British writer and historian L.T.C. Rolt's collection of ghost stories, Sleep No More was published in 1948. His short fiction deserves greater exposure. More than simply a 'derivative imitation' of ...what came before, one could argue the collection provides an end point for the Victorian and Edwardian ghostly tale. Whilst heavily influenced by, and indebted to, the works of Sheridan Le Fanu and M.R. James, Rolt's tales assuredly re-shape the traditional ghost story from the outdated gothic settings of the past and the academic background of James's works—the isolated country churches, foreign abbeys and country halls—into the more identifiable surroundings of post-war Britain with its steam trains, canals and factories. Gone too are Le Fanu's country squires and James's fusty antiquarians, replaced by railwaymen, steel-workers and motor-racing enthusiasts. It is into this recognisable world populated by ordinary characters that Rolt slips his unease. In doing so, he forges the way, alongside Fritz Leiber for the generation of 'working-class' or 'blue-collar' stories that follow.Beginning with a close analysis of the key fundamentals of a ghost story as laid down by M.R. James, and juxtaposing those against Rolt's informative essay The Passing of the Ghost Story (1956) we can see how Rolt's tales provide a distinctive connection between the traditional ghost stories of James and the industrial short horror fiction of Leiber. Rolt also sets a portion of his tales in isolated Welsh valleys and the Shropshire border country where he was raised. It is in these more wild and brooding locations, more aligned to the works of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, that his tales of ghosts and hauntings are transformed into unsettling, disorientating excursions where 'angel satyrs' stir.
In this thesis I identify the limited research into Hardy's use of dialect and metre in his poetry. I argue that critics assume a narrow textual approach that disregards Hardy’s broad thematic, ...linguistic and metrical range. To redress this anomaly, I propose a broader critical methodology which reflects and accommodates the multi-faceted nature of Hardy's poems. I employ a combination of post-colonialism and textual criticism to place Hardy's work in its socio-historic and textual contexts. Intrinsic to this study is an acknowledgement of the cultural and linguistic disparities between Victorian social classes and the cultural subjugation of the rural labouring class by the middle and landowning classes.I conduct an examination of Victorian prosodic and philological debates in relation to Hardy's poetry. I demonstrate that Hardy was familiar with these debates and fuses standard poetic devices and language with the non-standard devices and dialect of his native rural culture. In doing so, Hardy proposes the equality of rural and urban cultures in order to reclaim rural culture from the subjugation of the dominant urban centre. I propose that this fusion reflects increasing nineteenth- century urbanisation and renders rural culture inherent to Victorian social evolution. Conversely, I consider whether Hardy's fusion of cultures articulates growing anxiety expressed by Victorian liberals regarding the morality and maintenance of the British empire. I argue that the increased Victorian interest in philology indicates a middle-class desire to return to pre-imperial identities.I demonstrate that Hardy's poetry assumes an anti-imperialist stance in which he contends that all empires fail and result in the loss of imperial identities. His migration poems provide a detached view of society in which non-fixation of identities becomes possible. My multi-theoretical stance permits Hardy's multi-cultural understanding of society, which he articulates through dialect and standard English, and speaks for all mankind.
This study investigates how key Victorian novelists, such as Anne and Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, ...emphasize performativity in their critiques of marriage. Given the performative nature of wedding ceremonies, this project focuses on wedding descriptions in select novels by the aforementioned authors. Such a focus highlights an interesting dilemma. Although we often think of Victorian novels as overwhelmingly concerned with marriage, the few wedding descriptions found in Victorian fiction are aborted, unusually short or announced after the fact. Those Victorian novelists who do feature weddings often describe them as grotesquely theatrical to underscore the empty performativity associated with contemporaneous wedding rituals that privilege form over substance, and to stress deception and inauthentic play-acting in marriage. In these ways, the key Victorian novelists draw attention to a gap between the empty formalism of marriage as a legal, religious and social institution, and the reality of many Victorian marriages.Nevertheless, many of the same novelists who show their general distaste for the empty performativity of weddings, acknowledge that theatricality itself plays a more complex role in their marriage plots, raising questions about authenticity, fraud and pious deceptions in marriage. For example, Wilkie Collins complicates the argument about theatrical weddings by stressing that quiet weddings, performed without much pomp and ceremony, may also signify deceptive marriages. Moreover, Thomas Hardy emphasizes the value of festive public weddings, which solidify the spouses’ connection to their community. Additionally, both the realist and sensation novelists discussed here, especially Anne Brontë, Dickens, Braddon, and Collins, condone temporary play-acting and deception, which extend beyond weddings, if such performances allow their characters to circumvent inflexible and unjust marriage laws.In sum, this dissertation analyzes how key Victorian novelists redefine courtship and marriage by focusing on the performative aspects of marriage as a legal and social institution. Those redefinitions are, at times, non-linear and contradictory. They also relate to the continual enmeshing of two primary modes of Victorian narrative, realism and sensationalism, which complicates the view of performativity in marriages as either artificial or authentic.
