The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

The Novel as Climate Model: Realism and the Greenhouse Effect in Bleak House

As steam-powered industrialization intensified in mid-nineteenth century Britain, the rate and severity of workplace injuries spiked. At the same time, a range of historical dynamics made working class people individually responsible for bearing the effects of industrial injury and carrying on in the aftermath of accidents without support from state or company. By the midcentury, railway accidents were represented as events that put on display the moral character of individual rail workers and widows, rather than — as in radical rhetorics of previous decades — the rottenness of state or company bureaucracies. Bearing injury or loss in a reserved manner came to appear as a sign of domestic virtue for working class women and men, though the proper manifestations of this idealized resilience varied by gender. Focusing on dynamics in the railway and nursing sectors, and in the sphere of reproduction, Infrastructures of Injury shows how variously situated working class subjects responded to their conditions of vulnerability over the second half of the nineteenth century. These responses ranged from individualized or family-based self-help initiatives to — beginning in the 1870s — strikes, unionization drives, and the looting of company property. Ultimately, this dissertation tells a story about how working class cultural and political practices were remade through the experience of injury and loss.

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Infrastructures of Injury: Railway Accidents and the Remaking of Class and Gender in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain - eScholarship

This work investigates the representation of domestic servants within mid-twentieth century novels of female development, which are written by middle class women. The comparison is between the following authors: Rosario Castellanos from Mexico, Jean Rhys from the West Indies, and Clarice Lispector from Brazil. Postcolonial women writers have needed to tackle hegemonic structures within their own fiction, as they confront the privilege of the modern writing subject who frames herself in opposition to the silence of colonized female characters. Working to rewrite history, and to develop texts that speak from the margins, there is a conscious effort to incorporate subaltern voices into their narratives. Nevertheless, anxiety arises within those texts of middle-class writers who are preoccupied with the management of differences, stemming from a realization that in fact there is no place within the privileged writing subject's text from which the subaltern can actually speak. Therefore the authors struggle to write within a masculine-centered literary tradition that privileges certain voices over others, while at the same time recognizing their complicity with that system that works through exclusions. While the servant is silenced, the writing also shields her from being appropriated and defined by the mistress who needs her as a caregiver while she pursues a personal growth and awakening. That is, silences are used to form a protective space in which the marginalized woman cannot be merely the embodiment of alterity for the narrator's quest for subjectivity. An element of shame is therefore revealed by means of an implied author, which reminds them that they are expressing an ideal that they themselves have not lived up to. The marginal character becomes a negative element that points to the inability of the narrative to adequately represent her. It questions the model of solidarity through shared oppression that readings of women's and postcolonial writings often take, suggesting that new forms of community need to be imagined that take into account inequalities and injustices between women.

Can Silence Speak? Reading the Marginalized Woman in Three Novels of Female Development

In recent years the analysis of the intersection of literature and economics has generated a vibrant conversation in literary and cultural studies of the Victorian period. But Aeron Hunt argues that an emphasis on abstraction and impersonality as the crucial features of the Victorian economic experience has led to a partial and ultimately misleading vision of Victorian business culture. In contrast, she asserts that the key to understanding the relationship of literary writing to economic experience is what she calls "personal business" - the social and interpersonal relationships of Victorian commercial life in which character was a central mediating concept. Juxtaposing novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Margaret Oliphant with such nonfiction works as popular biographies, periodicals, and business handbooks, the author builds on and extends the insights of the "new economic criticism" by highlighting the embodied, interpersonal, and socially embedded interactions of everyday economic life. Hunt analyzes the productive and disciplinary roles that character played in the Victorian economy and traces the proliferation of different models of character as literary writing and commercial discourse responded to the challenges and opportunities presented by personal business. She suggests that the dynamic interchange between forms of character employed in the everyday practice of business and those imagined in literary writing helped shape character as a crucial mode of power in Victorian business culture and economic life. Ultimately, Personal Business provides new ways to understand both the history of the Victorian novel and its implications in middle-class culture and the turbulent experience of nineteenth-century capitalism.

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel

Citations

The Novel as Climate Model: Realism and the Greenhouse Effect in Bleak House

Infrastructures of Injury: Railway Accidents and the Remaking of Class and Gender in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain - eScholarship

Can Silence Speak? Reading the Marginalized Woman in Three Novels of Female Development

Personal Business: Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture

The Novelistic Poem and the Poetical Novel: Towards a Theory of Generic Interrelation in the Romantic Period

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