Search

This thesis explores the relationship between faerie and power in the work of Charlotte Brontë. Focusing on Brontë's juvenilia, novels, journals, and fragments, I examine the function of faerie while considering the influence of the print and visual culture of the period (1780-1840). Challenging previous scholars, I argue that faerie operates as a healing force which empowers more marginalised characters and provides an imaginative, therapeutic escape. Starting with Brontë's juvenilia, I identify key themes and tropes throughout her early work, including miniaturisation, the creation of the faerie landscape, and healing by faerie intervention, mapping their re-emergence in her later work. This thesis investigates a variety of themes across Brontë's novels, including the power to create safe spaces in Jane Eyre, the power to preserve the past and redefine the present in Shirley, and the power to create alternative identities to process grief and loss in Villette. By setting Brontë's writing in the context of the broader, nineteenth-century culture of faerie, this thesis enters what is largely uncharted territory, as it examines potential influences and Brontë's acceptance or rejection of ideas about religion, gender, class, and imagination. While I argue that faerie is a healing force, I also pay careful attention to instances where faerie is malevolent in nature, appreciating that, though it mostly provides safety, it can, at times, cause harm. Brontë's own relationship to faerie is also considered, bearing in mind the author's conflicting feelings towards imagination and duty, a reoccurring tension woven throughout her works. Rather than dismissing Brontë's work as 'escapist', this thesis looks more seriously at what the power to escape meant for Brontë and her characters and contributes towards a deeper understanding of the link between faerie, gender, class and power, in her work.

This thesis focuses on Jane Austen's surviving manuscripts: those of her extant letters, of her early fiction, gathered in three handmade books (commonly called 'juvenilia'), of her later fiction, unpublished during her lifetime (commonly called 'later manuscripts'), and the early draft of two chapters of Persuasion. These autograph manuscripts, because they have not passed through a full editorial process, display Jane Austen's writing in its earliest stages, and permit an analysis of her writing process, and the development of her style. After a survey of the scientific, philosophical and literary texts that informed the understanding of Austen's time, this thesis analyses occurrences of touch and the haptic in these writings, and argues that they are central to understanding her narrative and stylistic choices. Touch was an important element of her early writings and personal letters, which Austen gradually toned down in her fiction and correspondence, but which resurfaces in her final works, Persuasion and 'Sanditon'. Early drafts usually contain numerous haptic events, which are erased or minimised in revisions and corrections. The reader needs to infer these deletions in order fully to understand Austen's prose. This thesis argues that references to the haptic are essential to understanding Austen's prose, because they are part of her writerly instinct, but only remain present in final drafts at critical moments, when they attain most narrative focus. It also argues that tactile and haptic instances inform Austen's very style. The grammatical, semantic and figural structures that Jane Austen uses call on ambiguity and syntagmatic suspense, which elicit in the reader a physical reaction akin to touch. Austen's style effects a mental dissonance or friction that stems from the seemingly irreconcilable elements she conjoins; these sensations are an integral part of the pleasure of the ideal reader, who is invited to be a participant in Jane Austen's creative process.

This is the first comprehensive study of the Brontës' representations of masculinity. In it, I analyse the ways this family of writers depicted forms of masculinity as they developed from late-Romantic child writers to mature novelists and poets of the Victorian period. My chief concern is to situate the Brontës within the historical period of 1829-1855, from Charlotte's first Glass Town stories to the time of her death. This thesis examines the Brontë siblings' complete body of work, including Branwell's contributions to the Angrian saga, Emily's and Anne's Gondal poetry, and Charlotte's and Emily's Belgian devoirs. In undertaking this work, I model my approach on Heather Glen's precise, historical readings in Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (2002), as well as John Tosh's social historical examination of Victorian masculinity, particularly in A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home (1999). This study examines representations of masculinity in the modes of cultural production the Brontës were exposed to: contemporary periodicals, poetry, fiction, domestic handbooks, gift books, educational texts, clerical and medical handbooks, and labour management treatises. I track the Brontës' various engagements with and revisions of Byronic and Carlylean forms of masculinity, as well as the rise and fall of the silver fork dandy and the emergence of both the Victorian self-made man and the new professional. This study considers how the Brontës' representations of gender formation were affected by different modes of familial literary production and collaboration. Though the Brontës shared their creative works from a young age and grew up within the same domestic literary culture, the siblings' depictions of masculinity diverge, and each sister situates herself within various cultural contexts relating, for example, to child-rearing, romance, and professional conduct. My thesis is organised thematically, with chapters examining heroic, domestic, and professional representations of masculinity in the Brontës' works.

