Victorian literature and historical time: Genre and historicity after Walter Scott

"Between the dawn of the nineteenth century and its close, Britain went from a predominantly rural nation with modest territorial holdings to an urban industrial power with an expansive imperial presence. This dissertation, ""Victorian Literature and Historical Time: Genre and Historicity after Walter Scott,"" examines how Victorian writers experimented with literary form to create narrative temporalities capable of negotiating these changes. Georg Lukács famously associated literature's historicity with the realist novel’s ability to capture social movement through typical characters, a narrative form he tied to the historical fiction of Walter Scott. Yet Lukács believed that a reactionary turn after the failed European revolutions of 1848 coincided with an increasing decline in the novel's capacity to depict such historical dynamism. Critics including Ian Duncan, Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Ruth Livesey, Harry E. Shaw and Raymond Williams have since shown the persistence of British literature's historical focus through a variety of inventive forms. This project explores the modes of temporal experience that different literary genres convey. Focusing on Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1833-6; 1839), Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage (1849; 1858), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), and Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), it demonstrates how genre-driven temporal experiments capture a sense of historical movement through creative figurations of narrative time."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2019

Author dc:creator

• O'Dell, Benjamin Daniel

Contributors dc:contributor

• Goodlad, Lauren M.E.
• Saville, Julia F.
• Underwood, Ted
• Bigelow, Gordon

• Victorian
• Victorian literature
• history
• the historical novel
• historicity
• historical process
• George Eliot
• Adam Bede
• Charles Dickens
• Sketches by Boz
• Arthur Hugh Clough
• Amours de Voyage
• Thomas Hardy
• The Mayor of Casterbridge
• time
• temporality
• narrative
• form
• genre
• experiment
• Georg Lukács
• Walter Scott
• historical romance
• modern
• modernity
• England
• change
• changefulness
• British
• British literature
• English literature
• the verse novel
• sketchbook
• serialization
• serial
• seriality

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2019 Benjamin D. O'Dell

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105011

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/105011