عنوان
پدید آورنده
موضوع
رده
کتابخانه
محل استقرار
TL95q2007s
انگلیسی
Blank Subjects:
[Thesis]
Rahmani, Sina
Orphanhood and the Rise of the British Novel
Mufti, Aamir RMakdisi, Saree
2014
Mufti, Aamir RMakdisi, Saree
2014
From Oliver Twist to Jane Eyre, Becky Sharp to Jude Fawley, the nineteenth-century British literary horizon is replete with orphans. Both their ubiquity and prominence in so many canonical texts raises a question. Namely, how do figures often associated with social and material abjection -- "Please sir, I want some more" -- take center stage in a narrative form profoundly connected to the individuality and agency of the modern subject? My dissertation answers this question by making a case for what I call orphanhood as a central thematic in the history of the novel. Rather than fabricate some key to all orphans, I argue that the figuration of orphanhood crystallizing in the nineteenth-century British novel provided a discursive space to imagine modern individuated life--something made up of an infinite web of affiliations. Taken together, the different narratives and histories I analyze over four chapters highlight how orphans showcase some of the ideal qualities of bourgeois individuality: deracinated, mobile, and above all, blank. In this sense, orphanhood can help us understand the link between literary production and the Empire, an imaginative venture that inscribed Britishness on a blank and colonizable map of the world. Accordingly, I have built my dissertation around three authors who exemplify the formal, geographic, and temporal globality of the nineteenth-century "British" novel: Maria Edgeworth, Charles Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling. In my concluding chapter on W.G. Sebald, I show how long after the bond between national languages and literature has been broken, orphanhood remains a perch to view the rise of the global individuality of the refugee as well as the transformations taking place in what is coming to be called the Global English novel.
Pasquini, Sarah Cecilia
Rahmani, Sina
UCLA
مطالعه متن کتاب p
[Thesis]
276903
a
Y
