Victorian literature and historical time: Genre and historicity after Walter Scott

O'Dell, Benjamin Daniel

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/105011 Copy

Description

Title

Victorian literature and historical time: Genre and historicity after Walter Scott

Author(s)

O'Dell, Benjamin Daniel

Issue Date

2019-04-12

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Goodlad, Lauren M.E.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Saville, Julia F.

Committee Member(s)

• Underwood, Ted
• Bigelow, Gordon

Department of Study

English

Discipline

English

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Victorian
• Victorian literature
• history
• the historical novel
• historicity
• historical process
• George Eliot
• Adam Bede
• Charles Dickens
• Sketches by Boz
• Arthur Hugh Clough
• Amours de Voyage
• Thomas Hardy
• The Mayor of Casterbridge
• time
• temporality
• narrative
• form
• genre
• experiment
• Georg Lukács
• Walter Scott
• historical romance
• modern
• modernity
• England
• change
• changefulness
• British
• British literature
• English literature
• the verse novel
• sketchbook
• serialization
• serial
• seriality

Abstract

"Between the dawn of the nineteenth century and its close, Britain went from a predominantly rural nation with modest territorial holdings to an urban industrial power with an expansive imperial presence. This dissertation, ""Victorian Literature and Historical Time: Genre and Historicity after Walter Scott,"" examines how Victorian writers experimented with literary form to create narrative temporalities capable of negotiating these changes. Georg Lukács famously associated literature's historicity with the realist novel’s ability to capture social movement through typical characters, a narrative form he tied to the historical fiction of Walter Scott. Yet Lukács believed that a reactionary turn after the failed European revolutions of 1848 coincided with an increasing decline in the novel's capacity to depict such historical dynamism. Critics including Ian Duncan, Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Ruth Livesey, Harry E. Shaw and Raymond Williams have since shown the persistence of British literature's historical focus through a variety of inventive forms. This project explores the modes of temporal experience that different literary genres convey. Focusing on Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1833-6; 1839), Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage (1849; 1858), George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), and Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), it demonstrates how genre-driven temporal experiments capture a sense of historical movement through creative figurations of narrative time."

Graduation Semester

2019-05

Type of Resource

text

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105011

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2019 Benjamin D. O'Dell

Owning Collections