The limits of community in Victorian fiction.
Item
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Title
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The limits of community in Victorian fiction.
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Identifier
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AAI9732938
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identifier
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9732938
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Creator
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Kramer, David.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Elizabeth B. Tenenbaum
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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This dissertation claims a close relation between the outcast figure of the Victorian realist novel and the alienated figure of the High Modernist. Discussing novels by Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Gissing, and Thomas Hardy, the dissertation posits that the growing unease of Victorian writers as to the possibility of finding social connections helps lead, ultimately, to the Modernist disbelief in and rejection of the concept of the traditional community. While World War I has often been identified as Modernism's key event, the historical and cultural forces at work in the nineteenth century were, if not as cataclysmic, at least acutely disturbing, and quite often disillusioning. The theological and economic disruptions that so widely affected Victorian culture, such as the scientific investigations of Lyell and Darwin and the continuing shift in England from an agrarian to an urban economy, helped produce an important strain of the Victorian novel that, while accepting the mainstream Victorian assumption that virtually everyone desires absorption into a community, examines the profound difficulty of joining such communities, reflecting the sense of dislocation growing in the nineteenth century. The works' socially marginalized protagonists, such as Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, Pip, Rhoda Nunn, Edward Reardon, Tess, and Jude, like their Modernist successors, hold confused, even rebellious attitudes towards traditional structures, learn to feel no tie to their culture, and, to an extent, expose the meaninglessness that lies beneath society's organization. Thus, the climate that produced the radical narratives of the High Modernists had been prepared partly by such works as Great Expectations and Jude the Obscure, which helped to subvert cultural assumptions in less striking forms.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
