Fictional Selves: Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography

<p>Fictional Selves: Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography is about fictionality and the role that processes of fiction play in our experiences of personal subjectivity. I argue that the particular and historically situated form of the Victorian fictional autobiography helps us to perceive the more widespread importance of fiction to our understanding of identity as both a creative and a social process. In my work, a fictional autobiography is the autobiography of an explicitly fictional character. <em>David Copperfield</em> and <em>Bleak House</em> by Dickens and <em>Jane Eyre</em> and <em>Villette</em> by C. Bronte are openly imaginative works, but they are told through the thematic and formal conventions of the nascent genre of autobiography. I propose that the dual presence of conventions of reference and conventions of fiction encourages a doubled reading stance with respect to the text that allows the sympathetic reader to recognize the fictionality of her own practices of identity formation by seeing them played out in the narrative of an openly fictional character with whom she emotionally identifies. By thus redefining the nature of human identity, the fictional autobiography implicitly engages, and asks us to reconsider, Victorian preoccupations with human potential, especially through the paradigmatic figures of the author and the domestic woman.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English and Comparative Literature

Year dc:date.available

2013

Author dc:creator

• Pennington, Heidi L.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Miriam L Bailin

• Bronte
• Dickens
• Domesticity
• Fiction
• Self
• Subjectivity
• English Language and Literature

Language dc:language

English (en)

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7936/K7G15XZJ

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:openscholarship.wustl.edu:etd-2089