Mid-eighteenth-century English writer and illustrator Thomas Chatterton was a stylistic chameleon with a keen interest in literary fame and commercial success. The emerging professional and publishing opportunities of Georgian England both engendered and were reflected in Chatterton’s protean stylistic experimentation. This thesis examines Chatterton’s stylistic mediation of this dynamic cultural economy, as expressed through his various textual, visual, and antiquarian ventures. It comprises a series of four case studies that explore Chatterton’s engagement with Georgian literary sociability and theatricality, material and visual cultures, literary professional networks, and emergent middle-class cultural economy. It adds to existing scholarship by offering a new conception of Chatterton’s style, both as he understood it himself and as it was constituted in the context of Georgian England’s convivial urban literary milieus. Essential to this recovery is a critical assessment of Chatterton’s lesser known illustrative works, as continuous with his precocious stylistic mirroring of the prevailing fashions of Georgian visual and bibliographic cultures. This mixture of archival and cultural historical analysis provides a more accurate reflection of Chatterton’s idiosyncratic experimentation with literary style as a performative means of professional self-promotion and reveals the broader social catalysts for his ever-changing array of genres, voices and modes. The significance of Chatterton’s protean style lies, this thesis argues, in its often poignant, yet compelling, expression of the anxieties and ambitious failures of the creative underclasses of the Georgian literary economy.

In the art of song composition, American composer Samuel Barber was the perfect storm. Barber spent years studying under superb instruction and became adept as a pianist, singer, composer, and in literature and languages. The songs that Barber composed during those years of instruction, many of which have been posthumously published, are waypoints on his journey to compositional maturity. These early songs display his natural inclinations, his self-determination, his growth through trial and error, and the slow flowering of a musical vision, meticulously cultivated by the educational opportunities provided to him by his family and his many devoted mentors. Using existing well-known and recently uncovered biographical data, as well as both published and unpublished song juvenilia and mature songs, this dissertation examines the importance of Barber's earliest musical and academic training in relationship to his development as a song composer.

During the twentieth century juvenilia received increasing critical attention. This provided a rise in the literary status of writing by children. However, even now, in the twenty-first century, it remains one of the more neglected literary forms. This thesis adds to the growing body of literature recognising juvenilia as an authentic literary genre, worthy of the critic's attention. Two key ~underline this thesis: firstly, juvenilia can be of importance to the scholar in their own right whether this Is due to their social and/or political impact, their influence on other authors, their development of a literary style or methodology, or the merit of their aesthetic quality -a variety of issues examined in chapters focussing on Marla Edgeworth, William Ainsworth, George Eliot and Emily Bronte. Secondly, juvenilia are precursors to the adult writing of the examined authors, with many of the advances to their writing that are the subject of praise in their adult work having been established long before in their juvenilia. This is demonstrated in representative early works by the same authors, examined alongside their later novels. An Appendix of Edgeworth's unpublished play The Double Disguise Is also included. These are not entirely new contentions, but, notwithstanding some attention from a handful of scholars, little research has been done to confirm and demonstrate their merit. This thesis suggests that critics should evaluate an author's body of work as an "entire entity" rather than confining their research to the author's mature writing. To dismiss something just because it is titled "juvenilia" is to dismiss a major part of the author's development and literary career.