Domestic formalism : comfort, narrative, and the Victorian imaginary
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Literary criticism has long treated one of Victorian narrative's favorite hobbyhorses—the pleasures and perils of domestic life—as a fascination born of the historical and political contexts of nineteenth-century Britain. My research rethinks this account by uncovering the distinctly aesthetic stakes of Victorian literature's intense investment in domesticity. With special attention to a tradition that includes Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Henry James, I argue that nineteenth-century British writers drew on the images and values associated with domestic comfort in order to explore the nature of narrative experience and problems of novelistic form. Seeking to map this field of "domestic formalism, " this dissertation identifies four landmark categories that demonstrate its range across narrative levels, from that of scene and character to that of genre and compositional modes. These categories include coziness, an aesthetic mode intimately related to the novelistic unit of the scene; inclination, a style of identification that mediates between comfort and desire; maternal reminiscence, a genre of shared autobiographical memory; and dictation, a writing practice situated in relations of assisted authorship. Through its focus on the aesthetic resources of domestic formalism, this project demonstrates how the novel at its cultural height developed a robust account of narrative experience, one that affirmed narrative's sociability and manifold pleasures and consolations.
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 | Wilder, Elizabeth Honor |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Cohen, Margaret, 1958- |
| Thesis advisor | Ngai, Sianne |
| Degree committee member | Cohen, Margaret, 1958- |
| Degree committee member | Ngai, Sianne |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Elizabeth Honor Wilder. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Elizabeth Honor Wilder
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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