage in Don Quixote" Nizar F. Hermes argues for the need to critically reassess "the essentialist belief that literary influence is predestined to be a one-way traffic." According to East, Hardy celebrates literary imagination as a force that can enchant the world, despite the dominating presence of rationality.
This book analyses the emergence of the modern global novel, and the way it mirrors the underlying process of the globalization of culture. It focuses on Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, Conrad's ...Lord Jim, Achebe's Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease, and Vargas Llosa's The War at the End of the World. In these works, a global narrative unfolds, as the forces of modernization tragically clash with the embattled defenders of traditional society.
This study of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) examines the context of the 1840s when the narrative is set, when the celebration of November Fifth had become an annual occasion of ...radical violence. Through the symbol of the bonfire The Return of the Native examines contemporary fears of violence in England in the wake of the French Revolution against an indigenous, age-old culture of economic unrest and rebellion. This division between political and economic radicalism is figured in the distinction between Eustacia Vye’s association with bonfires and Paris and the Egdon laborers whose bonfire burning is an age-old act of rebellion that, in the 1840s, had associations with radical violence on account of economic grievances. Bonfire Night in The Return of the Native thus gives expression to the political and economic issues that underlie the narrative and the economic issues that remain unresolved, thus reflecting the complex and divided radical climate of England in the wake of the French Revolution. This reading of the significance of the 1840s as a setting for the narrative provides a coherent framework for understanding the seemingly disparate elements in the novel, namely bonfires as a structural motif, Clym’s return from Paris and his educational program, the breakdown of the Yeobrights’ marriage, the death of Eustacia, and Hardy’s addition of the epilogue, “Aftercourses,” as a revised ending.
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was one of the most influential authors and critics of nineteenth-century American literature. In his life he observed the rise and influence of eminent Romantic ...writers and critics hailing from Boston, and in 1860 became part of the Boston literary circle, soon taking on the prestigious role of the Atlantic editor. Howells was now ostensibly ensconced in the American genteel literary tradition. However, in the early 1880s Howells declared that a “new school” of writing was developing, with himself as arbiter of the new realist aesthetic which would push aside the romantic, idealistic writing of the past. The new aesthetic informed interpretations of truth, beauty, art, and “the real” that were antithetical to the romantic ideas of these concepts. Thus, the “new school” generated both positive and negative criticism, inciting what was known as “the realism war.” While much of this conflict was a result of what many viewed as a replacement of the genteel, “old-school” literary methods, a considerable amount resulted from Howells’s ambiguous and contradictory position regarding the realist aesthetic. Howells was stepping over the genteel boundary, which would situate him in a liminal place between genteel and modern literary approaches. Much recent scholarship overlooks Howells’s intellectual and ideological idiosyncrasies which precipitate his decidedly ambiguous and contradictory literary philosophy. Howellsian aesthetics of truth, beauty, and “the real,” views on regional dialect, and theories on capitalism, socialism, and inequality are all conspicuously affected by ambiguities and ambivalence. The objective of this dissertation is to revitalize interest not only in Howells as a distinguished man of letters, but in his cultural, social, and literary endeavors that were often disrupted by contradictions.
In this thesis, I examine the importance of the body to identity and fulfilment in three of D.H. Lawrence's best-known novels. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Rainbow, and Women in Love, each written ...in the early twentieth century before Lawrence's death in 1930, Lawrence represents the bodies of his characters as equally as integral to their identities as their minds. Also prominent in these works are Lawrence's criticisms of modern technology, as well as of the privileging of the mind and mental processes that this technology encourages. Lawrence offers the "life of the body" as an alternative to mental, mechanical life. For him, the body has a consciousness of its own, and the body's sensations are as informative as the mind's thoughts. Additionally, Lawrence explores the relationship between masculinity and femininity, and its interaction with the relationship between the mind and body; Lawrence's female characters, in these works, more successfully achieve the life of the body. Their embodiment, I argue, facilitates their more complete identities and greater, more fulfilling relationships with others, compared to those characters, mostly male, who work primarily with machines and privilege their minds at the expense of their bodies. Motherhood and pregnancy are also, for these women, ways to re-evaluate the links between the body, the self, and the wider community. Furthermore, I examine Lawrence's concept of the posthuman through these texts, showing that in his ideal vision of a future humanity, the body must remain integral to human life if true identity and fulfilling relationships are to be preserved.
This dissertation tracks the automaton’s appearance in Victorian literature from 1840 to 1900. It shows how authors across genre, form, and time conceptualized and responded to the Machine Age, using ...the automaton as a symbol of humanity’s changing relationship to machine technologies. Chapters 1 and 5 trace how Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and E.E. Kellett’s “The New Frankenstein” (1900) similarly address concerns about gender equality in Victorian Britain, challenging the assumption that women could themselves be classified, and controlled, as talking/reproducing automata. Chapter 2 argues that Dickens’s conceptualization of the human machine in Our Mutual Friend (1865) allows his working-class characters a degree of class mobility outside of bourgeois object-oriented ontologies. The automaton informs Dickens’s commentary on Victorian class. Chapter 3 reads The Coming Race (1871) as a reactionary response to what Bulwer-Lytton perceived as the machine’s potential to liberate women from the domestic sphere. In this dystopic vision, women would necessarily come to control all aspects of society when freed of housework by the machine. Chapter 4 looks at Scots working-class poet Alexander Anderson’s 1878 collection Songs of the Rail. Anderson lauds the train engine as savoir and prophet of a coming technological age. I argue that he creates a literary aesthetics for that age by anthropomorphizing the steam engine, extending to it his own poetic voice.
This dissertation explores how the British post office and the British naturalist novel handle the circulation of personal objects—letters and characters—in impersonal ways, with the postal system ...functioning as a useful analogy for understanding the narrative habits of British naturalism. With the adoption of uniform postage, the increased use of envelopes, the reversal of payment remittance from recipient to sender, the introduction of letter boxes and pillar boxes, and the subsumption of Britain into one postal zone, postal reforms predicated the postal system’s efficacy on methods of handling that minimized human contact, thereby naturalizing an impersonal way of handling human subjectivity in circulation in writing. I argue that British naturalism makes this way of thinking part of its narrative conventions in order to bring it into formal conversations about the Victorian novel and scholarship on American and French literary naturalism, but also to untether it from realism and complicate critical impulses to genrefy with a formal approach.
Ginsburg argues that An Imaginative Woman, rather than being a condemnation of feminine propensity toward imaginativeness, is a story about the relation between gender, the imagination, and literary ...creation, and, more precisely, a story that confronts two gendered ways of understanding the poetic imagination. An Imaginative Woman, a short story Thomas Hardy wrote in 1893 while working on Jude the Obscure, tells of a woman--a wife and a mother--who aspires to be a poet and who falls in love with a male poet she never meets. The story displays many of the features people have come to associate with Hardy's most celebrated novels: a plot marked by the failure of events to occur at the right time; the presence of an impersonal, indifferent will manifested through the repetition of traces; a critique of the institution of marriage and of the lot of women within it; an uncanny element that challenges natural laws without completely suspending them.
Donald Winslow was born in 1911, and attended Tufts and Boston University; after serving in World War II, he returned to BU as a faculty member, where he specialized in teaching Thomas Hardy, ...Virginia Woolf, Eighteenth Century British Literature, and Biography.
