https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1141&context=gradschool_dissertations

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

Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature

The angel rocks the house: An unstable icon

“Wilde’s Personal Drama” studies the drama of Oscar Wilde’s first two commercially produced plays, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and A Woman of No Importance (1893). I suggest that Wilde both borrowed from old performance genres and revised them. He drew motifs from familiar varieties of comedy and melodrama, often following the expected patterns only to reverse them at the last moment. Viewing life itself in theatrical terms, he presented social performances such as afternoon calls and country house parties as theatrical genres, often conflating these performances with scenes more traditionally associated with the stage. In appropriating scenes from stage and fashionable drawing room, he mocked the rigid assumptions about marriage and morality on which these genres were based.

Wilde’s Personal Drama

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1035&context=modlangdiss

Red social en La Celestina: una aproximacióncuantitativa a su sistema de personajes

Through a sustained close reading of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1855 novel The Newcomes, this essay examines three analogous types of particularity in the novel: the particularity of loved ones in the social network, of fictional persons in the literary work, and of the individual text. Drawing on recent sociological and network readings of Victorian narrative, I argue that Thackeray's plot about relationships in the marriage market is reflected (on the level of form) by the structural relation between characters and text, and (on the level of the reading experience) by the affective engagement of the reader to the novel. As characters encounter problems in replacing old relations (former lovers, deceased spouses, estranged relatives) with new ones, the novel raises analogous questions about the replaceability of characters as textual constructs or fictional persons, and of the novel itself as one experience among multitudes on offer in the nineteenth-century market. A tension between the continual or particular experience of an individual novel and the felt historical pressure of novels en masse registers in the text itself as a formal and narrative problem, one that leads us suggestively toward recent methodological debates about intimate and distant reading.

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

Citations

Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature

The angel rocks the house: An unstable icon

Wilde’s Personal Drama

Red social en La Celestina: una aproximacióncuantitativa a su sistema de personajes

These Newcomes: William Makepeace Thackeray and Novelistic Particularity

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Aspects of the Novel

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