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Bodies in transit : mobility, embodiment and space in the mid-nineteenth century novel
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Mathieson, Charlotte Eleanor (2010) Bodies in transit : mobility, embodiment and space in the mid-nineteenth century novel. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b2533312~S1
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 (PhD) | ||||
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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: |
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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 |
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