Global ETD Search
Search theses and dissertations gathered from participating repositories worldwide. Every result links back to the library that holds it. No account is needed.
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Showing 1 to 10 of 10 for “"The Woman in White"”.
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"The Wretched State of My Nerves:" Hysteria and Sympathy in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
<p>This thesis explores the sympathy shown to disabled characters in Wilkie Collins’s 1860 novel <em>The Woman in White</em> with an emphasis on hysteria. Using disability studies framework and historical context of hysteria in the Victorian era provides a nuanced reading of the novel which …
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Privately deviant, publicly disciplined: the violent seizure of female narratives in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Woman in White, and Lady Audley’s Secret
In Victorian England, women were subjects within their patriarchal society. What Anne Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon emphasize and “sensationalize” is the subjugated marriage relationship, violently portraying men forcing their wives into submission. Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell …
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Rite of Association: The Figure of the Secret Society and Victorian Democratic Debate
"Individual chapters focus on the contextually-specific role that the figure of the secret society was made to play in England during several key moments of democratic stress, including the passage of the Catholic Relief Act (1829), the trial of the Glasgow Spinners (1838), the controversy over …
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Symptomatic writings: prefigurations of Freudian theories and models of the mind in the fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins and George Eliot
This thesis examines ways in which the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) and George Eliot (1819-1880) anticipate aspects of the works of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). It argues that psychoanalytic theories were a product of their time, finding their ancestry in …
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Sleep and Sleeplessness in the Victorian Novel, Jane Eyre to Dracula
<p>Victorian inquisitiveness about sleep and dysfunctions of sleep is exemplified in novels published during the fifty-year period from <em>Jane Eyre</em> (1847) to <em>Dracula</em> (1897). This inquisitiveness foreshadows modern medical sleep science and immerses the reading public in a body of …
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The Law and the Lady: Consent and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
… many scholars have written on women and marriage in nineteenth-century British history and fiction, this dissertation, The Law and the Lady: Consent and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, is the first to apply consent theory to those unions. Modern consent theory dictates that for …
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Centers of Consciousness: Protagonism and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Since Aristotle, we have categorized characters in terms of relative quantity and proportion. From Henry James's "center of consciousness," to E. M. Forster's theory of "round" and "flat," to Deidre Lynch's "pragmatics of character," to Alex Woloch's influential "one versus many," scaled …
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Beyond Scandal: Seeking Morality in Sensation Fiction
… critics condemned sensation novels on the grounds of excessive immorality. However, three of the most popular sensation novels display a pattern of increased social status as a reward for good behavior is common, clearly suggesting that notions about the genre as immoral are misguided. …
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In Defense of Ugly Women
My thesis explores why beauty became so much more important in nineteenth-century Britain, especially for marriageable young women in the upper and middle class. My argument addresses the consequences of that change in the status of beauty for plain or ugly women, how this social shift is reflected …
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The Serial Imagination: Novel Form, Serial Format, and Victorian Reading Publics
<p>A great many Victorian novels were originally written, published, distributed, and read in parts over time—that is to say, serially. Yet today we rarely read those novels in serial format. Nor do we consider that format in any way equivalent to what we mean by the form of the novels in question. …