The gospel of freedom : agency, idealism, and the forms of Victorian fiction
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- My dissertation argues that conventional literary histories of the Victorian period have obscured a major tradition of nineteenth-century writing: a uniquely Victorian transcendentalism. Such histories typically define the "Victorianism" of Victorian literature in terms of an aspiration to realism, epitomized by the widening of the novel's mimetic range and the consolidation of its techniques for representing ordinary experience. Equally fundamental to the period's literature, however, was an impulse leading away from the world of experience and towards the reality of some transcendental phenomenon, whether this be mind, spirit, or idea. For the writers I consider, the growing dominance of empiricism and naturalism throughout all domains of life was a cause for concern, as well as celebration—especially insofar as these modes of explanation threatened the metaphysical and epistemological structures that had traditionally secured human freedom. Across its five chapters, my dissertation explores how Victorian writers drew on the formal resources of literature to articulate and reflect upon these threats, and to generate new and compelling representations of transcendental agency. To contextualize these representations and to clarify their stakes, I turn to the transcendental discourses that flourished in Victorian culture: in metaphysics and moral philosophy, aesthetics, theology, political theory, and literary and cultural criticism.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Taylor, Mark Andrew |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Daub, Adrian |
| Thesis advisor | Duncan, Ian |
| Thesis advisor | Greif, Mark, 1975- |
| Degree committee member | Daub, Adrian |
| Degree committee member | Duncan, Ian |
| Degree committee member | Greif, Mark, 1975- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Mark Taylor. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Mark Andrew Taylor
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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