In this thesis, I compare how English literature of the nineteenth century is taught in undergraduate courses in Kazakhstani and American universities. The work demonstrates what goals and objectives ...are pursued, what methods professors use for achieving their goals and what influences their choices in teaching. The paper examines the possibility of transferring the way of teaching English literature of the nineteenth century of an American university to Kazakhstani universities. My first chapter examines the Model Curriculum, reading materials and the approaches of teaching English literature in Kazakhstani universities, with the example of Central Kazakhstan Academy. This chapter demonstrates the need to switch from the old model of teaching English literature in Kazakhstan, which is focused on rote study, to new methods of teaching English literature. In the second chapter I explain how English literature of the nineteenth century is taught in the U.S. in comparison to Kazakhstan, illustrating the differences and the peculiarities of teaching in American universities, with the examples of Georgetown University (private) and University of Maryland (public). The third chapter centers on my proposed approaches of teaching English literature of the nineteenth century for Kazakhstani students majoring in English.
Thomas Hardy is perhaps best known for his depictions of a nostalgic, rural past—and the interruption of that rural life by modern cultivation. This essay takes as its starting point Hardy's ...suspicion of cultivation, but it reverses any notion of nostalgia. Hardy's skeptical depiction of cultivation ultimately arises not from the novel's ambivalence about culture but from its ambivalence about nature. Modern cultivation in The Woodlanders (1887) is a circular, nonprogressive practice that undoes the narrative of linear individual development on which the midcentury realist novel was founded. Though Hardy is often seen as departing from midcentury realism, this article argues that, instead, we can see a new direction for realism in the discussion of cultivation. Hardy contends that nature is not, and probably has never been, more real than cultivation. By making a world of surfaces and then undoing it, The Woodlanders highlights the cultivated nature of subjecthood, a cultivation that end-of-century realism must attempt to capture.
... when Jude receives a subsequent letter from Sue asking if he would give her away at the wedding, Hardy writes that "if Sue had written that in satire, he could hardly forgive her"; after Jude and ...Sue overhear two clergymen speaking in hushed tones outside their home, Jude cries, "What a satire their talk is on our importance to the world!"; and even Sue herself begins to imagine things in the same terms, begging Jude in the midst of their deterioration, "Don't satirize me: it cuts like a knife!" or, pages later, "Don't crush all the life out of me by satire and argument!" (J, 205, 424, 435).3 Satire may not be the word most readers of this novel would expect at such moments; we observe the lashings endured by the blighted couple but struggle to find any humor behind them, as a satire might suggest.
This essay explores an aesthetic tension at the heart of a reader or perceiver's encounter with a fixed set of verbal or visual cues. A few details or brushstrokes can give rise to the idea of ...something more because of our cognitive readiness to identify objects that have been represented to us in only limited ways. Mimetic representation relies on our everyday ability to form beliefs about what is not available to the senses based on whatisrepresented. At the same time, this same readiness to identify possibilities that are only implied brings perceivers up against the limits of representation. While a few cues can be remarkably effective at suggesting something more, thissomethingcontinues to remain withheld. The second half of the essay examines instances of this predicament, with particular attention to its recurrent representation in the work of Thomas Hardy.
The Gauertal incident in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” employs elements of an archetypal hospitality plot involving aid for a pursued man, a plot previously employed by Jack London, Joseph Conrad, ...Robert Louis Stevenson, Victor Hugo, Homer, and others as well as by Hemingway himself. The essay locates these influences in short story collections recently found in the library of the Hemingway family’s Windemere Cottage. Elucidation of the hospitality plot in Harry’s reminiscences, particularly those of the secretaries in the snow, the attack on the Austrian officers’ leave train, and the death of Williamson, aids in interpretation of the story’s essential conundrums, the frozen leopard carcass and Harry’s death flight to Kilimanjaro’s summit.
...forty years after its publication, Hardy inserted verses from Browning's "By the Fire-Side" (1853) among the ghostly literary voices that Jude Fawley hears in Oxford. ...during his long career, he ...crossed paths with many of his contemporaries at parties, salons, and at the Savile and Athenaeum clubs.
