Skip to content Skip to navigation
University of Warwick
  • Study
  • |
  • Research
  • |
  • Business
  • |
  • Alumni
  • |
  • News
  • |
  • About

University of Warwick
Publications service & WRAP

Highlight your research

  • WRAP
    • Home
    • Search WRAP
    • Browse by Warwick Author
    • Browse WRAP by Year
    • Browse WRAP by Subject
    • Browse WRAP by Department
    • Browse WRAP by Funder
    • Browse Theses by Department
  • Publications Service
    • Home
    • Search Publications Service
    • Browse by Warwick Author
    • Browse Publications service by Year
    • Browse Publications service by Subject
    • Browse Publications service by Department
    • Browse Publications service by Funder
  • Help & Advice
University of Warwick

The Library

  • Login
  • Admin

Bodies in transit : mobility, embodiment and space in the mid-nineteenth century novel

Tools
- Tools
+ Tools

Mathieson, Charlotte Eleanor (2010) Bodies in transit : mobility, embodiment and space in the mid-nineteenth century novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

Full text not available from this repository, contact author.
Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b2533312~S1

Request Changes to record.

Abstract

This thesis focuses on narratives of mobility in the mid-nineteenth century novel,
analysing journeys within and between England and Europe in novels of the
period 1845-65 by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth
Gaskell, and Mary Braddon. I locate bodies in transit as crucial representational
sites asserting that, in an era of capitalist modernity effecting immense
transformations to space, mobile embodied subjects provide a locus through
which spatial readjustments are mediated.
The theoretical context for this analysis is provided by the fields of critical
geography, feminist geography, and recent studies into travel and mobility; the
intersection of these fields constructs a new theorisation of mobile embodied
subjects. I read textual representations of bodies through this critical lens, using
literary analysis to develop a more nuanced theorisation of the relationship
between the body and space.
The first chapter explores the changing production and understanding of space in
the mid-nineteenth century, following which subsequent chapters each focus on a
different travel context. Walking in the English countryside and the city (with
focus on Adam Bede, Jane Eyre, and Villette) centres on issues of gender,
mobility, and modernity; journeys across European spaces (Little Dorrit, Villette)
explore anxieties about nationality and the stability of British place in a
contracting global space; and railway journeys (Dombey and Son, Lady Audley’s
Secret) position anxieties over modernity, and its implications for the human
subject, at the forefront of concern.
Through this analysis, I situate mobility as occupying a central position in midnineteenth
century literature: a significant representational principle that is
fundamental to the internal structures of novels and their interactions with wider
cultural contexts. The thesis demonstrates that reading novels through spaces of
mobility provides a perspective through which to significantly reorient our
understanding of familiar literary texts.

Item Type: Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): English fiction -- 19th century -- Criticism and interpretation, Travel in literature
Official Date: November 2010
Dates:
DateEvent
November 2010Submitted
Institution: University of Warwick
Theses Department: Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type: PhD
Publication Status: Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: Frith, Gillian, 1946- ; Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo
Sponsors: Arts & Humanities Research Council (Great Britain) (AHRC) ; University of Warwick. Humanities Research Centre ; 18th and 19th Century British Women Writers Association
Extent: iv, 329 leaves : ill.
Language: eng

Request changes or add full text files to a record

Repository staff actions (login required)

View Item View Item
twitter

Email us: publications@live.warwick.ac.uk
Contact Details
About Us