Narrative ambition : Victorian self-help and competition
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation investigates the Victorian narrative of ambition across its two key genres, the novel and the self-help text. The term and the genre of "self-help" were invented in the nineteenth century, with Thomas Carlyle coining the term in Sartor Resartus (1834), and Samuel Smiles preaching its importance in his 1859 Self-Help, which collected and condensed the biographies of great men in order to illustrate the importance of hard work, perseverance, and energy. Whereas Smiles's brief, condensed biographies focus on the individual, in the novel, the self-help plot expands to explore the dangers of excessive ambition in a competitive and hierarchical society. I suggest that the Victorian narrative of ambition divided into two paths, and whereas Smiles's self-help ethos focuses on the individual's ambition--with each person rising "very much according to his deserts"--the novel takes on the wider social context of ambition, as many ambitious self-helping characters compete, crowding a fictional world that, as one of Anthony Trollope's characters laments, "will soon be like a fishpond, very full of fish, but with very little food for them." Across chapters focusing on Smiles's Self-Help, Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon and Vanity Fair, and Anthony Trollope's The Three Clerks and An Autobiography, I argue that these Victorian authors used varying narrative strategies to dramatize ambition. Smiles's Self-Help repeats the same story of successful ambition across hundreds of examples, seeming to replicate in its form the perseverance of the characters. But whereas Smiles uses these stories to praise ambitious work, the Victorian novel explores the consequences of ambition--both within the story, as the ambitious subject seeks to displace others in the process of "getting ahead, " and in the telling, as narrators exaggerate, satirize, and judge the ambitions of the novel's characters. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that dramatizing ambition has both formal and stylistic consequences on the Victorian novel.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2013 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Richardson, Rebecca |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of English. |
| Primary advisor | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Primary advisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Gigante, Denise, 1965- |
| Advisor | Gigante, Denise, 1965- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Rebecca Richardson. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of English. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2013 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2013 by Rebecca Joy Richardson
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