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Victorian literature and the Victorian state.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Victorian literature and the Victorian state./
Author:	Goodlad, Lauren M. E.
Description:	1 online resource (326 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 57-09, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International57-09A.
Subject:	British and Irish literature. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9798516092671

Victorian literature and the Victorian state.
Goodlad, Lauren M. E.

Victorian literature and the Victorian state. - 1 online resource (326 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 57-09, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 1995.

Includes bibliographical references

The largely unexpected, uninvited and, yet, inevitable emergence of the modern Victorian state marks a focal point in Victorian literature and culture as well as a challenge to existing notions of English identity. Part I of this thesis, Middle-Class Culture and the Idea of Character argues that a quasi-romantic and essentially middle-class discourse of character--predicated upon individual autonomy and deeply antithetical to state interference--shaped early and mid-Victorian imaginings of Englishness. Chapter I ("Victorian Benthamisms") considers the writings of literary Benthamites (Bulwer, Mill, and Martineau) and administrative figures (Chadwick and Kay-Shuttleworth) concluding that (1) despite their putative "collectivism" Benthamite ideologies are profoundly invested in quasi-romantic, individualist character; and (2) for this reason, the entire notion of a monolithic "Benthamism" underwriting the emerging state is misleading. The second chapter ("Radical Individualism") further suggests the critical importance of autonomous middle-class character by considering a body of vehemently anti-bureaucratic writings (by Samuel Laing, Samuel Smiles, Joshua Toulmin Smith and Herbert Spencer) and demonstrating their proximity to mainstream Victorian culture. Both chapters argue that Foucault's influential model of "panopticism" is inadequate to describe either the genesis or the strategic operations of the various discourses that shaped (and were shaped by) the emerging state. Part II, The Workhouse and the Rise (and Decline) of Victorian Respectability, constructs an "iconographic" historiography of what is arguably the single most transformative and contentious of Victorian state institutions--the New Poor Law workhouse. Considering novels by Dickens, Frances Trollope and Gissing, propagandistic fiction by Martineau, articles by Chadwick, sensational fiction by Greenwood and a variety of other popular media, Chapter III argues that the workhouse underlies a new (but not paradigmatically "panoptical") form of disciplinary subjectivity--"respectability." Victorian respectability emerges from but ultimately undermines the idea of character, thus marking middle-class culture's profound alienation from its own foundational self-imaginings, and problematizing English identity. Late in the century, the inevitable decline of Victorian "respectability" anticipates the rise of "mass" institutional culture.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2024

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9798516092671Subjects--Topical Terms:

1466643
British and Irish literature.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Bentham, JeremyIndex Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

Victorian literature and the Victorian state.
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