English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item The Life of Honor: Individuality and the Communal Impulse in Romanticism(2013) Kantor, Jamison Brenner; Wang, Orrin N.C.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For most scholars of Romanticism, honor is a traditionalist value. It underwrites Edmund Burke's defense against revolutionary radicalism; it is the code of medieval crusaders and tribal highlanders in Walter Scott's novels; and it is a quality reserved for nobles such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, who relies on honor to assert her privilege in the face of the rising middle-class. Despite these conservative connotations, The Life of Honor shows that early-nineteenth-century writers did not simply consider honor a reactionary ethos. Rather, they saw how honor could be progressive and egalitarian--a modern virtue that allowed them to grapple with the dilemmas of emerging liberal society. A personal sense of communal obligation, the modern honor ethic balanced the individualism emphasized by the republican political movement with the demands of a rapidly changing social order. Reading texts from a variety of authors and genres--Godwin's Jacobin novel, Wordsworth's autobiographical poetry, Scott and Austen's historical fiction, and the brutal slave narrative of Mary Prince--I demonstrate how this ancient civic virtue was reinvigorated in response to some of the most pressing cultural questions of the day, conflicts between the self and society that could not be resolved through the operations of sympathy or the power of the imagination. Because this modern form of honor emerged from post-revolutionary life, it was associated with a new political order: liberalism, a set of civic norms that began to thrive in the late-eighteenth-century and that still prevails in Europe today. While the Romantic honor code drew upon the liberal commitment to universal dignity and individual merit, Romantic honor simultaneously illuminated the conceptual problems of liberalism--its propensity to rank independence over obligation; to connect private commercial success with public virtue; and to abstract social predicaments from identity categories like race and gender. Responding to recent scholarship on the liberal disposition in Romantic pedagogy and nineteenth-century Realist aesthetics, The Life of Honor reveals the paradox of a civil society built around the pursuit of individual esteem and thus the wager of Romanticism's political commitments.Item Oral Storytelling in Modernism: Narration, Ideology, and Identity(2012) Wellman, Jennifer Jean; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Oral storytellers abound in modernist texts - from T. S. Eliot's inarticulate J. Alfred Prufrock to Djuna Barnes' desultory Dr. Matthew O'Connor, from Joseph Conrad's loquacious Charlie Marlow and other men of the sea to Rebecca West's dainty Harriet Hume. This project theorizes the construction of orality and the figure of the oral storyteller in early to mid-twentieth-century literature, with a focus primarily - but not exclusively - on the British Isles. While the prevalence of such constructions has been surprisingly under-examined by modern literary critics, early to mid-twentieth-century writers were fascinated with oral storytelling, and this fascination provides vital insight into literary modernism's all-important efforts to redefine self and community through art and artistic innovation. Modernist authors employ written representations of oral storytelling to explore and attempt to negotiate the relationship between cultural authority and the formation of modern subjectivities. I examine modernist representations of oral storytelling in works such as Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" (1936), Joseph Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Rebecca West's Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (1929), Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931), and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (1958). By exploring how authors contextualize ideas of orality and the oral storyteller within discourses of nationalism, literary tradition, and technology, I show that the figure of the oral storyteller presents a contact site for the contesting forces that inflect the formulation of self in the early to mid-twentieth-century. These forces include: ideologies of gender and empire; narrative itself as a culturally-inflected schema for understanding experience; and new and recently emergent communication technologies, like the gramophone and radio, which shift early twentieth-century understandings of language, presence, and the limits of the body. Moreover, as inherently self-reflexive moments within texts, scenes of oral storytelling implicitly engage with the defining modernist struggle to both undermine and appropriate the authority of earlier writers and contemporary literary and social traditions. The writers examined in this study use oral storytelling scenes to explore and delineate the relationship between dominant cultural narratives, the material world, and embodied identity.