Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1938, English

Committee: Rea McCain (Advisor) Subjects: British and Irish Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 1984, English

The first half of this paper will trace Neroni's development from the unlikely caricature of a siren to the rounded, believable narrator's accomplice whose position establishes her own credibility. Neroni serves to reinforce and augment the implications of the narrative whenever she holds court with her suitors. As "the Circe of Barchester" (Kn 37 1), she leads her lovers into revealing those traits that the narrator has already warned us to expect, thereby providing the narrator with further text to comment upon. Trollope needs to reveal certain aspects of his men, not in their inward deliberation, but in startled reactions to a shot gone home. The narrator discloses their areas of potential psychological conflict; Neroni starts the conflict into motion.My second half will examine Neroni's position as an accomplice to that side of the author that subverts the narrator's more conventional views. Neroni's subversive role is built on the foundations of the narrator's early dependence on her as a clear-seeing, analytical character. Her original position of moral ambiguity sets her up as the logical advocate for the views about which the author himself feels ambivalent. Even as Trollope cajoles the reader into belief in the reliability of Neroni's moral judgments, he is jolting us periodically with her unorthodox moral opinions. In this section, we build on a hypothetical delineation of Neroni's self-concept to show how her unorthodox perspective is both valid and necessary.

Committee: Katherine Linehan (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, English

Drawing on literary texts by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Gissing and non-literary texts appearing in periodicals, comic newspapers, and music-hall songs this dissertation show how the lower middle class consisting of those members of British society working variously as Civil Service, commercial, and retail clerks, school teachers, and living in the suburbs of London and other large cities is represented as dangerous, laughable, and pitiable. Through readings of self-improvement books by Samuel Smiles, conduct and instruction manuals, and didactic literature I show how middle-class anxieties about its own position vis-a-vis the aristocracy and the working class drive middle-class elites to represent the lower middle class as dangerous, in need of containment, and surveillance. One of the constant fears of the middle class is that the lower middle class will develop a cultural and economic identity of its own. I then show how the lower middle class poses a threat to the heteronormative order that both underwrites and is underwritten by the bourgeois order. The lower middle class enjoyment of female to male cross-dressing performers like Vesta Tilley highlights how the music hall develops into a place where lower-middle-class men and women can re-imagine their class, gender, and sexual identities. As such, it becomes the locus of an emergent lower-middle-class cultural identity independent of middle class influence. The dissertation also shows how Dickens in David Copperfield offers up a solution to the socio-literary problem of the lower middle class by deploying the Bildungsroman to allow for the social mobility of some members of the lower middle class. Specifically, David Copperfield enters into the Victorian debate over the nature of the gentleman and proposes that the best way for young lower-middle-class men to rise to the rank of middle-class gentlemen is through authorship. The dissertation then turns to a discussion of how Born in Exile and (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Riede (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2006, English (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century sensation fiction evoked a cultural revolution that threatened to challenge accepted norms for personal behavior and increase possibilities for scripting one's life outside of established norms for respectable behavior. Because of the ways that it threatened to represent new scripts for personal behavior, sensation, which I term a “dangerous alternative social text,” disrupted hegemony and provided new ways of thinking amongst its Victorian British readership; it became a vehicle through which the law and government (public discourses) ended up colliding with domesticity and the very private texts surrounding it. Using an expanded definition of sensation, this project analyzes four “sensational” novels from the mid- to late Victorian period – Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Margaret Oliphant's Salem Chapel, Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamondsand Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray– and connects it chapter-by-chapter to concerns about cultural revolution evoked by the passage of the Infant Custody Acts, the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act, the Married Women's Property Acts and the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. It also argues that the laws these novels engage additionally served as dangerous alternative social texts for personal behavior to the Establishment which attempted to bar their passing. It short, the project reads both the laws and listed novels as versions of sensation. Both sensation fiction and sensational laws legitimized new “dangerous” patterns for behavior and threatened possible changes in the “social text” of England.

Committee: Joseph McLaughlin (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English