Inhabiting liberalism: politics, culture, and the spaces of masculine professionalism, 1823-1903

Inhabiting Liberalism: Politics, Culture, and the Spaces of Masculine Professionalism, 1823-1903 investigates the physical, social, and epistemological spaces of Victorian liberalism. It argues that liberalism is locatable and that its locations matter. By locatable, I mean that the tenets of liberalism—a set of contentions about how one should live in the world—were formulated from within preexisting physical environments and also served as the basis for new ones. These environments were the places where liberalism was conceived or put into practice, its sites of meaning. This dissertation, therefore, takes up the following questions: How did the structures constitutive of particular environments shape Victorian intellectuals' conceptions of liberal norms and practices? What kinds of spatial configurations did they think were ideally suited to liberalism? Why do liberal characterological and temperamental ideals—detachment, objectivity, many-sidedness—seem so inextricably intertwined with the physically objectified social spaces that these intellectuals inhabited but often thought themselves to have transcended? And, if the places where liberalism was conceptualized or put into practice provide the background conditions of its intelligibility, then what might this mean for the recuperative approach to liberal theory recently advanced by a number of scholars working on the period? Although the following chapters explore various answers to these questions, my underlying premise is that social space, or the arrangement of differentiated positions, is instantiated by physical structures and inscribed within cognitive faculties that are themselves constituted, at least in part, by these structures. Through an examination of key architectural sites—including India House, the House of Commons, the country estate, the Athenaeum Club, and the People's Palace—as John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Besant adapted, imagined, or lived in them and represented them in literary texts, I delineate the relationship between liberalism and the physical locations of its production and reception.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Humanities

Grantor

Rice University

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Morrison, Kevin A.

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Michie, Helena
• Patten, Robert L.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Wiener, Martin J.
• Hennessy, Rosemary

• British and Irish literature
• Political science
• Social structure
• Architecture
• Communication and the arts
• Social sciences
• Language
• Literature
• Linguistics
• Professionalism
• Victorian
• Masculinity
• Liberalism
• Spatial theory

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1911/78040

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.rice.edu:1911/78040