Brontë Scholar (II)

More recently presented Brontë-related Ph.D. dissertations:

First-person multiplied: Plotting narration in Victorian multi-narrator novels (Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker) by Avilah Joy Getzler

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
DATE 2006
ADVISER Gallagher, Catherine
SOURCE DAI-A 67/08, p. 2992, Feb 2007

Abstract
This study re-theorizes the relationship between narrative form and story content in the multi-narrator novels of Emily and Anne Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker. While eighteenth and twentieth-century multi-narrator novels emphasize their narrators' divergent perspectives, Victorian multi-narrator novels emphasize plot. Employing between two and sixteen narrators while muting their individual points of view challenges the most fundamental assumption of first-person fiction: that the narrators initiate, direct, and control the story. De-privileging the narrator as the story's source, Emily and Anne Brontë, Collins, and Stoker make visible a dialectic between the narrative form and the story content. While structuralists propose a binary between form and stow---and deconsructionists deny a distinction---I argue that they are mutually constituted. Rather than form acting on story, meaning emerges at their juncture; rather than a stable constant, the story is imagined into existence through the reading of the text; and rather than proving a dualistic model of narration, point of view reveals a dynamic interchange between narration and story. In my first chapter, I use Emily and Anne Brontë's frame narratives to establish how; multi-narration challenges normative models of first-person fiction. Comparing Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I explore the specific dynamics which surround autobiographical and observer narrators. In my second and third chapters, I consider more closely the plottedness of Victorian multi-narration. While critics commonly complain that Collins' plots subsume his multiple narrators, I am interested in how his plots affect, and in turn are affected by, his multi-narrative form. I argue that The Woman in White's competitive plot creates narratorial power struggles; by contrast, The Moonstone 's unintentional plot raises questions of narratorial ownership. In my final chapter, I investigate Stoker's failed attempt to eliminate the narration/story divide altogether. Dracula initially plots its own assembly; however, as the novel draws to a close, the compilation process falls apart. In conclusion I argue that, while narrative form and story content are co-determinant, the difference between them cannot be erased.

English cultures, French nowheres: Cross-Channel revisions of the Victorian novel (Charlotte Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Ireland) by Julia D. Kents

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
DATE 2006
PAGES 199
ADVISER Anderson, Amanda
ISBN 978-0-542-95539-6
SOURCE DAI-A 67/11, p. 4195, May 2007

Abstract
In novels as diverse as George Eliot's Middlemarch, W.M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and Charlotte Brontë's Villette, a 'theatrical' French character displays cold detachment from the English novel's most intimate communities, the family and nation. In Vanity Fair, for example, the Anglo-French Becky Sharp prepares to perform national allegiances to the winner of the Battle of Waterloo, 'were he Englishman or Frenchman.' The refusal of French characters to honor close-knit communities has often been interpreted as a conservative novelistic pattern, one affirming Edmund Burke's declaration that the 'French' Enlightenment cut the organic bond between individuals and their families, nations, and classes. Challenging this assumption, my dissertation argues that key Victorian novelists are strongly drawn to French ruptures with naturalized communities and the aesthetic forms with which these breaks are often associated---theatricality and the grotesque. What these forms often expose, I argue, are the conflicts concealed by the Victorian novel's snug images of a cohesive national family. For the novelists I consider most extensively, C. Brontë, Thackeray, and Wilde, this critique of British cohesion operates through a dramatic reversal of ideological oppositions between England and France: for the first-person narrator of Villette, France's 'theatrical' relation to origins becomes an ideal way of inhabiting national character; in Vanity Fair, Becky's ironic and theatrical stances toward the family and nation interrogate the contradictions in English conceptions of national solidarity; and in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a French decadent aesthetic grotesquely distorts the English novel's conception of the national body. Because these authors allow English subjects to inhabit characteristically French stances, they suggest that an unstable relationship to communities of origin is a more universal condition of human experience. This idea anticipates Julia Kristeva's recent claim that French Enlightenment thinkers inaugurated the view that internal division---an uncanny sense of foreignness to oneself---affects all modern subjects. Like Kristeva, Brontë, Thackeray, and Wilde also locate in this condition a cosmopolitan ideal, one as yet theoretically examined, that differs from more confident and elitist constructions: the individual's uneasy awareness of her inherent foreignness motivates a powerful challenge to dominant conceptions of the English subject.

Intimations of intellectual disability in nineteenth-century British literature (Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte) by Paul R. Marchbanks

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
DATE 2006
PAGES 270
ADVISER Taylor, Beverly ; Thornton, Weldon
ISBN 978-0-542-54472-9
SOURCE DAI-A 67/02, p. 571, Aug 2006

Abstract
Mental retardation and autism spectrum disorders do not yet command the same critical attention as sensory or mobility impairments. Rosemary Garland Thomson's Extraordinary Bodies (1997) set a precedent from which few have deviated, deftly including intellectual disability in a taxonomy for disability studies without exploring the subject in depth. My project addresses such continued oversight by turning to the pivotal nineteenth century, a period when promising medical innovation was outpaced by increasingly isolationist institutional practices and dehumanizing, proto-eugenicist systems of thought. A few writers moved against this powerful current, interrogating their own prejudices as they created progressive visions of the intellectually disabled in close, interdependent communion with an able-minded majority. The project opens with an examination of how individuals with cognitive disabilities provided the people of an increasingly powerful nation with a useful yardstick against which to measure their industrial and social progress. It then considers Mary Shelley's deconstructions of monstrosity within the context of a pervasive physiognomic practice. Charles Dickens's increasingly non-stereotypic portrayals of the idiot, the Brontë sisters' visions of domestic care for the mentally disabled and mentally ill in a time of growing institutionalization, and Robert Browning's critique of proto-eugenicist and intellectist ideology, as well as his refined use of terms like 'idiot' and 'imbecile.'

Categories: Scholar