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theses

This dissertation examines the social aesthetics of characterization in nineteenth-century fiction, presenting a series of studies into the distinct figurative and rhetorical techniques that novelists developed for representing literary characters in fiction. During the nineteenth century, British society underwent massive change and reformation. The growth of industry, the redistribution of populations from the country to the city, the expansion of the British Empire, the dissolution of status hierarchy, and the rise of the middle class all defined this period of British modernity. Character, understood as both a semantic construction and as a quality of the individual person, became an important vehicle for negotiating this new modernity. In order to understand how the novel models or mediates this changing world beyond its pages, this project argues that critics must rethink the particular ways that literary characters are constructed across the representational space of the novel. In turn, this project argues that novelists like Walter Scott, William Makepeace Thackeray, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Vernon Lee turn to literary character as a vehicle for engaging with the limits and conditions of subjectivity and collectivity in the nineteenth century.

This project establishes character as the expressive medium for creating conceptual and literary relations between part and whole. Worldly Figures reconsiders the techniques for troubling the figuration of character as unified, coherent, and particular, presenting four case studies in conceptual logics for indeterminate characterizations: singularity, exceptionality, exemplarity, and referentiality. Chapter 1 situates the logic of singularity within the context of Romantic idealizations of the individual genius and figures of abjection. Chapter 2 examines Thackeray's ambivalence toward heroism in a series of fictional narratives about soldiers. The representation of war in narrative and in history becomes an opportunity to address the question of how novels adjudicate between personal and general experience. Chapter 3 turns to the late-nineteenth-century adventure novel as a critique of British imperialism. By focusing on the question of agency and accountability in the adventure novel, the chapter argues that Stevenson uses the themes of quantification and abstraction to illustrate the ideological effect of the subject's dislocation from scenes of decision making or action. Chapter 4 turns to the problem of reference and representation in late-nineteenth-century British Aestheticism and the genre of the roman à clef. The chapter argues that Lee connects questions of reference and identity to the roman à clef's formalization of vulnerability and exposure.

ETD_9281

doi:10.7282/t3-h1f9-tf97

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Matthew John Phillips

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.